Menswear Style Podcast

Oliver Spencer, Menswear Designer / British Menswear

May 06, 2020 Menswear Style Episode 55
Menswear Style Podcast
Oliver Spencer, Menswear Designer / British Menswear
Show Notes Transcript

Oliver Spencer the brand is the vision of Oliver Spencer the man. Self-taught tailor and shopkeeper, his eye is the starting point of everything they do. Frustrated by the limitations of art school and impatient to strike out alone, Oliver abandoned studenthood in favour of a stall at Portobello Market. Working that market stall ingrained his enduring love of garment and cloth — shop and shopkeeping. Having spent the previous decade creating and expanding formalwear brand Favourbrook, he wanted to create something new: a range of clothing with all the quality and craft of premium tailoring, but with a relaxed modern style. The philosophy? Quality needn't mean formality; casual needn't mean careless.

That philosophy found plenty of adherents, and from a single shop on London's Lambs Conduit Street, Oliver Spencer has gone on to open several more shops, and an international online business — as well as being stocked in many of the world's leading department stores, from Harvey Nichols to Liberty of London to Mr Porter. Alongside his distinctive design style, he is uncompromising in the standards he sets for production and provenance. That means the company seeks out the finest fabrics and yarns from artisan British and Italian mills, making every garment in only the best European factories and workshops.

In this episode of the MenswearStyle Podcast we speak to Menswear Designer Oliver Spencer whilst he is working from home in self-isolation on the Isle of Wight. Our host Peter Brooker asks him about his background and how he first came to start his eponymous menswear brand. Championing British cloth such as linen from Northern Ireland, Oliver discusses the best places to manufacture men's garments, with a focus of reducing overall footprint. They also discuss the current climate of operating during the Coronavirus pandemic and the struggle that shop owners are currently facing. As a bonus, we're then joined by the head of sustainability, Bleue Wickham-Burnham, who educates us about sustainability and what Oliver Spencer is doing to become a more sustainable menswear brand.

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Hello, welcome to another episode of The menswear style podcast. I'm your host Pete broca. And on this episode I'm going to be speaking to the founder of Oliver Spencer, Oliver Spencer Oliver Spencer the brand This was founded in 2002. Having spent the previous decade creating and expanding formal wear brand Facebook, Ollie wanted to create something new, a range of clothing with all the quality and craft of premium tailoring, but with a relaxed modern style, the philosophy quality needn't mean formality casual needn't mean careless. So Oliver was really generous with his time. Whilst we were talking. We also touched upon a lot of the sustainability elements involved with the brand of expenses, so we thought it might be a good idea to get the head of sustainability for Oliver Spencer on the phone, blue wick and Burnham is a very impromptu call, but blue was really gracious with his time also gave us some really good insights. So stay tuned. After the chat that we have with Oliver. We're also going to get on the phone to blue. Now in the meantime, do check out the website menswear style.co.uk they will find all the reviews, travel features, lifestyle articles, competitions still running on the website. Do check it out. And if you want to get in touch with us here at menswear style, it's info at menswear. style.co.uk Okay, so here's that chat with Oliver Spencer. Well, it's my great pleasure to introduce to the podcast Oliver Spencer, of course founder of Oliver Spencer, the brand. How are you doing today? Well, I've yeah woken up and it's cloudy, the sun's out. We've had good. We've had to weather I see recently, which has been nice. The days are a little different at the moment because obviously I'm at home and working from home. And that's well changes as good as a lot of things really. So you go about your work in a different way. And you look at your work in a different way. And I think that this is the whole situation for as bad as it is and it is shocking and terrible. It does give you five minutes to look at what you're actually doing on wonder whether you're doing it correctly and wonder whether you should be wonder how really you should be looking at pushing your business forward in the future. Yeah, and so where is home for you right now? The Isle of Wight. You know are you kind of trapped on the Isle of Wight. Are you based in London as well? How does it work for you? Now I'm not going to London at all at the moment on I've got a home in London. I've got a home on the Isle of Wight. So I'm trapped on a on a not so desert island. I spoke to a friend last night I said I'm going to be speaking to Oliver Spencer today. I've heard he's trapped on the Isle of Wight and I said it as a joke, but he then goes oh my god, is he okay? Has he got food and water? I said yes. All right. Yeah, it's a civilised place. