Luxury Briefing Issue 186 INSIGHT FEATURE 4
Issue 186 Luxury Briefing Sir Eric Peacock speaks with: ACHILLEAS CONSTANTINOU Hot Couture SIR ERIC PEACOCK MEETS ACHILLEAS CONSTANTINOU, CHIEF EXECUTIVE AND CO-FOUNDER OF ARIELLA FASHIONS, TO TALK SUCCESS, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND OF COURSE, THE SIXTIES Founded in 1966 on London s Carnaby Street, Ariella became synonymous with the psychedelic fashions of the Swinging Sixties. Its vintage designs from that era now sell as collector s items, but the company is as forward-looking as ever. In fact, the brand has won industry awards in each of its five decades of trading since the 1970s. Today, Ariella has 11 retail outlets in the West End, as well as numerous franchise operations overseas. Achilleas Constantinou sits down with Sir Eric Peacock, to tell us about one of Britain s most successful fashion brands. Ariella is 50 years old. Tell me, how did it all begin? It began in 1956. My dear late father was a master tailor in Carnaby Street, and my brother Aristos was a graduate of London College of Fashion. I was still in my last year at school, about to go to University, and my brother used to make all these fuddyduddy outfits for couturiers. One day, in the summer of 66, I said to my brother, Why don t you stop making all these fuddyduddy couture outfits and make something really crazy for the young kids on the street? He said, You know, that s not a bad idea. So he went to Berwick Street Market, bought some cloth, and knocked up about ten or fifteen dresses. My hippie friends and I painted the premises on Carnaby Street in the most psychedelic colours, and we called it Aristos Clothes Shop. We opened a retail shop on Carnaby Street with fifteen dresses! Well, being the salesman, I sold all fifteen dresses in the first day. That s how we started trading. In the first week, we took 300. The average salary in those days was 20 a week. After that, we bought a [second] shop in Newburg Street and called it Blooshp. From there we opened another shop on Carnaby Street, and then we opened another one further down, and we opened up two on Oxford Street. Where is the business today, and particularly Ariella Couture? The fashion business as you know, Sir Eric is like a wild horse. It needs a lot of controlling when you re riding, and Ariella has always been like a wild horse because we ve always been up-tothe-minute in fashion. We have been in business for fifty years. There are not a lot of fashion companies that can survive five years, let alone 5
Luxury Briefing Issue 186 INSIGHT FEATURE fifty years. The secret of our success is that you have to believe in your product and understand it. We always believed in original, feminine fashion. Today we re in the most exciting place. We have lots of wonderful young talent in the business, all ex-fashion graduates, so we ve decided to expand. We re going back into retail. Although we had eleven branches back in the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s, I lost my brother in 1985 and it was too much for me to have wholesale and retail. So we shut the retail down, carried on the wholesale, and did very well winning lots of awards. But now we ve re-opened the retail division. In 2012, we launched Ariella Couture [because] we felt there was a need for red carpet fashion that wasn t 5,000-10,000 at a time. We pitched it between 500-4,000 and we put on a catwalk show. It received an incredible response. Do you want to know the celebrities that have worn Ariella Couture? Yes, please. I can t remember them all, but this is just a few of them that have worn the label in the last couple of years: Amanda Holden, Darcey Bussell, and Michelle Rodriguez. Michelle Rodriguez is a great story. She wore our dress at the V&A Hollywood Costume Gala in London. She got papped more than anybody else in our swish dress. Well, you can t buy press like that. But the interesting thing was that swish at the back of the dress. A designer showed his design to me, and I asked to see the back. As he turned the dress, it swished. I said, I love that swish. Give me that swish. Then we engineered the dress so that whichever way you stand, it always looks like you ve just spun round. The press absolutely loved it. On the back of Ariella Couture, we created Ariella London, which is our own exclusive retail brand pitched between 150-750. We ve got fifteen branches now. We ve got a huge flagship store in Brent Cross, and we re looking at having thirty branches by this time next year. Is Ariella still a family business after all these years? Yes, I m delighted to tell you it is. The family is a lot bigger now not only with my own four children, but the staff as well. My oldest son Alexander has an I.T. company and he does all of our I.T. work. My second son Nicholas is a