VIVE LA DIFFERENCE

Mulberry is on a roll. Defying the economic slide, profits at the British fashion and luxury goods brand are up dramatically this year, and the company, with its iconic factory in the English countryside, is opening six new stores worldwide this year. LUX Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai chatted to Mulberry Brand Director Georgia Fendley recently in their airy HQ in London's Kensington.

Darius Sanai: British brands seem to be having a global luxury revival: I'm thinking about the sales for you and also for Burberry, with Dunhill also doing well in China. What took them so long?

Georgia Fendley: I think British brands are having a moment right now and I think they last had that moment probably in the late 1970s. That’s when Mulberry was very successful previously with Le Style Anglais and suddenly hunting, shooting, fishing, countryside way of life was very cool. We’ve had a really strong last few years since 2008 and I don’t think that’s a coincidence at all. 2008, the way I see it, wasn’t the beginning of the recession, there was a change in the psyche of the world’s consumers, in some regions more than others. We had all kind of shopped ourselves out and were already feeling a little bit sated with, well, how many more amazing, beautiful, status objects can one have? People were asking, actually where’s the meaning in this? What am I doing? Am I just working harder and harder to shop more and more?

I think that 2008 and the economic crash was a wake up call for consumers, I think that we all started to think more about what it was that we were spending our hard earned cash on and we were looking for products that had. People started buying things that they will really love their whole lives and that will get better with age and I think that Mulberry sits in that category. Our products last so it’s a justifiable purchase for people and we have our own factory but also really stringent sourcing policies and I think people care about those things more than they used to. Our sourcing policy is really, really stringent so we’re a luxury business but we take our responsibilities really, really seriously.

DS: You've just opened a flagship in New York. What products do you anticipate are going to be particularly popular?

GF: I think that we originally struggled with the States, particularly with some of the core product. Some of the bags are unlined so you’ve got a kind of raw faced leather on the inside, which a few years ago, consumers in the States and in Asia found very difficult. A few years ago, we’d have problems explaining that to the consumer. But I think that the consumers appetite has changed, so I think they’re enjoying that naturalness, that authenticity. In the US, perhaps more than the UK, somebody who has bought a Tilly bag will want a Tilly notebook and wallet, they will want the whole family of items to go with it.

DS: And do consumers in China have very different tastes?

GF: We’ve been watching what they’ve been buying very carefully and we made all sorts of assumptions, none of which played out! In China they’re buying what everybody else is buying. So the same bags that are bestsellers in London are bestsellers in China. We did think that it might be that they would like more delicate, smaller pieces. And they do but they actually still love those hulking great big bags that European women don’t seem to want to do without.

DS: How important is the Britishness of Mulberry for your brand?

GF: I think it’s really important but it must be handled subtly and sensitively. I don’t think that they’re buying Mulberry because it’s British. But I think that there’s something in Mulberry’s personality that is intrinsically British and which separates us from other brands. We don’t put Union Jacks on things and it’s not that kind of overt, parodied, pastiche of British life which is not true, it’s much more, British sensibility rather than British iconography.

DS: How do you transmit that Britishness?

GF: It means, for an international audience, that we have an irreverence, that’s perhaps unusual, so we can be witty and humorous but never to shock. That British irreverence, isn’t necessarily about shocking, it’s not jarring in that way, it’s much more a sort of smile or a wink of seeing the ridiculous in things. A lot of our presentation tends to be quite playful. If you look in our windows at the moment it’s all giant, oversized toadstools that completely dwarf the mannequins next to them, some of the toadstools are about 8 feet tall with all the seats covered in moss so it was like being in a English woodland. There’s a narrative there that very much belongs to British storytelling. And we’re very democratic and friendly, so if you go into one of the shops, you won’t have a scary security guard on the door. If you look at the staff in the shops, they’ll represent a very broad demographic, they’re not all stick thin, 20 year old girls.

DS: Which is more important, China or America?

GF: America is our big growth market. We have a new store there, in September, and it’s a market that clearly enjoys Mulberry and understands it. It makes sense to consolidate one market before you move to the next, and remembering the size of our business, I think it would be very dangerous to sort of have that scattergun approach of trying to do a little bit in every hot market, we actually need to focus on a market and consolidate. Obviously we’re active in China and it is clearly important, but it would be crazy not to establish in a relatively mature market first, and also the US is tremendously important because of the influence it has on the rest of the world. We all look at Hollywood, the world looks at the US and that’s something that we were acutely aware of.

DS: How important are online sales for a luxury brand like Mulberry?

GF: Really important. Very early on, we realised that online sales were going to be important, and our website is our single bestselling shop. We are spending a lot of time thinking about how to deliver a luxury experience online, both in terms of the transaction side, and storytelling and how people can build a better relationship with us. And also in terms of customer service, where businesses like Net-a-Porter have led the way, but actually there’s still so much further to go. As a busy working mother, all of my shopping is done online and that’s the way that a lot of our consumers will, by preference or necessity, want to shop luxury going forwards.

Darius Sanai is Editor-in-Chief of Condé Nast Contract Publishing