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good. We have all the amenities down here. There's 160,000 people live on the Isle of Wight. It's somewhat Isles, I made a lot of work since about 20 years behind the mainland. So all the stuff down here is is is done. I mean, there's huge tomato farms down here. Huge garlic farms, massive dairy herds. I mean, it's so self sufficient. Of course, you've got water all around you as well. So it's really self sufficient down here. And don't tell anyone I said so. But it's a fantastic place to live. So don't come running down. Yeah, you're enjoying your peace and quiet as well. No quiet. I've got three boys under the age of 15. And it's pretty mental. It's good. It's good. Yes. I was gonna ask you how the business is getting on amidst a pandemic, but I wanted to kind of shoot that back a little bit. But first, I wanted to get maybe a thumbnail sketch of you and your background. You went to art school. Is that correct? Yep. Yeah, I went to law school didn't last very long, right? Yeah, it was kind of a Yeah, I was kind of too busy. Too busy. On my market stall, really important Bella road. This was back in the early 90s. And I sort of switched out of art school and went to selling secondhand clothing, which is great fun, School of Life, School of Life, self taught tailor. Now, for anyone that wants to do self taught tailoring these days, I'm imagine they just rush to YouTube. You know, try and develop as many videos as they can realise it's impossible next to impossible and kind of quickly abandon it. Now, I'm taking leaf set of my own book here with because I've done fashion academies, and I'm trying to be self taught. And it's, and it's really hard. So how did this process work for you? Well, the process work for me was that I found that I was selling more stuff than I could get hold off. So the process started for me by by very simply, I went, I found a fantastic work room in the East End of London. And a wonderful man who, who bought his patents out and showed showed me how to cut to a patent across some clock. And I just spent time in that factory learning the basics of manufacturing. textiles, has been a huge thing for me. So then my next step was that I went often, this is over a period, by the way, that about two or three years, my next step was to go off and learn more about textiles. And I went up to Suffolk to do that to a place called Steven Walters, and find out about how you weave, spinning yarn, all of that type of stuff. And so basically, that was it. But But shopkeeping was sort of always quite high on my agenda. So I guess in about 93, we had our first shop. And this was all Facebook, which is still a business I own and doing doing really well. We started that business and we started slowly built the businesses up from that. So we've Oliver Spencer, you and you manufacture in the UK and Portugal? And is there a bigger scheme or philosophy for you to bring more manufacturing back to the UK? How's it how's it sitting with you right now? Yeah, it seems to me pretty well, there are things you can't produce in this country anymore. So you can't produce shirts, really, there are a couple of shoe makers left but not really very many. So the best shirt makers are down in Portugal at the moment. tailoring deconstructed tailoring is better done in Portugal. Constructed tailoring you can definitely produce in the UK. So we have a pretty healthy mix of the two. I'm very pro British, very pro British cloth. In the winter, the UK does fantastic cloth in the summer, the you're generally better off buying a tanning cloth. However, the caveat there because we sell a lot of linen and we buy a lot of linen from Northern Ireland. Right. And there's some very nice, very, very nice learning coming out of Northern Ireland. So I think that, you know, we have a bit of a mix up, but we keep it very localised. But I mean, I want my, you know, if I'm making shirts, the shirt maker is probably 10 miles away from the shirt mill, right? Down in Portugal. So that tells you that we're keeping the footprint to an absolute minimum the whole time. And that's my objective, my objective actually for the business going forward. And especially in light of what's going on is to become more organic and more. Making my footprint smaller basically, I think that's a very, very important thing. And yes, it does cost me more money to do that. But that's the business of the future in my mind. Yeah. And maybe we can just touch upon how things have changed for you, in light of what's happened with the pandemic. How's how's the goalposts change over Oliver Spencer? Well, right now at the moment we're in, we're in, in in a bunker. weathering the weathering the storm. We're looking after ourselves hundred percent, that's the most important thing. So it starts with the staff, then it starts with us and then it goes to our suppliers making sure that all of them are looked after fully paid. I And then thirdly, and and I don't want to be too, too down on the landlords to be honest with you because I think they're getting an awfully bad steak and some of them suck just some of them really deserve it. But some of them, some of them behaving very well so so that the landlord's the landlord cannot be forgotten about at the end of the day, so we do need to, you know, you need to have that backs up, but we need to survive What's going on? The difficult part of that from a cash flow point of view is that there is no exit sign. No one's put one up yet. Nobody's told us when we're going to move on from