Alan White interview: transforming N Brown from a catalogue business into an online titan

All fears that former N Brown chief executive Alan White might struggle to cope after last month retiring from the retailer where he had spent 25 years are allayed when a sunkissed, and somewhat hirsute, White walks in for our meeting.

Not only has White had a well-deserved holiday, he also sports a bushy silver moustache, which he is quick to point out is not indicative of being demob happy post-N Brown but is to raise awareness and funds for prostate and testicular cancer and mental health as part of the Movember campaign.

White’s departure comes after a career spent with the home shopping giant, which operates plus-size womenswear retailers Marisota, Simply Be and JD Williams and lingerie retailer Figleaves, among others. White joined N Brown in 1985 as finance director when it was a mail-order specialist turning over around £40m a year. Excluding a short spell with rival Littlewoods, 25 years later he leaves a business with sales of £800m,predominantly online.

Online game-changer

Unsurprisingly, White says the internet is the biggest game-changer the industry has experienced during his career and his own biggest achievement was capitalising on the opportunity it presented.

When the internet first emerged as a channel, White says observers predicted it was the death knell of traditional home shopping, but in fact it ended up offering the industry a lifeline.

“The internet was the new kid on the block who could make these catalogues look like dinosaurs,” he says. “It was the start of fast fashion, it was start of retail theatre on the high street and home shopping was by and large two catalogues a year, ‘static product’, static pricing.”

But rather than fight it, White was quick to embrace online when he took the helm of N Brown in 2002. “There was a fight going on within the company - I expect one that was going on in all retailers at the time - about how much resource to put into the internet. “People were concerned it was going to be one of these fads but in the first year I was there it was clear this was something that was here to stay.

“I put a note out to the business saying at some point in time, this is going to be 50% of our business, we’ve got to give it our full support.” White’s prediction came true last year when online revenue broke through that barrier.

N Brown was, in fact, one of the first established retailers to fully embrace online in the early 2000s. White says: “High street retailers said ‘well if we don’t want to do catalogues, why would we do the internet?’ It was only the rise and rise of the internet that convinced those people they would have to come. “It’s one of the reasons that Asos has got to where it is today, it had the internet to itself in young fashion for a long period of time. [Asos boss] Nick Robertson was able to build his database and get a foothold for peanuts because there was nobody else there.”

A wealth of customer data and its established fulfilment capabilities made it easier for N Brown to move online than its high street counterparts. The retailer had also already experienced one channel change during White’s tenure, making it more adap-ted to change. When White joined the retailer in 1985, 95% of the orders came in by mail. That moved to 85% of orders via call centres by the late 1990s.”Part of the success of N Brown
is that, despite those changes in channels, it’s been fleet-footed enough to move its logistics to take advantage of that,” he says.However, gearing the business up for the online world was not straightforward. White says the retailer had to change everything from product ref-reshes to promotions in order to adjust to a changing retail world where fast-fashion was in the ascendancy and the home shopping and mail-order models were beginning to look outdated.

Challenging times

Like his idol Sir Alex Ferguson, White had a tricky start to his N Brown management career. “My first four results announcements were profit warnings. A month before I joined, sales were down 15%. I was thinking: ‘Perhaps I should have done more due diligence before I came back’,” he says.

For while ardent Manchester United fan White will always be synonymous with N Brown, he did jump ship to Liverpool-based arch-rival Littlewoods in 1999 as finance director, eager for a challenge as it was about to launch an IPO.

“It was at a time when Manchester United were in the ascendant in footballing terms over Liverpool. [New Look non-executive chairman] Alistair McGeorge, a fellow United supporter, was also there at the time so we even had the majority of the boardroom,” he jokes.

While the IPO was abandoned, White was given the challenge he was seeking just a few years later when N Brown boss Jim Martin retired and he filled the role.

After taking up the post, White reviewed the N Brown business and concluded that it had the right strategy of focusing on growing mature and plus-size markets but its execution was awry.

“Changing the execution is not easy but it’s easier than changing the entire strategy,” says White.
It was evolution not revolution, but White says if he looks at the functions of the business now they are “radically different” to where they were in 2002.

