MWB-ONLINE.CO.UK FEBRUARY 2017 | INTERVIEW | 19
is non-specific gender. We also do a bit of homeware which we sell quite well online. — TB: Where are the majority of your online customers located? SC: Most of them are in London, a whopping 61.2 per cent of our online customers in fact. We do a bit through Amazon, and we pay for Google AdWords and do a lot of targeted mailers – building a customer database all the time. Second is Glasgow, third is Birmingham, fourth is Manchester, fifth is Middlesbrough and sixth is Newcastle. And then about 10 per cent comes from overseas. — TB: Is the growth being driven by the online business? SC: Yes, very much so. What’s exciting is we launched an app about two years ago, but it never really did anything because you could only buy using Paypal. But now we can take credit cards on the app, and it’s made a huge difference. The app now accounts for 9 per cent of our online sales, and that’s a massive increase on last year where it was only about 1 per cent. We only relaunched that in mid-November last year. An app is a lot cheaper than a website, and a website is a lot cheaper than a shop, so that could be the future. — TB: But surely the bricks and mortar shop still has a big role to play? SC: It does, of course. I’ve been doing this for 35 years now, it’s Psyche’s 35th anniversary this year, and I absolutely still love it. It isn’t work to me. I love buying, I love product and dealing with customers, and I love being on the shop floor, although I don’t get time to do it as much as I’d like. I also think shops will come back stronger in a few years’ time, but in a slightly different format. Things will stabilise and settle down and, once they do, the novelty of going to shops will come back. Shops will have to improve and evolve, and they will need screens and to be interactive. Click and collect is growing at a massive rate, so you’ve got to come in to the shop to collect your purchase. —
TB: How much of your business is now done online? SC: The split is 68 per cent store and 32 per cent online at the moment. However, online sales increased by 36.7 per cent and 32 per cent the previous year, so at some point over the next year or two I think online sales will match the store sales. The amount of web sales we now do from mobile phones is enormous, some 63.7 per cent of our online sales. If you include sales from tablets that rises to 78 per cent. — TB: Would you consider yourself to be a groundbreaking retailer? SC: Most definitely. We try loads of new things all the time, though quite often they don’t work out. We actually launched online in 1997. Unfortunately, at the time, I had the Psyche own label, and then I took on this building in 2002, and that took my focus and attention away from online. I wish I’d continued to put all my efforts in to online, because we’d be a massive player now. We probably got in to it too early if anything. We’ve only really been refocusing on it for the past three years. — TB: What’s new on menswear? SC: We’ve just opened a new men’s contemporary area in what was an Armani shop-in-shop. Armani has now moved in to the main floor space, and in the new area we have Kenzo, Dries Van Noten, AMI, McQ, Oliver Spencer, Universal Works, Fred Perry x Raf Simons, Dsquared, Nudie, Edwin and YMC. All the cooler brands which are more about the fabrics, cuts and fits, as opposed to being about the badge. It’s good to have those brands all together in one space now, as they used to get a bit lost. So we’re really now having a big push on those brands. Dries Van Noten is my favourite brand in the world. The stuff that’s more about the badging and logos is on the main floor. We’ve also moved some of the more mass market brands, like Farah and Pretty Green, to Psyche 2 in the Cleveland Centre in the town centre. The
second shop is 4,000 square feet, and it’s been open for two and a half years. It also carries brands such as Original Penguin, EA7, Levi’s, Fila Vintage, Eastpak and Nicholas Deakins. We wanted to also be somewhere right in the centre of town, because the main Psyche store is just a bit off-pitch from the centre. And we wanted to have something that appealed to a younger customer, with a slightly lower price point, in between JD Sports and Psyche. — TB: This year marks Psyche’s 35th anniversary: did you ever envisage having such longevity, especially seeing out so many recessions over that time? SC: Well, I started off as the singer in a punk band called Sliced Tomatoes. And my first shop was called Sliced Tomatoes too. The band weren’t very good and we didn’t get anywhere, but I designed the clothes we wore, and people liked the clothes better than the music. That’s when I had the urge to do something with clothes. When I opened the shop in 1982, it was a bit of a laugh really. It was meant to help to get me fixed up with girls rather than be a proper business, because I was still young and daft – I was only 23. This is, of course, a big business now, with a boardroom and non-executive directors – the whole nine yards. It’s been an exciting, rollercoaster growth. We’ve had a lot of challenges along the way, and 2008 was the biggest challenge. That hit us quite hard. I didn’t really feel the other recessions to be honest, but that one I did. It set us back a bit and probably turned my attention away from e-commerce when I should have been getting more in to it. — TB: What plans do you have to celebrate the 35th anniversary? SC: The actual anniversary is on 1 August, but we’re going to have a big party in October – it’s a better time for everyone. We’re going to throw a lot of money at it. We’ll have a catwalk show, live bands and we’ll do food and drink – there’ll be a lot of stuff going on.
“ I’ve been doing this for 35 years now, it’s Psyche’s 35th anniversary this year, and I absolutely still love it. It isn’t work to me.”