this, this sort of state that we now find ourselves in. And this, this is very unique for many businesses. So people with online businesses who are selling sort of loungewear, and stuff that you can wear around the house are probably doing okay. For us, it's a little more tricky, because we're quite dressed up. And people aren't dressing up at the moment. So that's a bit of a tough one. But but but I'm, I'm cautiously optimistic about the future and what what it looks like. Independent retail, tough, tough time at the moment. Third, party wholesale, is difficult. And and I'm going to say again, I think the wholesale model probably has got to change. I'm not sure it's working the way it is at the moment. And I think people need to be more. I think that needs to be more transparency about how goods are made. I think there's a lot of there's a lot of talk at the moment about Made in Italy. Who is exactly making it naturally? Well, it turns out that there's 280,000 Chinese work in process, which is is pretty heavy duty, it turns out, they're all on the black economy. So I think that that's a very bad thing. And I think that some to certain people in the luxury goods sector are pulling the wool over people's eyes. And and yes, it is made unnecessarily but it's not made legally in Italy. Right. So I think that that I think there's got to be some major changes there. I think there's definitely a time that, that we've got to look at ourselves and go, Well, we can't you know, what, we can't be producing stuff like this profit margins for the profit margins that these big luxury goods houses are requiring around sustainable, they can't get them legally. Yeah. And I think that that, that that, that they need to look at themselves in the mirror, and they need to make some changes. And is this a government issue in terms of implementing more policies and more kind of red tape around these people so that they can decide they have to be more transparent as I can't? I mean, the Italian government is going to do what the Italian government government wants to do. But I think that I think, no, I think it's down to consumer, small consumer base. Yeah, I think the consumer needs to vote by not buying these products. And we need to tell more people about this, because it's quite disgusting. But if they were made more aware of it, so how can this and I'm generally I am, I want to go back and say Actually, let me just give you a caveat here. There are some Italian manufacturers that are off design and true and do an absolutely wonderful job. Sure. Okay. But those this whole thing is now come out because the Chinese people work in Italy, and that's the difficult thing. I mean, we also have something similar in the UK, I think where the say the example the word London I often think is hijacked quite a lot, but I know what you're gonna say because there's multicultural and all of the Yeah, all of the In fact, the word rooms that I work with and have been doing for many years and mostly, mostly staffed by Turkish folk and Bangladeshi and Indian folk. Okay, but they've all got English passports. massive difference, they're all legally working here. Okay, so that there's a square massive difference. So the people in Italy are being imported into Work for six months periods, I actually encourage a lot of people to, if they haven't, at the moment got the opportunity to go into one of your stores, obviously, to really have a mooch around on your website, I've been spending most of my morning on it. And it actually does take you down a few rabbit holes where you can learn a lot about organic cotton learn a lot about linear. We try. We didn't just spend some time but we employed somebody to blue, his laners who, who part of his polities, everyday working week is to drive us forward in a more sustainable manner. and sustainability is a really important part of the way we go about everyday life. Yeah, look sense. So that That to me is very important. linen, just on the subject, you mentioned that it's my favourite subject is the fabrics of the future. Right. So I think at the end of the day, where, you know, we are have been introducing more and more linen into our winter range. And I think that there are lots of different there's a viewpoint online and that it always looks kind of a bit crinkly. And a bit messy will actually is the further forward we go with linen. We found out that if you freeze the yarn before it's woven, it actually takes a lot of the crinkling out. Wow. Yeah, so there's that there's one male using that technology at the moment that w more males to follow, as well. Wow. Do you know I'm kind of with you on the whole linen renascence. At the moment, I've since learned that hospitals are massively craving linen, because one of the big things that they need right now are linen sheets for the beds, they say like out of all of the supplies. You know, it's one of the things that we can't do without. Yeah, I can really say that. Yes, 100%. And, you know, I hope that I hoped that these wonderful people at the NHS have all got enough clothing to wear in fact, that's the next call I'm going on to is to talk to a journalist about some perhaps making up perhaps using our operations in East London to look at making up to more everyday clothing to the NHS, NHS worker who's who's who's working so hard to protect our country and look after our people at the moment