Fashion addict

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A penchant for a good shirt was the start of a beautiful retail relationship for Hawes & Curtis chief Touker Suleyman. He tells Lisa Berwin what drives him.

In 2004 Touker Suleyman found himself with a run down shop on Jermyn Street, an inherited debt of£500,000 and a pile of old stock. After spending almost 30 years as a manufacturer for retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Suleyman and his brother Mustafa had decided to take the plunge into retailing. Buying Hawes & Curtis for£1, the plan was to build a rather worn and fading shirt shop into a luxury brand.

“Having walked Jermyn Street and seen what people were doing I thought I could do better, so I researched every company on that street and discovered Hawes & Curtis was for sale,” recalls Suleyman.

However, it soon became apparent that a love of shirts and Jermyn Street would not build him a luxury empire overnight. “We had big decisions to make on where to position ourselves and a friend of mine at Asprey pointed out that we really needed 10 years to build a luxury brand,” says Suleyman. “I did not have 10 years.”

He decided that instead of grasping for a top-end luxury position, he would have to make Hawes & Curtis a real competitor, not only on Jermyn Street but on high streets around the UK.

“Shirts were not thought of as a luxury commodity in their own right, but just a commodity. I wanted to start designing more exclusive products and, to do that, we had to have scale,” he explains. To that end, he rolled out 12 shops in the following 18 months.

Suleyman says that the secret to shirts was good fabric and getting them into stores quickly, so he overstocked on fabrics “so that a new product could be brought to store within weeks”.

The brothers experimented with younger, more fitted styles and put new styles in stores every week. “We trialled new shirts on a Saturday and the best-sellers would come back within two weeks.”

After 18 months Suleyman tapped into another market and began making ladies’ shirts, which now accounts for a third of the business. “We found the secret to our success was newness as well as good quality and customer service, so we brought in multiple purchase offers.”
There are now 24 Hawes & Curtis stores in the UK and one in Cologne, Germany. There is also a transactional web site that accounts for about 10 per cent of the business.

This autumn, a flagship Hawes & Curtis store will open on Jermyn Street. The 8,000 sq ft store will be set over three levels and be the largest shop on the iconic street in London’s West End. “We want this shop to bring back to Jermyn Street the heritage of great shirts,” says Suleyman.
In the basement of the shop there will be a café, called Duke’s Café, which will be a nod to the Duke of Windsor who was historically the brand’s biggest customer. With the business now at a more established level, he hopes the store will also mark a more upmarket positioning for the brand.

Suleyman says that, four years on, his business is not only an income for him but a hobby. “I find retail addictive; I often go around the shops at weekends to spot what the customer is looking for. I like to know before anyone what to expect on a Monday morning and act accordingly.”
Before the end of this year, Hawes & Curtis will launch three more stores in the UK and Suleyman hopes to build the brand to 75 in the next two years. The retailer is also eyeing franchise opportunities in Russia, India and the Far East, as well as a New York flagship. “I think the biggest challenge in retail is building scale and I feel privileged that I had the buying power to be able to buy my own fabrics and expand the business as I did,” Suleyman says.

“There is so much talent out there and many retailers who would expand if only they had the right production or finance in place. I think smaller retailers in this country are penalised and that is a shame.”

Hawes & Curtis will not, he hopes, be Suleyman’s only retail venture and one of his future ambitions is to own a luxury womenswear brand.
In the meantime, he feels that he is in a stronger position than most apparel retailers – this year he has been able to ramp up sales by 27 per cent. “At the end of a season fashion is often worthless, but a white shirt is still a white shirt,” he says.