Catalogue e-business interview with Peter Higgins

After almost five years as chairman at cataloguer/retailer Cath Kidston, Peter Higgins is to step down. The move, however, does not signal Higgins’s complete departure from the business.

Higgins, who has a background in management consulting gained from his days at Bain, joined Cath Kidston as chairman in 2006 after selling most of his shares in shirtmaker Charles Tyrwhitt back to cofounder Nick Wheeler. Today, Higgins retains a five percent stake in Charles Tyrwhitt and plays an active role in the business’s development. He is also chairman at Joe Browns, a Leeds-based apparel cataloguer, and was chairman at apparel brand Crew Clothing for two years to October 2009—but “four businesses were too many to manage,” he says.

Higgins says he will stay on at Cath Kidston to help lead the search for a “retail heavyweight” to take the business forward. Following the appointment, he may take a nonexecutive role. “You never know, the business might float in three year’s time, so I may stay on as adviser, especially on the mail order side.”

When he joined Cath Kidston in 2006, it was turning over £7.5 million and making a small profit. Higgins immediately began “getting ducks in a row” and in April 2010, Cath Kidston, now a £50 million business with a £12.5 million profit, was sold to private-equity firm TA Associates for a rumoured £100 million.
Higgins attributes the business’s strong growth to “increased brand awareness, getting a strong team together, narrowing SKUs and focusing on bestsellers, opening bigger stores to feature more of the range, and doing mail order properly”. Cath Kidston is now “truly multichannel,” says Higgins, “a circle where every part of the business supports the rest”.

Joe Browns, one to watch
Building a strong team is a theme throughout the interview, with Higgins reinforcing the importance of getting the right people in as soon as possible. That’s why Joe Browns has just appointed Hilary Large, formerly head of marketing at Littlewoods, as its marketing director—and Higgins says he wishes he could have found her sooner. At Joe Browns, Large will develop the Joe Browns brand with responsibility for recruiting customers from new avenues, getting more from the company’s best customers and crafting a leading website.

Higgins is keen to play down Joe Browns’s recent success. But the business is doing well—it turns over £20 million and is profitable. What’s more, it’s been relatively unaffected by the recession. Joe Browns is “good value for money,” says Higgins. This meant that during the recession the business found itself attracting customers who still wanted a branded product but found other brands too expensive. “It was actually an opportunity to grab more market share,” he says.

Joe Browns has quietly grown its business overseas too. Through its wholesale deals with multicatalogue groups N Brown (Simply Be, Jacamo), Otto (Freemans, Grattan) and Shop Direct (Littlewoods, Very) Joe Browns has a presence in Europe and in the US. It also delivers worldwide via its website and sees roughly 10 percent of sales come from international markets, despite no dedicated international marketing efforts and no firm plan to become “country-specific”.

When asked whether Joe Browns will be sold, Higgins hinted at a private-equity deal or becoming part of a larger retail group, but he would not be drawn on a timeframe. Charles Tyrwhitt, however, is categorically not for sale. The business he founded with Nick Wheeler back in 1990 is predicting £70 million turnover and profit “around the £20 million mark” for the next fiscal year. The focus at Charles Tyrwhitt is on becoming a multichannel retailer, and as such it is rolling out more stores, with plans to take the total number of outlets from 12 to 50 by 2018. Once again, Higgins raises the importance of employing the right people; Charles Tyrwhitt has hired former Habitat managing director and Diesel head of retail Ruth Dangerfield as retail director to lead the charge. 

Is he sure he doesn’t want to sell up? According to Higgins, he and Wheeler are happy to carry on growing the business and expanding it internationally. “We want to catch up with Boden first,” he says. Adding quickly, “make sure you print that as a joke.”