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Franchise in Taiwan

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What's your business background?

I didn't have a big career plan. I left a role in merchandising at Topshop in 1990 to work for Levi's. I certainly didn't expect to be there for 19 years.

I had a range of roles during my time there, including in product development. If you ever want to lead at that company, you've got to understand jeans. From Levi's I went to run Claire's, which I left to join Cath Kidston as chief executive in 2011.

What was the most important thing you learned during your time at Levi's?

Being identified for the Levi's leader development scheme was a lucky break. It meant that I was exposed to very senior people early on. When I was 34 they made me brand president for Europe and the Middle East. At that point it was a £1.6bn business. That teaches you an awful lot about yourself at that age.

I was at Levi's long enough to see it go up and come down, and I was part of the team that helped turn it around in Europe. Working to turn around a business is a very useful experience.

What keeps people at a company?

It's usually not about pay. It's about clarity of the role and great co-workers. For me, especially when I was younger, I wasn't interested in vertical promotions. I wanted to learn new stuff. As you progress, much of your work moves from learning to teaching others. In my role at Cath Kidston, as at Levi's, I'm constantly teaching and mentoring - things that are important at smaller businesses too.

What's it like to work with a founder?

From day one, Cath [Kidston] was hugely supportive of my role. There was a mutual respect for our different experiences. I've never founded a company, and she's never run a business as large as I have.

It's important to remember that business is emotional as well as rational. She said: "It's always hard for a founder, because it's like watching a child grow up and then the child walks away." She wanted to work to a point where she felt she could step back from the day-to-day running of the business. I've always thought of it as this - she's entrusted her child to me. I've got a daughter of my own, so I have a sense of how that might feel.

How did you expand Cath Kidston internationally and what advice can you offer other companies?

First, figure out whether your brand has global appeal. To test this for Cath Kidston I walked around London stores and saw a lot of consumers from Asia. This was confirmed by the web sales. At Levi's we were always taught to focus on the consumer. Applying that principle helped me assess the breadth of the brand's appeal internationally.

You have to know what your business model is before you expand. I took a decision that Cath Kidston would have the UK market as owned stores and use franchises to grow elsewhere. I also hired staff who were experienced in international expansion. You need people with the scars of trying and failing in new markets.

It's important to think with a global mindset, but localise products. We have a large lunchbox that we sell in the UK. It comes with a fork and knife. We also have a small lunchbox that we sell in Japan. It's a bento box and it comes with chopsticks.

But it only works when you've got the infrastructure. When I started at Cath Kidston, we were shipping products from China to the UK, then back to Japan. We quickly shifted that supply chain so that we had a distribution hub in Hong Kong and then shipped it to our Asian partners.

How can you change an organisation's culture from UK-focused to international?

It's one of the biggest differences between a small business and a big business - the global mindset. Cath Kidston only had six international stores when I joined. People talked about "our shops" and "their shops" and I had to eradicate that pretty quickly. I'm as proud of a franchise shop in Taiwan as I am of an owned store in Liverpool.

We changed the bonus scheme to focus on global performance and we also changed employee objectives to concentrate on global issues. I also increased the travel budget for the company so that employees could go and see international stores with their own eyes.

How have you kept the integrity of the brand and developed it without Cath as a driving creative force?

For anyone who comes into a founder-led business, keeping the integrity is crucial. Early on Cath asked me: "When you were sitting in an office in Brussels, how could you control a brand [Levi's] that's being used by thousands of people?"

I reached into my bag and pulled out my copy of the Levi's brand bible and a book called This is a pair of Levi's Jeans, which is the history of the company. You've got to give people guiding tools and principles. I asked if she had a Cath Kidston brand bible. She didn't.

I asked her to sum up Cath Kidston in a sentence. She said: "The home of modern vintage." From that statement we built a brand book that we now give to every employee. She also had a motto: to brighten up people's days. That's the epitome of our company culture.

Long after Cath Kidston and myself, what is now an international brand will be a global one. And it will be defined by being "The home of modern vintage". For now, I'm its custodian.
Kenny Wilson will be speaking at The Telegraph Festival of Business 2016 on 8 November 2016. Find out more here

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More than just a floral print: how Cath Kidston became an international brand

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What's your business background? I didn't have a big career plan. I left a role in merchandising at Topshop in 1990 to work for Levi's. I certainly didn't expect to be there for 19 years. I had a range of roles during my time there, including in product development.