solicitor, and he s the in-house solicitor for the firm. My daughter Lana-Marie is the creative director. Finally, my youngest son Marcus is the marketing director. What is the main message of the brand, and how has that changed over the years? It s changed enormously because of social media. The fashion world is getting smaller all the time; the Internet has shrunk the world. If you go to a catwalk Previous page: Late 1970s, Satin doublebreasted evening trouser suit Opposite: Ariella Monroe dress show with your wife and you see something beautiful, she has to wait six months in order to buy it before it s in the stores. The new motto for Ariella is: See it now, buy it now, wear it now. In other words, we re giving people instantaneous fashion. We re doing a catwalk show this September at London Fashion Week, and it s going to be five decades of Ariella. We re taking some of our best-looking shapes from the 1960s [up to] the 2000s, and creating a fusion collection. The selling point is going to be: You watch the catwalk show, you like a garment, you press a button on your ipad and you get it tomorrow. Can you share something of your supply chain and manufacturing process? We ve got some wonderful manufacturing units that work for us, and they re all Sedex approved. [This means] they are all compliant with the codes of practice that exist, not only from our clients but our own code of practice as well. Our sources are in China, Romania, Sri Lanka, and a lot of our hand-beaded dresses come from India. You re a founding member of the British Fashion Council. Can you tell us more about that? After the whole fashion explosion started in the 60s with Carnaby Street and King s Road, there was a huge demand for British products. Companies from overseas were coming and wanting to buy the British look that we were pioneering. As a result, international trade fairs sprang up. We had the designers, the mainstream companies, and the exhibition organisers. The designers wanted to show nearer the season, the companies that supplied the High Street wanted to show earlier so they had longer lead-times, and the exhibition organisers didn t care one way or the other they just wanted to put on a show at the cheapest possible price. So we went mad. A lot of the exhibitors went mad, and Ariella has always been quite vociferous in the interest of the trade. We had meetings and we formed what s called the midseason collection. It didn t suit the designers at all, but it suited some people. We realised there was something wrong here, and we formed the Fashion Industry Action Group (FIAG). There was only about six or eight of us. We came to the conclusion that designers and mainstream are two different animals, serving two different customers, and so we do not need to show at the same time. But the exhibition organisers were a third element, a spanner in the works. 6
Issue 186 Luxury Briefing The new motto for Ariella is: See it now, buy it now, wear it now 7
Luxury Briefing Issue 186 INSIGHT FEATURE We needed our own show, but even that, we needed to have one body that can represent us. So we formed the British Fashion Council (BFC). Cyril Kern was the first chairman and I was on it right from the beginning. From then on, the BFC grew. The idea was that the BFC would be the shop window of British Fashion. It would be where our young designers can put their stuff on a catwalk, and bring in more demand for British products from across the world. Mainstream companies then cash in on that demand. The BFC has done a fantastic job of raising the profile of British fashion to be on a par now with Paris, Milan and New York. It is one of my proudest achievements to have been a part of that from the beginning. Has your business ever crossed into product categories other than the original proposition? We re still getting the womenswear right, so the answer to your question is: Not yet. We re just now building up the Ariella brand. Now that we re back in retail, we re making Ariella a high-profile brand again. We re spending money on this, hundreds of thousands of pounds throughout 2015. We sponsored the Oscars, the Grammys, the Emmys, and the Golden Globes, on UK television, Sky and the E! channel. We aired over 3,500 TV commercials. This page, opposite page: Aristos and Achilleas, Ariella Gigi dress We ve identified countries in Europe [that have] very good eveningwear markets. Places such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Scandinavia Now, you know what happens when you establish a brand. Of course you can branch out, and we have every intention of doing that, but we re not ready for it yet. When we do, it will be in handbags and various other elements of fashion. Probably some very up-market tailoring, and some very eveningwear-style knits. Can you tell us a bit more about