London's Link and Lace

One British name sells heritage to the world at four figures and another sells basics to America at single digits, and between them they say something about what we are good at

What British Fashion Sells Abroad

Ask someone in New York or Shanghai to name a British fashion brand and you will get one of two answers. From a certain kind of person, the house with the check lining. From another kind, increasingly, a shop where everything costs less than lunch.

They could hardly be more different. One sells a coat for two thousand pounds. The other sells a T-shirt for two. Both are British, both are growing abroad faster than at home, and I have been wondering what, if anything, they have in common.

The Coat

The luxury house has always lived on foreign customers. A business report from as long ago as 2016 noted that it made more than 80 per cent of its sales in international markets. That was in the context of a surge in sales in Britain itself, as tourists took advantage of a weak pound after the referendum.

Which tells you something. Even the sales made in London were, in large part, to visitors.

What those customers are buying is Britishness. Rain, officers, a certain idea of understatement. It is a story, and the coat is the proof that the story is true. The company’s recent recovery has been built on remembering that, as I wrote in another post.

The T-Shirt

The other export is odder.

Primark is owned by a British food company and began, as it happens, in Dublin. For decades it was a purely local affair. Then it crossed to the Continent. Then, about ten years ago, it opened in America.

The trade press reported this summer that its sales in the United States rose 16 per cent, helped by three openings that took its estate there to 41 stores. That was against flat sales at home and a fall in continental Europe. Worldwide it has close to five hundred shops.

So the fastest-growing part of Britain’s biggest cheap fashion chain is on the other side of the Atlantic.

What are Americans buying? Not Britishness. There is nothing British about a nine-dollar pair of pyjamas. They are buying a format. A big, bright shop where the prices are startling, the stock changes weekly and you can fill a basket for the cost of one item elsewhere.

America has cheap clothing. It did not have quite this. The nearest equivalents are either general discounters, where clothes sit between the tyres and the cereal, or online.

What They Share

On the face of it, nothing. But I think there is a thread.

Both know exactly what they are. The coat company went wrong when it forgot and recovered when it remembered. The cheap chain has never been confused for a moment. It does not advertise much. It does not sell online for delivery. It does not pretend its clothes are anything other than what they are. It is, in its way, as disciplined as a couture house.

And both are good at something that is genuinely hard. One at making a product that lasts forty years. The other at the logistics of getting millions of garments from factory to rail at a price nobody else can match. The second is less romantic. It is not less difficult.

British fashion has always had this split personality. Savile Row and the market stall. The bespoke and the cheap and cheerful. What we have never been especially good at is the middle: the polished, mid-priced, international brand that the Spanish and the Swedes and the Japanese do so well.

The Missing Middle

That is worth dwelling on. The great global chains of the past thirty years, the ones in every shopping centre from Dubai to Denver, are mostly not British. The names that ruled our own high street when I was young either stayed at home or went abroad and came back with their tails between their legs.

Why? I have heard several theories. That British retailers were too comfortable in a big home market. That they did not understand how different other countries’ sizes, seasons and tastes are. That the City wanted dividends and not the patient investment it takes to open in a new country.

Whatever the cause, the result is that our exports are at the two extremes. The very dear and the very cheap.

Is That a Problem?

One view says no. Play to your strengths. Britain has an unmatched stock of heritage and a knack for value. Let others have the middle.

The other view is that both ends are exposed. Luxury depends on a small number of wealthy shoppers, many of them in China, and their mood can turn. The January trading news this year described luxury as flickering back to life after a difficult stretch.

The cheap end is now being undercut by websites with no shops at all. The same summer report that gave the American numbers was mostly about price cuts made to fend off an online rival.

A country with nothing in between is relying on rich tourists and thin margins.

The American Test

The American venture is the one I shall be watching. The United States has been a graveyard for British retailers. Famous names have gone there with great fanfare and retreated.

The difference this time may be the lack of pretension. Those earlier attempts tried to sell America a British idea of style. This one is selling America a bargain, which is a thing Americans already understand perfectly.

Forty-one shops in a country that size is a toehold. But sixteen per cent growth, in a year when home is flat, is not nothing.

What I Take From It

That the brands which travel are the ones with a clear answer to the question “why you?” A coat with a hundred and fifty years behind it has an answer. A shop where jeans cost nine pounds has an answer. A pleasant mid-market chain selling nice enough things at reasonable prices does not, once it leaves the country where people grew up with it.

I would like us to have a third export. A British brand in the middle, well designed, properly made, fairly priced, that the world wanted. There are a few small ones trying. I buy from them when I can.

In the meantime, we send the world a raincoat and a two-pound T-shirt. It is an odd pair of ambassadors. I am rather fond of both.

The London Prat has views on what Britain sends abroad and expresses them in its UK satirical news on British exports and its British satirical news about Americans discovering Primark. Bohiney Magazine has the reaction from the receiving end.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/