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Last November, Starbucks opened a new store, just like they'd already done more than 1,700 times in 2013. Like the Starbucks you pass on your way to work, this new coffee shop has everything you need for your caffeine consumption ritual: a coffee bar, cozy lounge and enough coffee choices to make you wired for days on end.

Only there's a minor difference: This new Starbucks is on a moving train.

The coffee behemoth partnered up with Swiss train company SBB to convert a double-decker train car into a store that people could visit during their workday commute. Logistically speaking, it's a smart move; instead of making busy customers come to them, they figured, why not just go to the customers? "It's all about us meeting our customers where they are in their day," says Bill Sleeth, Starbuck's vice president of design for the Americas.

You could read the sentiment as just another one of the company's plays for worldwide caffeine domination, but the intense customization of stores is actually an ongoing effort to make the Starbucks brand a little less brand-y. "What you don't want is a customer walking into a store in downtown Seattle, walking into a store in the suburbs of Seattle and then going into a store in San Jose, and seeing the same store," Sleeth explains. So how do you make the world's largest coffee house feel like a neighborhood haunt? The answer: good design.

The intense customization is meant to make the Starbucks brand a little less brand-y.

There was a time when Starbucks really was the coffee shop next door, but that was a long time ago. The company opened its first shop in Seattle in spring of 1971 and stayed relatively small (under 100 stores) for the next 20 years. Of course, since then Starbucks has boomed to be the largest chain of coffee shops in the world. Today, there are more than 18,000 shops worldwide.

But let's go back in time a bit. In the mid 2000s, the chain was doing great, opening a store a day, branching into new territories like Asia and South America. The design team had opening new shops down to a science-or at least a kit of parts that made it easy to launch a cafe with as little risk and time as possible. Come 2007, the economy went south, and so did some of Starbuck's business. In 2008, the company closed around 600 shops, prompting a change in senior leadership, and ultimately a change in design thinking.

The company polled customers to find out what they thought of their not-so-little local coffee shop. It turned out that for a lot of people Starbucks was becoming synonymous with fast food. "The customers were saying, 'Everywhere I go, there you are,' and not in a good way," Sleeth says. "We were pretty ubiquitous." Ubiquity isn't a bad thing; it meant people wanted what they were selling.

But what's good for the bottom line (mass production makes things cheaper) isn't necessarily good for the brand. Starbucks execs wanted to transition from the singular brand they'd been working to establish worldwide, to focusing on more locally relevant design for each store. "There are lot of reasons people come to us; we know people come to us because of consistency quality, speed," says Sleeth. "But we need to do something that felt authentic." But how?

It turned out that Starbucks was becoming synonymous with fast food.

To Design Local, You Have to Be Local

They began by getting people out of Seattle. In 2008, nearly all of the company's designers were stationed at the company's headquarters in the Pacific Northwest. This meant someone who was designing a new store for a neighborhood in Houston or Chicago or New York had maybe never even been to the city they were creating a store for.

"We couldn't design locally relevant stores, stores that would resonate with our customers from Seattle," Sleeth explains. So they began relocating their design team, pushing them out from the headquarters into the actual communities where they would be designing stores. Today, Starbucks' more than 200 designers are working out of 18 design studios around the world, with 14 of them stationed in the Americas.

As the designers became more familiar with their surroundings, they began to incorporate the communities' stories into the designs. There are thoughtful touches like furniture made from reclaimed basketball court wood at the Barclay's Center in Brooklyn. And a brass-instrument chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the new Canal Street location in New Orleans. But even more interesting than that was the cultural observations the designers were able to make.

With more people on the ground, they began noticing things that might make a difference in not just the aesthetics, but how a particular customer might want to experience the shop. In metropolitan U.S. cities, for example, people tend to come in pairs or alone. They'll saddle up to a long community table next to a stranger without giving it a second thought. In more urban settings, people will just sit right next to each other, alone but collectively together," he explains.

While in places like China or Mexico City, the Starbucks experience is much more group-oriented. "People are in bigger groups, so you have think differently about the seating there." he says. "They won't crowd together in a banquet like they would in New York City." This drove the designers to place more individual stools in the shops, so people could drag them around, creating impromptu group seating areas. The design in the Kerry Center location in Beijing, feels like a lounge, with a "coffee workshop" on the second level meant to teach a predominantly tea-focused culture about coffee.