Some tough decisions were made, including changing the entire board, and the focus was on growing online and introducing more newness to the product range.

However, those changes took some time to filter through. “It was 2003 and I’d gone out to watch Manchester United v Real Madrid and the N Brown share price had hit 80p. I thought ‘I shouldn’t be here. I’m fiddling while Rome burns’. But that was the bottom point and the share price is £5 today.

“If you’re changing your range to be more contemporary and more fashionable, there’s no instant fix. But in the quarterly results cycle, people were thinking ‘when is this new chief exec going to sort it out?’”
The results started to come through at the end of 2004 and since then, including during the recession, sales and profits have continued to grow.

A niche audience

N Brown is different from some other home shopping players because it relies on its product rather than its credit offer - in fact, only 45% of its customers use credit compared with 90% at rival Shop Direct, which owns Littlewoods, Very and Isme.

“People came to us as we offered something that wasn’t available on the high street. With other home shopping companies you could buy stuff that was on the high street but on credit. Having a strong USP was always there.” White believes serving a niche audience allows N Brown to thrive. “If you’re a specialist, it doesn’t have to be the lowest price,” he says.

As well as leaving N Brown with a successful online business, White also set the retailer on course for another game-changing journey: opening stores. White piloted stores for Simply Be and menswear brand Jacamo in 2011 and his successor, Angela Spindler, has outlined plans to open 25 dual-fascia shops.

White says that, although N Brown customers find it hard to get what they want on the high street, that is still where 80% of plus-size clothes shopping takes place.

Although N Brown could have sat pretty with its stronghold in the fastest-growing sales channel, online, it would have cut itself off from the largest plus-size fashion market. “Although I subscribe to the view that high street sales will fall and online sales will grow, it will be many years before stores are not the biggest channel,” says White. He agrees that online is undoubtedly taking footfall away from the high street, but does not believe it is to blame for the demise of town centres.

He points out that high street retailers that have embraced online have made a success of it. “There’s no doubt about it, the channels cannibalise each other, but the consumer these days expects everybody to have everything.”

Breaking new ground

White - who admits that “there are not many people with as much grey hair as me in the online world” - believes retailers are still much nearer to the start of their online journey than the end. Internationalisation will become a bigger part of retailing, especially online, he predicts. However, data will be the major battleground over the next few years. “Now, pretty much everyone has a decent website. I think you can go on a website now and not know whose website you’re on because they all look the same,” he says.

“There’s a fight to be had about how relevant the product you see is and how smart you can be for that customer.” However, White says that part of him is pleased to “get off the roundabout” of online retailing, which he says can be difficult because of the pace of innovation. “It makes some of those investment decisions in systems more difficult. 20 years ago, you could say ‘oh, we’ll make our money back in 10 years’. That cycle of how long you’ve got to get your money back is getting shorter and shorter.”

However, he is not leaving the world of internet retailing. He is at present eyeing a private equity chairmanship role and says anything he’s involved with is likely to be linked to online.

Although the moustache will have disappeared by now, White’s tan may be here to stay as he seeks to swap plus-sizes for piña coladas and enjoys more long-haul travel during his retirement.

If you’re chairman, you’re in control of the diary, so I can get more time for me. I’ve never minded having a conversation with people from my sun lounger in the Maldives.”

Alan White believes competition has increased in the plus-size markets and says sizes 16 and 18 are the battleground. “As a market it’s bigger than the whole of size 20+ by a considerable factor. And that is where the high street has an opportunity to gain,” he says.

More retailers are stocking larger sizes. “Every retailer is alive to the trends. It’s laughable that we think of size 16 as the start of the plus-size market, when that is the average size of a British woman. No-one in retail could survive without offering size 16,” he says.

People have become more comfortable with their shape and now want fashionable clothing that is designed sympathetically to their figure, says White. Although more mainstream retailers are stocking sizes 16 and over, White believes there is only space for niche operators when sizes rise beyond a 20.

“It doesn’t work from large operators in a store. Next tried it but thought ‘no, the market’s tiny’. If you have hundreds of stores running everything in a larger size, the market isn’t big enough,” he says. “But If you do it in home shopping, you only have one shop so can attack small markets.”