After almost five years as chairman at cataloguer/retailer Cath
Kidston, Peter Higgins is to step down. The move, however, does
not signal Higgins’s complete departure from the business.
Higgins, who has a background in management consulting gained
from his days at Bain, joined Cath Kidston as chairman in 2006
after selling most of his shares in shirtmaker Charles Tyrwhitt
back to cofounder Nick Wheeler. Today, Higgins retains a five
percent stake in Charles Tyrwhitt and plays an active role in the
business’s development. He is also chairman at Joe Browns, a
Leeds-based apparel cataloguer, and was chairman at apparel brand
Crew Clothing for two years to October 2009-but “four
businesses were too many to manage,” he says.
Higgins says he will stay on at Cath Kidston to help lead the
search for a “retail heavyweight” to take the
business forward. Following the appointment, he may take a
nonexecutive role. “You never know, the business might
float in three year’s time, so I may stay on as adviser,
especially on the mail order side.”
When he joined Cath Kidston in 2006, it was turning over
£7.5 million and making a small profit. Higgins immediately
began “getting ducks in a row” and in April 2010,
Cath Kidston, now a £50 million business with a £12.5
million profit, was sold to private-equity firm TA Associates for
a rumoured £100 million.
Higgins attributes the business’s strong growth to
“increased brand awareness, getting a strong team together,
narrowing SKUs and focusing on bestsellers, opening bigger stores
to feature more of the range, and doing mail order
properly”. Cath Kidston is now “truly
multichannel,” says Higgins, “a circle where every
part of the business supports the rest”.
Joe Browns, one to watch
Building a strong team is a theme throughout the interview, with
Higgins reinforcing the importance of getting the right people in
as soon as possible. That’s why Joe Browns has just appointed
Hilary Large, formerly head of marketing at Littlewoods, as its
marketing director-and Higgins says he wishes he could have found
her sooner. At Joe Browns, Large will develop the Joe Browns
brand with responsibility for recruiting customers from new
avenues, getting more from the company’s best customers and
crafting a leading website.
Higgins is keen to play down Joe Browns’s recent success. But the
business is doing well-it turns over £20 million and is
profitable. What’s more, it’s been relatively unaffected by the
recession. Joe Browns is “good value for money,” says
Higgins. This meant that during the recession the business found
itself attracting customers who still wanted a branded product
but found other brands too expensive. “It was actually an
opportunity to grab more market share,” he says.
Joe Browns has quietly grown its business overseas too. Through
its wholesale deals with multicatalogue groups N Brown (Simply
Be, Jacamo), Otto (Freemans, Grattan) and Shop Direct
(Littlewoods, Very) Joe Browns has a presence in Europe and in
the US. It also delivers worldwide via its website and sees
roughly 10 percent of sales come from international markets,
despite no dedicated international marketing efforts and no firm
plan to become “country-specific”.
When asked whether Joe Browns will be sold, Higgins hinted at a
private-equity deal or becoming part of a larger retail group,
but he would not be drawn on a timeframe. Charles Tyrwhitt,
however, is categorically not for sale. The business he founded
with Nick Wheeler back in 1990 is predicting £70 million
turnover and profit “around the £20 million
mark” for the next fiscal year. The focus at Charles
Tyrwhitt is on becoming a multichannel retailer, and as such it
is rolling out more stores, with plans to take the total number
of outlets from 12 to 50 by 2018. Once again, Higgins raises the
importance of employing the right people; Charles Tyrwhitt has
hired former Habitat managing director and Diesel head of retail
Ruth Dangerfield as retail director to lead the charge.
Is he sure he doesn’t want to sell up? According to Higgins, he
and Wheeler are happy to carry on growing the business and
expanding it internationally. “We want to catch up with
Boden first,” he says. Adding quickly, “make sure you
print that as a joke.”
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