Business star:
George Davies
The man who revolutionised the British high street is back with a new idea
INTERVIEW | JOSH SIMS
GEORGE DAVIES DOESN’T GO SHOPPING MUCH.
“It’s just such a drag now – it’s a physical effort,” he says, looking out over the seven-hole golf course he had built in his Gloucestershire garden so, he says, he can play without anyone thinking he’s an idiot. “If you wanted a crate of a particular brand of whisky you’d have to be crazy to get into your car to go and get it. You’d use the internet. And if you go to a store you’d probably be treated badly anyway. How often do you hear people say they love clothes but hate shopping for them now? But for every action there’s a reaction…”
That reaction may prove to be GIVe, Davies’s fourth and latest retail venture, a chain of womenswear stores which he launched in October with the flagship in London’s Regent Street, followed by a nationwide roll-out of shops, starting in Glasgow, Bristol and Liverpool (as well as being stocked in other stores from Dublin to Farnham).
The GIVe concept is what Davies terms ‘affordable luxury’. Affordable is, of course, relative – Davies trousered £125 million from selling to Marks & Spencer the Per Una brand he created for it just four years previously and arguably saved the high-street stalwart in the process. But the idea is a simple one: start with decent fabrics, add good design, change stock frequently and sell it using trained ‘style advisors’; add in-store internet shopping, an on-site tailor, make a commitment to give 10 percent of profits to charity and you have what he calls “the bloody obvious”.
“I honestly think too many retailers don’t care that much. Lots of the big ones are diverted by what they have to say to the City, for example, by those things that at the time seem that much more important than the actual consumer.
And it’s hard. But there is this idea that value is a top at £3. That’s price. Value is the product, presentation, service… Just as fashion design isn’t just about sketching but understanding how the whole market works.”
GIVe’s founder, for those who don’t know, is the Liverpudlian who invented the British high street. If that seems like hyperbole, Davies is the man who put the George into George at Asda, building sales of £2 billion a year during the 1990s and making it the UK’s biggest clothing retailer. In doing so he democratised fast-fashion and sold clothes where no clothes had been sold before – in supermarkets, where, despite their obvious conveniences of easy parking and child-seat trolleys, many expected it to flop. “The starting point is always to understand what the consumer wants,” he explains, “not yesterday but in response to how life’s changing.”
Before that, in 1982, Davies created Next, rescuing its owner J Hepworth & Son and forging the pioneering idea of ‘total look’ retailing. Rather than cramming shops full of clothes, he built a tighter collection that gave shoppers the chance to pick and choose in the knowledge that everything goes with everything else.
Next also brought a sea-change in catalogue shopping.
“‘Never assume the bloody obvious,’ is something of a motto because it helps you question,” he says. “With Next Directory I kept being told that 48-hour delivery times [as opposed to the then standard 28 days] couldn’t be done. And yet I could go into any corner shop of a morning and buy a paper that had been printed that night. It was just a question of borrowing ideas from other industries. That – and the fact that I threatened to pull the plug on it unless we did it right.”
DAVIES ATTRIBUTES HIS SUCCESS IN PART TO BEING FINELY TUNED INTO WHAT WOMEN WANT – he has married three times, and was born into a family with a strong matriarch. “It was difficult, what with rationing after the war, to find good clothing but my mother said she thought most of it was rubbish and so made her own anyway. Getting involved with all the patterns on the floor influenced me sub-consciously,” he suggests. Add to that his hours on shop-floors watching women browse and listening to their wish-lists, and he clearly understands women’s retail needs and how to fulfill them.
Doing so may touch on the gimmicky or questionable. For instance, GIVe will have lifters to allow women to mimic the effect of wearing different heel heights when trying on clothes.
And the traditional sizing system is being replaced by Roman numerals in sizes I to VI on the basis that it removes the stigma of being a larger lady. And he speaks of the hidden tool kits that will allow shop-staff to alter display racks with minimum fuss as the kind of detail of which he is most proud. Yet Davies’s ideas have been emulated so many times that even the gimmicks have become high-street standard. All told he estimates he has sold some £54 billion of clothing. Small wonder he has a private jet, a Ferrari and, until he recently gave it to charity, a super-yacht.
But that success may just as well be attributed to his signature single mindedness. A wonderful anecdote has Davies, on hearing that M&S was clawing back money from him on Per Una returns, sending the then M&S chairman a gift: a black jacket neatly wrapped in a black box with black ribbon, with ‘RIP’ and a note that read “Bye, bye. That’s the end.” Imagine the reaction…
“When I started out my line was ‘no duplication’, because so many businesses have too many people doing the same thing, and ‘no compromise’. And I don’t, not in business at least. A brand needs to be an army going in one direction,” he says.
So no doubt, with GIVe, he is relieved finally to be working solo on a project? “Well, it stops me having too many rows,” he half-jokes, referring to notorious spats with senior management at both Next and M&S. “Funnily enough, being Liverpudlian, I’m a bit of a fighter. I remember at Asda some idiot calling me to point out that we’d had a bad week. I told him to f*** off. They never phone you to say, ‘Well done for three good years.’”
Are there more good years ahead? Can lightning strike four times? Actually, Davies isn’t sure whether going it alone with GIVe, into which he has poured £20m of his own money, is an entirely good thing. “It’s bloody hard to start new,” he concedes. “For all that people know me, it’s a new concept that has to be built. Asda, for example, already had an audience. This is tougher – we have to get the people in. And it’s a hard time to start. When I left Per Una I didn’t think for a moment I’d start again. But then things become quite obvious, or you think they are, and you have to do it.
“Besides, I hate that word ‘retirement’,” he adds, pondering the golf course he rarely has time to get out on. “It sounds morbid but I’d rather drop dead working. I’m driven and I don’t get tired easily, although I’m not young – I don’t like to say it but I’m 68 this week.”
So how will he be celebrating the occasion? “On my birthday I’m opening a shop and then lecturing in international branding for the afternoon. But, you know, I might have a pint in the evening.” www.give.co.uk
