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Business Cornwall meets Tom Kay, founder of renowned Cornish clothing brand, Finisterre
Tom Kay – Finisterre St Agnes-based outdoor clothing company celebrates its tenth anniversary this year and it has very much been a labour of love for its founder Tom Kay.
BC: Are they the ‘big corporate surf companies with little integrity and no transparency’ you talk about on your website?
With no design background and little business experience, Kay has built his company up the hard way, very much ‘learning on the job’.
TK: They’re the ones. A lot of them have come a long way now, which is good, but at the time these big brands, the stuff is not always very well made.
He has been driven by strong convictions of doing business the right way, and a passionate belief in producing products that stand close scrutiny not only for their quality but for their ethicality as well.
BC: More of a fashion brand?
It’s these sorts of beliefs that led him last year to being featured in Richard Branson’s book, Screw Business As Usual. As Kay explains, he has little time for the ‘big corporate surf companies with little integrity and no transparency’. But how does he balance this ideology with the harsh realities of the commercial world?
Business Cornwall: You don’t have the usual background for starting a clothing business. Tom Kay: Not at all. I studied for a marine biology degree and then I became a chartered surveyor. I had an opportunity to do coral reef research, I could have done that abroad, but I decided England was my home, my family was here. So when I left uni, I went to work in London in a suit, working 9-5 in a big office block. BC: Totally different to this. TK: A million miles away. I soon realised that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted something I was totally committed to and passionate about, so I started thinking what that might entail. I have always been into the sea and surfing and started to combine the areas of my passion – surfing, cold water, UK, the environmental side I got from my degree – into a brand. And then the name Finisterre came from an old shipping forecast area, which in Latin means Land’s End, end of the earth, that sort of thing. When I was little I remember listening to the shipping forecast in the car on a winter’s day. 18
Face to Face
BC: You didn’t consider Lundy or German Bight! TK: Finisterre just had a romantic sounding name and a meaning to it as well, it just stuck out. They’ve changed it to Fitzroy now. BC: You didn’t think about changing? TK: (laughs) No! But I read an article about it and it was an EU ruling telling the UK met office they needed to change the name of the area because French and Spanish boats were getting muddled with Finistere in France and also Cape Finisterre in Spain. I thought it was quite funny because it was a British weather shipping forecast. You guys can go and listen to your own forecast! BC: So why clothing specifically? TK: I was massively into surfing and looking around at some of the big brands out there, they made fleeces which the wind would go straight through, not windproof or waterproof, made in some factory in the far east and totally not fit for purpose.
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TK: Totally. We came from a functional point of view, there’s a real need for the product. Our first product was a fleece, windproof and breathable. Changing in the car after a freezing cold surf in the middle of February, this is what this brand provides for. We look after you in that kind of sense. Yes, it looks good and fits as well, but ultimately has a function behind it. There was a need for surfers to have this product, and that’s how it started out. BC: Having no design background or industry experience, how did you go about bringing out your first products? TK: We started out with just one product, two styles – the fleece. It was literally a case, in those days, of getting the yellow pages and getting onto a fabric manufacturer to send fabrics down. I had to work out what I thought was missing in the market – a cold water surf brand. I worked with a factory up in Devon who we still work with today, and started putting patterns and products together, then sent the stuff off to Leeds University’s textile technology department to get some credibility behind it, testing the products. That gave us the stamp of approval from a product point of view. Our first product came out and I remember we got quite a good write up in the Sunday Times Good Gear Guide, about cold water surfers need this product, about it being beautifully made. And the cheques started coming in, not a lot, about one a day, which was a lot back then! I had all the stock in one corner of my room.
Business Cornwall Magazine - October 2012