Design Is a Business

Creating hyper-localized design for every shop Starbucks builds is impossible. After all, Starbucks is a business, and businesses need to make money. "We know we can't just go in and overspend," Sleeth says. "We can't turn every store into a flagship." He says that Starbucks balances their design spend on the level of projected income a store is going to earn. So a shop that's slated to be a big earner, like the one in New Orleans, will get more personalized touches than, say, a shop in York, Nebraska.

That's not to say the designers don't take care with every store they open. Sleeth and his team have been working to revamp the company's standard kit-the parts that show up in most every Starbucks store on the planet. You're always going to see the "school house" chair, a sturdy wooden seat with an upright back. You'll see warm-colored ottomans, wooden tables and banquets. "We want it to feel custom, but we need to be able to scale it," he says. "Because we do a lot of projects in a year."

Much of the mass customization comes in the form of colors and materials. For example, in Miami and Los Angeles, the design team is more likely to use a lighter palette of colors to reflect the abundance of sunlight. Southern cities need furniture that is cool to sit on, and beachy locations need durable furniture to account for the sand that gets tracked in. "We were looking at how the floor had worn over 10 years because people were walking in with sand on their feet," Sleeth says about a store in Miami.

Still, Starbucks is actively working to test and roll out more its concept stores, with its main focus right now on the pre-fab drive-thru stores made from shipping containers. The concept, originally executed in Washington and inspired by the shipping containers Starbucks employees saw out their windows, uses pre-fabricated materials that can be delivered on a truck, lowered into place.

So far they've built 11 of these modular stores around the country, which may not sound like much in the grand Starbucks scheme. But in a few years, drive-thru stores will account for around 60 percent of shops Starbucks plans to build, a good chunk of which will use this same pre-fabricated method. "The push for innovation and design is just starting," Sleeth says. "This is the tip of the iceberg."

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With Stunning New Stores, Starbucks Has a New Design Strategy: Act Local

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Last November, Starbucks opened a new store, just like they'd already done more than 1,700 times in 2013. Like the Starbucks you pass on your way to work, this new coffee shop has everything you need for your caffeine consumption ritual: a coffee bar, cozy lounge and enough coffee choices to make you wired for days on end.

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McDonald's is a global phenomenon.

While many McDonald's restaurants around the world serve the signature burger and their own spins on the Big Mac, many global outposts offer completely different items. Many are specific to each country's cuisines - and most look far more interesting than items on the American menu.

These are some items you can order should you find yourself in an international McDonald's.

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26 crazy McDonald's items you can't get in America

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McDonald's is a global phenomenon. While many McDonald's restaurants around the world serve the signature burger and their own spins on the Big Mac, many global outposts offer completely different items. Many are specific to each country's cuisines - and most look far more interesting than items on the American menu.

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You have a global brand. But, to maximise its strength in global markets, you need to take account of the local customer needs and wants. That is the essence of the concept of "localisation" and few global brands take this approach more seriously than Starbucks.
"To Design Local, You Have to Be Local"
Starbucks opens almost 2,000 stores each year. So you might forgive the business for searching for economies of scale by installing standard store layouts for their global brand. However, in recent years Starbucks has opted for an entirely different approach - the intense customisation of stores.

This article in Wired magazine explains how Starbucks has opened 18 design studios around the world so that its store designers could visit the key international locations firsthand and design stores that incorporate local culture.

Take China as an example.

In China, customers tend to come to Starbucks in large groups. Store designers have accommodated by adding more movable furniture that customers can rearrange to sit together. In contrast with Americans, who tend to favor fast service that allows them to quickly get on with their day, the Chinese like to sit and relax for a while. So Starbucks is now building larger stores in China. It has also added custom flavors like red bean Frappuccinos to appeal to local taste buds.

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Localisation - How Design is Helping Starbucks Take A Global Brand into Local Markets | tutor2u Business

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You have a global brand. But, to maximise its strength in global markets, you need to take account of the local customer needs and wants. That is the essence of the concept of "localisation" and few global brands take this approach more seriously than Starbucks.

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Play your card right Motivational Theorists

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Play your card right Motivational Theorists

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p65-67

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