because I believe there's a shortage of clothing for them. Well, Oliver, that sounds like a much more important call. Well, I hope I can help because unfortunately, I've got no one in the I've got no one in the factories at the moment. Well, that's an issue as well. So but yeah, listen, thanks so much for your time over over spencer.co.uk for the people that are uninitiated that need a place to go and spend some time and do some learning do some shopping and also, you know, once we're all laid out, I encourage people to find find you around London, Soho, Shoreditch, Notting Hill, a couple of outlets in Bloomsbury, I believe, but listen, everything's available through the website. Oliver, thanks so much for your time. Thank you very much. Thanks, Oliver Spencer. Now, as promised, here's an interview with head of sustainability at Oliver Spencer, blue Wickham Burnham. But it's my great pleasure to introduce blue Wickham Burnham head of sustainability for Oliver Spencer, how are you doing today? Blue? I'm good. Thank you. Yeah, just like said working from home. And with a little bit of change in pace, but yeah, seems to be going well. And blue. What is it that you actually do say on a day to day basis over Oliver Spencer. And on a day to day it really varies. And it because my job is it is an overarching job, I look at all different areas of the business and we analyse those and, and try and work out a way to perform best as a business in its entirety, rather than just kind of having a product focused strategy around environmental sustainability. However, product is generally our main focus, and because that's where our largest impact occurs, so it's really working with new collections, seeing what's going on with them, seeing how we can progress and move forward seeing what we can do outside of their collection, looking at packaging, looking at energy, looking at what's going on in the stores, looking at how we communicate what we're doing to our customers. It completely varies from day to day, but it's generally looking at ways to improve our environmental and social problems. And was this a job that existed say 10 years ago were brands appointing people like yourself to overlook their sustainable department. And I think some of the larger brands might have, I think it probably would have been focusing more on the social side of things. So manufacturing and making sure people are safe and cared for within the supply chain. And I think probably about, I mean, it was probably about seven years or five, between five or 10 years ago, the conversation moved into a more environmental realm, as there was further understanding around the impact that the industry was having. And, and, yeah, so I guess maybe 10 years ago, the bigger companies probably would have had someone, mainly looking at the social side of things, maybe someone working on the environment side of things as well, probably more around compliance rather than progression and like strategy and being creative with what you're doing. But as I'm sure many of your listeners will be aware, the industry and people's understanding of what the fashion industry is doing to the environment has changed massively over the last 10 years. And that shift is caused a lot of people to kind of change the way they do things. And now we're, we're in a, in a much better position where a lot of brands are focusing on this, and a brand of our size, Kim really doesn't have this role. And I feel like we have this role, because it's so important to the brand. And it just it feels natural. It's just it's it's the way things are done. Is it even before I came into the business, you know, there was there was there perhaps wasn't the the knowledge base or the strategy wrapped around environmental sustainability. But there was the intention there. And they were doing things when they could, but then when I came in, it was about kind of making that a little bit more streamlined and working forward. And using. Using the knowledge I had to progress the brand, basically, what kind of schooling Do you need for this blue? schooling for me, I mean, it started at university, and learning about it there and applying myself and there really isn't one area that you can get all the information from this, you have to kind of replace after a few different areas, and publications, there's certain podcasts, there's other media outlets, that are doing things that are not as we just said, as it's become more streamlined, more media outlets are talking about it. And business of fashion do quite a lot of good stuff. There's a publication, which is really, really good for anyone who's it's quite technical. So you have to be kind of ready to apply yourself or have some knowledge already is eco textile magazine, which comes out quarterly, which is a very good source of knowledge. But yeah, I mean, it really it really information comes from all different areas. And the one thing is really important, which I would express to people is to be critical. You have to not take not have to not jump on bandwagons, you have to really look at things and analyse how your situation is unique and how these things apply to you. And in not accepting necessarily what people tell you just to make sure because there's a lot of people talking about stuff that perhaps isn't as good as they're saying is and and there's a lot of I mean, yeah, it's