On Brand by Alexandra Shulman CBE

Soho

Perhaps its glory years were its shabbiest, in the 1950s & 1960s, ambered forever in John Deakin’s haunting street photographs and portraits of his fellow artists and boozers.

Alexandra Shulman

Alexandra Shulman was brought up in London. She became the first female editor of a monthly men’s magazine when GQ launched in the UK in 1990 and in 1992 she became Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue where she stayed for 25 years, leaving after orchestrating the centenary year of that magazine in 2016. She is now working as a columnist on The Mail on Sunday, a fashion and retail consultant and speaker, and writing a new non-fiction book. She is also Vice President of The London Library.

On Brand

by Alexandra Shulman

Individual Aesthetic and Brand Pedigree

A very long time ago, roughly 40 years back, I was employed to compile a list of companies selling luxury product in London. I have no memory of what it was for – I don’t think I was even sure of the purpose at the time – but I do know that I was paid enough to buy a very nice skirt from the Kenzo store on Brook Street. I also know that nobody mentioned the word ‘brand’. But my list was of brands, of course: Floris, Rolls-Royce, Wedgwood, Waterford, Peter Reed, N Peal – a few off the top of my head that I remember. It’s just that back then nobody considered brands in the same way. The retail world was so much smaller in terms of markets and competition and the demands of growth, reinvention and narrative so much less pressing. Branding as a driver of business was still in its infancy – if not embryonic.

Over the past 30 years, though, branding has in some ways become the story. Even the smallest companies think in terms of their brand identity. I brand, therefore I am. The need to create a brand core from which you can evolve is one of the first stages in the invention of any business. And with the shift to e-commerce and digital operations, strong branding is essential. As customers surf the vast oceans of merchandise it is the brands they know, trust and are interested in that they will spot first. But for brands, as with anything, the quandary is how to stay alive. How to remain relevant as your customer base ages? How to keep being the story and not relegated to the dull, safe haven of predictability or, worse, become old news? In fashion, the arena where I have worked for the past 30 years, this is managed with hugely varying degrees of success, but one thing remains constant. The key is in the connection between the creative and business teams. Success relies on a real understanding between the two parts, encompassing genuine trust and shared objectives. Failure tends to follow when companies dive into a copycat response to what may have worked wonders in one business, but is not necessarily the right template for another.

Top ► Belmond.

Above ► Gucci Creative Director Alessandro Michele and his SS19 collection.

Right ► Who was more famous in 1995? Gucci or its then Creative Director, Tom Ford?