the tools that you use in the business? The greatest marketing tool at the moment is social media and Ariella.com is our website. I don t want people to get confused it s Ariella.com. That s the place that everybody wants to promote because it s instantaneous. You can put an awful lot of product on there very quickly and it gets delivered the next day. Then, you ve got all the other stuff like Twitter and Instagram. Blogging as well, you ve got to blog nowadays. And Facebook. These are incredible things. I understand we ve got a very lively section of [social media]. When we re sitting here, God willing, in five years, what will you be telling me? Hopefully nothing, because I ll be sitting on a beach somewhere, right? I don t think you ll ever sit on a beach. I guarantee you, I will sit on a beach playing chess with my older son Alexander. But in five years, [I hope] Ariella will have been established as a well-known brand for cocktail, evening, and special occasion wear. It will have a retail presence, not only across the UK, but across target areas in countries in Europe that we ve identified as having very good eveningwear markets. Places such as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. What about the many awards you and Ariella have received? Oh, awards, my goodness. In the 70s, Punch magazine described Ariella as the power in Carnaby Street. In the 80s, we won the Clothing Export Council award for exports. In the 90s, we won the UK Fashion Export Award for High Octane Glamour. And then in 2010 we won the HSBC Business Thinking competition for the London Region. We have won a major award in every one of our five decades. Can you capture some personal landmarks? There are three things that we ve done at Ariella of which I m very proud, because I ve been personally involved in them. One is the formation of the BFC and being part of that. I would like to think that during my twenty-five years there, I helped to steer it towards the success that it has achieved. Second is forming the Fashion Design Protection Association (FDPA) in 1974. At that time, copyright was not recognised in fashion design. When we were getting copied, lawyers told us that there was nothing you 8
Issue 186 Luxury Briefing can do. [They said] a dress is not a work of artistic craftsmanship within the Copyright Act. But my dear late brother and I went and saw a young QC called Hugh Laddie. Hugh was very sympathetic to the passion that we showed. I remember my brother and I showed him an original and a copy dress. Then, my brother showed him the pattern. In the pattern that my brother had created, he d made a mistake in the shoulder seam. There was a little notch. He said, Do you see this, Mr. Laddie? I slipped when I was cutting it and I left this notch in the pattern. Then my brother took the copy dress and he ripped the seam open. He showed Mr. Laddie that it had the same notch and said, They ve copied my mistake. Hugh Laddie was so impressed with this. And Hugh Laddie, although there was hardly any precedent in enforcing copyrighted garment design, took [the case] on. We then called a meeting of the trade and we said We re Ariella Fashions, we re getting copied and we don t like it. We want to do something about it. Is it happening to you? All the hands went up. They appointed me as the chairman because I was the only one with a law degree, and I m still chairman today. I m pleased to say that the law was changed in 1980 in a leading case in which I was an expert witness. The law then established copyright protection for fashion design. That was almost exclusively [achieved through our work] at the FDPA. Now, we advise the government on the Copyright Designs and Patents Act. So our little contribution to copyright law has given our young designers the ability now to profit from their originality. As far as Ariella is concerned, my pride and joy is that we re still here after fifty years. We re still buoyant, and we re once again full of energy and enthusiasm with all the young blood that has come into the business. Finally, is there a question I should have asked you that I didn t? How old I am. I m not telling you. I hate that one. SIR ERIC PEACOCK is the Chairman of the luxury furniture brand Timothy Oulton and the parent company Halo International. He is also Chairman of Buckley Ltd., the holding company for Boutin and Buckley brands. He was formerly the Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive of Babygro. Now, he is also a Non- Executive at United Kingdom Export Finance (UKEF), which supports UK export-focused businesses. In addition, he has also previously been a Non-Executive at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Business Innovation and Skills (BSI) and United Kingdom Trade & Industry (UKTI) government departments and agencies. 9