it's not a straightforward situation. So what is Oliver Spencer doing specifically to try and make itself more sustainable way, I mean, we're doing a variety things. Like I said earlier, our main focus is on our product and looking back and that's because that's where our largest impact occurs. So it's looking at our product, looking at where the pressure points are looking at how we can improve that now. One of the key focuses for us is our fabric usage. And working on using love for printed fabrics like organic cotton, we use some other interesting fabrics like undyed walls. So the walls actually have some really amazing colours as well and by staying away from the dyeing process, you save yourself massive savings or water. Firstly, because there's lots of water that's needed to dye the the arms on the fabric then or to wash fabric once you've been dying. There's a lot of energy needed to heat that water for the dye bath and then also to heat the water that's used to clean the yarns or fabric. And then there's a lot of chemicals used in that process as well to dye the fabrics and in addition to that, there's also water and energy which will go into creating those chemicals which are used to dye the fabric. So by kind of stepping away from that process, you create massive savings for, for a garment, or for a fabric screw. So we, we look at fabrics and try and work with low footprint fabrics, but are kind of what we've been focusing on a lot recently is organic cons undyed walls, and also working with European linens as well. Because linen is another amazing Milan, which naturally just has a low footprint. And because we're a UK based brand, and we have UK manufacturing and the linen is grown in Europe, the transport of that is not too significant. So the the kind of travel footprint as well is also reduced. And blue. For the uninitiated, what's the difference between organic cotton and normal cotton? Well, from from how the fibre behaves, it shouldn't really be any different, you know, it shouldn't be any, like, I don't think there's much notable noticeable difference in its softness or anything like that. But what it's really about, it's the environment, social kind of benefits you get from it. So from a social perspective straightaway, the people who grow cotton or the people who live in the area surrounding where cotton is grown, have to be exposed to the chemicals which are used in conventional cotton growing. And, and these chemicals in a lot of cases seriously armful for human health. And I mean cancer rates in areas where they have conventional cotton growing in comparison to areas where it's organic cotton grown significantly different. And so by moving to organic cotton, you automatically help the people who are wearing cotton, or handling raw state cotton or living in surrounding areas of cotton grow. And then from an environmental side of things as well, you really help by protecting the soil. So soil health is important for a number of things, it's important for the ability of farmers to continue to use their land to grow cotton or other crops effectively as well. If you have healthy soil, your soil will be able to store water and have more nutrients to give to whatever it is growing. So there's less need for irrigation. And also from an environmental perspective, when you're applying lots of nitrates to the ground, they can also be released into the environment. And thirdly, any runoff water from cornfields that gets into maybe river systems or any way that it fits into a water system that people use will also affect those people who are using that water. So it's quite, it's quite a complex thing. And I always found it hard at first because I think that saying if you talk about organic food, it's really straightforward to understand why you know, you're putting something your body is quite easy to understand why it might be better to not have any chemicals in it, but when you're talking about organic cotton, it's not you're not really putting something directly into your body, although those chemicals are touching your body and your skin is absorbent, so it will naturally take on anything which is on that cotton. But yeah, it's a bit more, it's bit more complex, but it really I mean, for me, the main, the main benefits the you're helping the people who are growing the cotton and you're helping build their future livelihoods as well by helping to protect their soil because that is what they're going to live off in years to come. And that's what they need to be kind of working towards protecting and building up as well. And also, so I don't know if I mentioned it a second ago but healthy soil is a very important factor in fighting climate change and the fact that it stores carbon, when you have healthy soil, plants can store carbon within that soil. And when you have dead soil or in fertile soil which has just been rinsed by chemicals, any carbon which is stored by plant will just be released straightaway blue wick and burn in their head and sustainability for Oliver Spencer. Thank you blue. Thank you, Oliver, and thank you for listening that's been this episode of menswear style. And I hope you join us on the next one and I hope you will stay safe out there. In the meantime, remember, it's only fashion people and you're never fully dressed without a smile.

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