Simon Hobbs You’ve been in the business almost 40 years, since you started your first shop. How core to your success is the determination to stay connected at all costs?


Paul Smith I’ve never really thought about it. I’m just so curious, so interested in stuff, in music, in people, in sport, in architecture. I use my eyes all the time. 


SH You’ve got 600 employees in the UK alone. People say that you are good at involving staff and that even the most junior members feel their opinion is valued. But when it comes to the endless carousel of collections, how easy do you find it to delegate? 


PS I’ve had to learn a lot about how to 
delegate… but I absolutely make the 
final decisions. 


SH Why did you put up the company for sale in 2001? 


PS Well it was the time when the trend was to be part of a big group. Certainly a lot of my important younger staff were saying: “Shouldn’t we talk to them, shouldn’t we try this?” Reluctantly, I employed one of the merchant banks to go through the motions and we met several people. The great thing was that in the end the younger staff said: “Why do we need these people?” It cost quite a lot of money to go through the process but in the end it made the young staff realise: “We’re all right, we’re okay.” 


SH You’ve said your mother gave you “tranquility” and your quirky dad gave you bothenergy and the ability to go into a room and make people feel comfortable. You’re firm in the beliefs they gave you: sincerity and effort, but what is the “power of personality”? 


PS Well, in the case of going to Japan in 1980-something or other, when almost nobody spoke any English, it was about communicating through touch, through gesture, jokes, humour — all this was absolutely crucial to my success in Japan. And you have to remember who has done things for you and say thanks and all that. 


SH Your siblings were good at school but you didn’t like it, why? 


PS Maybe it was because I didn’t identify with any of my teachers. But I was passionate about cycling, a sport that I wanted to do professionally. I used to race 60-70 miles on a Saturday, training three times a week. 


SH Is it true that cycling taught you a lot about yourself and the world around you? 


PS Yes, that’s probably true. I certainly realised I had a sense of humour. I was out on my bike with a friend one day and said something to him that was funny and he immediately crashed into a wall and fell over because he was laughing so much. It was nice also to have a bit of independence. I also realised that I had quite a competitive side to me, which I never knew about. 

SH You’ve said that you regret not getting more education and that sometimes, at dinner parties, when the conversation gets heavy you feel a bit left out and you end up playing the joker. 


PS Absolutely. People get onto a subject that I’m not familiar with and I turn to my safety net. But my wife and I don’t really enjoy those sorts of parties — people often seem much more interested in doing a deal than talking about ideas. 


SH So, you wanted be a professional cyclist when you left school at 15 but your dad said there was no money in that so he got you a job in a warehouse as an errand boy. But was it the nature of a cycling accident you had at this time which changed your life? 


PS It was the hospital. It had a lot of coal miners, motor and bike accident victims and a lot of people died while I was there. It was a real ‘grower-upper’. 


SH And at the same time you left the warehouse and fell in with the local arts school crowd and set up your first shop, Birdcage. 


PS I kept in touch with a few of the people I met in the hospital and one of them said, “Let’s meet up at the pub”. The pub was where all the arts students met. They talked about stuff like Andy Warhol and something called Pop Art. I thought, God, that’s really interesting. And this girl said her dad was helping her set up a boutique and asked if I would mind help setting it up — but I didn’t have any experience! It was an interesting time.


SH At 21 you met your wife Pauline, who had two sons already and you said that she stabilised your life. 


PS Absolutely. She came to live with me in Nottingham and was teaching two days a week at the local art school. She was a trained fashion designer and said that I had so many ideas and energy that maybe I could have my own shop. So I worked away at various jobs and opened up a 12ft2 back alley shop, which was only open two days a week. I had a sense of purity during this period by not changing, by existing by working other jobs. The shop was completely unique. 


SH So, what sort of business plans did you two have then? 


PS  What? No, we never had them. We just wanted to earn a living. So Pauline started teaching me masses about how to construct clothes and I went to a military tailoring course in the evening and I learned how to construct clothes that were very strongly made, and very powerful. I had friends who were selling clothes in America and France that were lovely but they were very badly made and often they were returned. Ours were not as interesting but they were very well made. 


SH So how did you expand? Who helped 
fund you? 


