City Slicker
From a small-time entrepreneur and failed photographer, Nick Wheeler risked it all again and again before becoming Jermyn Street’s king of shirts and building a £50 million business
INTERVIEW | JOSH SIMS
Image – Daniel Kennedy
NICK WHEELER IS WEARING, OF ALL THINGS, AN OLD T-SHIRT. “I’m about to go running with my dog, which I’ve been trying to do since 7am but the rain keeps putting me off,” he says, by way of excuse – for his attire rather than his stalled exercise. “But I am wearing our own socks and boxer shorts. And we don’t do tracksuit bottoms.”
Wheeler is working from home today, a perk he claims of having built a £50 million menswear company over the last two decades. With some small irony perhaps, the more successful his business has become, the less has been his need for his core product: Jermyn Street-standard City shirts sold under the Charles Tyrwhitt brand (from Wheeler’s middle names).
But then, while Wheeler says he has a passion for shirts – he speaks of a sense of brotherhood with the Great Gatsby’s refined appreciation for a soft, crisp, clean shirt – he concedes that he could have gone into business with almost any kind of product. And, indeed, he tried.
At university he started selling Christmas trees, dabbled in photography and then tried his hand in shoes.
“I had bought a fantastic pair of hand-made, made-to-measure shoes for £10 in India and thought, ‘If I could sell these for £50 each, I’ve got a business’,” says the 45-year-old father of four, who is married to Chris Rucker, founder of The White Company. “But I hadn’t realised the issues I’d have with Indian phone lines or fax technology of the time [by which he would send an outline of his customers’ feet]. Not one pair of my first order fitted. Everything came back either for a pixie or a clown. And from there to shirts was just as haphazard. I just couldn’t find a shirt I could afford during my student years living on spaghetti bolognese.”
Others might see more inevitability in Wheeler’s entrepreneurialism. As evidence, not least is his conviction that while experience is valuable in business, it is not the be all and end all. Much about success is plain old common-sense, he argues, and it is only internal politics that tends to stop companies putting this into effect. Then there is his self-confessed inability to have anyone tell him what to do.
“I hate the idea of anyone getting one up on me,” Wheeler admits. “I went all through my school career without calling any of the teachers ‘sir’, for example. I’d just mumble away. And I take equality very seriously. The trouble with lots of corporate places is that you do a good job and someone else takes the credit.”
Small wonder a spell with management consultants Bain & Co was short-lived. Here, after all, was the summer holiday worker in Harrods who, finding himself in the golfwear department (“Why, I don’t know. I can’t stand golf”), couldn’t resist on his first day pointing out how the departmental manager of some 20 years standing might do things better (“Next day I was moved to luggage”). Or the new graduate who, with an £8,000 inheritance, persuaded his bank manager to lend him another £17,000 so he could buy an Aston Martin. A rare example, that is, which he sold the following year for £100,000.
“I’ve always loved old cars,” says Wheeler, who drives the unlikely combination of a Bentley and a Morris Minor 1000, “but I suppose that was an indication that I’ve always been a bit of a risk-taker. As an entrepreneur you have to take risks, though I speak as someone who’s not a great entrepreneur – I just started early. The Aston deal might not have been the most sensible thing to do but I was convinced the classic car market was about to go up. It was a lucky bubble really. Certainly other bubbles have been less successful for me – I’ve made some horrible mistakes with shares. But then I’ve also had a totally unjustifiable sense of self-belief.”
Indeed, Wheeler believes that Charles Tyrwhitt has the potential to become a £1 billion company in the next 20 years, at what he has described as a reasonable and achievable 15 percent annual growth rate. “Charles Tyrwhitt is a lifetime’s work,” he says, “and I think about it every minute of every day. It’s a bit sad. It’s not that laudable but I do think I’ve created a great shirt business now.”
Making mistakes has, however, been par for the course – along which Wheeler says he has taken more the tortoise’s approach than the hare’s, ignoring advice after early losses that he should quit his brave attempt and just get a job. In 1994, for example, the company went into receivership after trouble with an agent. It clawed its way back up. Then there was the MD he appointed in 2006 who, as he puts it, tried to turn the company into Ralph Lauren. “The attempt was to become Ralph Lauren overnight, rather than the 40 years over which Ralph Lauren became Ralph Lauren,” Wheeler says. “The fault was with me for making the appointment. But we ended up making a lot of product nobody wanted.”
Rather, that is, than a specialist product with a loyal audience. Charles Tyrwhitt has won a dedicated following of one million-plus customers who buy their work shirts from the company by mail order and latterly the internet (which together still account for some 75% of sales). A retail operation has followed, with this year set to see the brand open five new stores, including Jermyn Street, Manchester and Bluewater, on the slow road to building a UK portfolio of 50 – beyond which Wheeler feels a specialist product risks being perceived as too mass-market.
Gradual expansion abroad is in the pipeline too: while sales are overwhelmingly British, the very Britishness of the product gives it appeal to certain overseas markets. Wheeler can see the same potential for stores in key metropolitan centres overseas, and already has stores in New York – the US is a key growth market for the brand – Paris, Madrid, as well as two outlets in India, also a growth market in line with the BRIC nations’ growing wealth.
But what makes Charles Tyrwhitt any different from the many other smart shirt-makers in the first place? ”Well, my rather grandiose catchphrase was that we made the best shirts in the world,” says Wheeler, who argues that few businesses are genuinely ground-breaking, with most doing what is already being done but striving to do it better.
“Of course, everyone is making the same claims and it’s true that from 10 yards away one white business shirt [Charles Tyrwhitt’s best-selling item] looks much the same as any other. Every coffee company is trying to make great coffee and provide a great environment in which to drink it too. It’s in customer service that I think we excel. We listen to the customer and do what they want.”
That is an easy mantra to trot out, of course, and Wheeler knows it. But all new employees in his company are invited to give their advice freely, as Wheeler once did himself, and to act on initiative. That includes the young London salesman who, dealing with a customer disappointed that his promised shirt had not arrived in time for his wedding the next day, proceeded to put it in a taxi. To Crewe. At a cost of £280.
“Initially I thought we’d gone mad but he made the case that we had let the guy down and he was right,” says Wheeler. “Staff bring all sorts of experience from all sorts of backgrounds and with that a new perspective. I’m the boring old bloke who’s been in the golf department for 20 years now, so I need it. He understood that you have to do what’s right for the customer.”
That is a fine philosophy so long as customers want the one thing you do well.
But with business dress codes softening in many corporate establishments, might Wheeler find himself selling something fewer and fewer people want? He is ready for that question.
The company has already established itself in suits and shoes, for example – because that is what the customer has asked for.
“Change in the way we dress will be very gradual and our change will be gradual with it,” says Wheeler, finally heading out for his run, his dog now rather keen to get moving. “I’m pretty sure that one thing that won’t happen is that people will start going around naked. The world doesn’t change that quickly. And knee-jerk reactions are nearly always a mistake. But if everyone does start working in T-shirts, then fine. We’ll just offer the best value, best quality T-shirts.” www.ctshirts.co.uk