PS Well, Mr Hill — he was a tailor — lent me £300 or something. And my dad probably gave me a couple hundred quid. But mostly I subsidised it by this [mimes groping behind him, by doing stuff nobody really knew about]. 


SH Individualism was big in the 1970s and became core to what you did. How did you come through with the Paul Smith look — a classic look with some unexpected flourish. 


PS Because I hadn’t trained formally at art school my approach was simply to nudge at the classics. Because we were so small, we could only buy mostly stock fabrics — such as navy blue pinstripe — and then we would add, say, a bright lining, maximising the small opportunities. 


SH So why, at 30, did you scrabble around to find the £25k that you needed to buy a shop in London, in Covent Garden, which was then almost a wasteland? 


PS It was the only time Pauline had not had confidence in something I thought was a good idea. I was working as a freelance designer in the West End a couple of days a week and we were moving to London, so I wanted my own shop and showroom. One night I ended up in Covent Garden, where people used to joke that you needed a passport to get to because it was so far out. It felt like Soho in New York. 


SH You’ve said that through the 1980s, the most important business lesson you learned was to say “no”. 


PS Yeah. I love every day of my life and I feel very humbled and privileged to lead such a life. But that’s because I don’t let myself do anything I don’t feel comfortable with. So I 
have done a few other products but only because they felt right. 


SH So, today Japan accounts for half of your business. How did that all important deal come through? 


PS I got a phone call one day from a Japanese businessman and a French designer who had been following my career for three years. So I flew out with Pauline, economy class with these long legs. I was flattered they wanted to give me this — in hindsight — very small amount of money! But it meant stability for my business. 


SH So, 25 years on, you have 200 stores in Japan. How do you manage that relationship? 


PS We have 30 people go twice a year, we’re in daily contact, we have a local office that manages the licence. That means you can police, check and double check distribution and advertising. I’ve been about 90 times — it’s about what you put in. 


SH Why haven’t you repeated this model in Britain? 


PS It doesn’t feel right to do that here. If you spread yourself across Britain you become like a high-street brand. 


SH You don’t have a traditional way of working with your shop spaces. You don’t profit-maximise, do you, putting sofas and scooters all over the place? 


PS We’re very old fashioned. And, you know what? During this interesting financial time, we’re massively stable, we don’t have any borrowings, we own most of our freeholds.

Fast Facts

Sir Paul Smith


1946 Born 5 July, in Beeston, Nottingham, UK


1970 Opens first shop — 10 Byard Lane, Nottingham 


1976 Smith shows his first menswear collection in Paris, under the Paul Smith label


1979 First fashion brand to open on Floral Street in London’s Covent Garden


1984 Paul Smith Ltd signs license contract with Japanese company, C.Itoh


1987 Opens first shop in New York — 108 Fifth Avenue


1994 First Paul Smith Women shop opens in Paris, at 22 Boulevard Raspail 


1995 London-based Design Museum opens a restrospective of Smith’s 25 years of work in the fashion business called True Brit, marking the first time the museum had devoted an entire exhibition to a single fashion designer


2000 Smith awarded a knighthood by HRH Queen Elizabeth 


2001 Shop opens in Milan, at Via Manzoni 30 


2007 Smith is awarded Honorary Fellowship of RIBA — Royal Institute of British Architects


2007-9: Opens shops in Bangalore, Leeds, Antwerp, Los Angeles


Weathering 
the recession

Paul Smith Ltd is owned by Paul Smith, Pauline Denyer (his wife) and two other members of the board. Smith functions as CEO and chief designer of the company and is still involved in most decision processes concerning the business. According to company sources, global sales at wholesale value were up 4% in 2008 at £345.9m (€389m). If last year’s results mirror the year before, Japan will account for just over half of all sales, the UK for 18% and mainland Europe for 19%. The company operates 26 fully controlled shops and has concessions in 1,629 multi-brand boutiques and another 462 in department stores. The company sells to 74 countries, and in 2007 accessories counted for a third of sales, mens jeans for 14%, the womens range for 13%, and mens and womens shoes for 7%. Just 5% of products are made in the UK, a third coming from Italy and another third from China, the remainder from India, Morocco and Portugal.