Interview with Dee Poon, Managing Director at PYE: Where Retail Means Business As the daughter of fashion executive Dickson Poon, owner of Harvey Nichols, S.T. Dupont, and other brands under the Dickson Concepts umbrella, and Marjorie Yang, the chairwoman of Esquel, the largest cotton shirt manufacturer with clientele such as Hugo Boss, J. Crew, and Ralph Lauren, Dee Poon is as close as you can get to fashion royalty in Hong Kong. Now, as an established fashion icon and aspiring entrepreneur, Dee runs her own show: PYE, the retail arm of Esquel. With stores in Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Urumqi, PYE focuses on selling designer dress shirts with a particular focus on style, functionality, relevance, and legacy. After graduating from Harvard Business School, Dee also served on the boards of the Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design, Zuni Icosahedron, Y.L. Yang – Esquel Education Foundation, and Teach For China. Business Today: How did the environment in which you grew up influence your pursuit of fashion, and in particular, men’s fashion? Dee Poon: I grew up in this industry and I always liked it. It’s very rare to find a place where you can work and manage both a strategic business goal and a creative environment. As to why I focused on men’s dress shirts, well, at Esquel, this is our core product, and we’re really good at it. So I think it makes a lot of sense if you’re going to start a brand to start with something where you know you can deliver value to the customer. BT: Could you give a brief overview of what was in your mind as you started the brand? DP: The current brand has existed since 1984, so there was already a framework for me to work with. The idea was always a little bit of East meets West. It was always in China, or in Asia, with this constant process of thinking about who we are in relation to ourselves and in relation to the rest of the world. A lot of the time, in the fashion space, there’s a lot of aspiration, but there’s a lack of relevance, especially in the Asian market. So we really try to create a space that people would understand instead of just being a space that you would create in and transpose. Working particularly in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, but also as we move into other markets, we focus on how to create something that’s globally relevant and cosmopolitan without giving up anything we believe in. BT: Could you tell us more about your beliefs as a designer and as a brand? DP: In today’s world, you can’t create a product without knowing where your product is coming from and what kind of impact you plan on having in the world. Most of the time people are very customer- focused, and of course we are very customer- focused as well. Our clothes are predominantly worn by business people, and you can’t simply say to them, “We’re going to give you this tool to go change the world,” without realizing the impact that we as a brand have on the world as well. So, being close to the manufacturer, we make sure our impact is sustainable, is green, and that we share our values of respect, treating people well, and giving people opportunities. All of that goes into every single thing that we do. From a product point of view, we have our core men’s dress shirts, but we have a couple of different lines, and they’re all called PYE at the moment. We have the Infinity, Executive, and Classic line, and even one called More, and we try to understand what each person wants and how we can provide that perfect garment for them. BT: Can you explain the image that you want to market toward the “businessmen” demographic? DP: I think the difference between us and other retailers is that many of them are solely fashion companies. When you think of shirts, you think of Thomas Pink versus us, and Thomas Pink really prides itself as a historic tailor. They are marketing toward business people and bankers, and you can see the way they create jokes and messaging – it’s really from a tailor to another person, but they’re not the same type of occupation. However, given my background in business, I really do think that my head is your head. We are the same person, and that’s how we try to message and target. Because we are first business people, not tailors. We of course are fantastic manufacturers, product people, and designers, but originally coming from that community allows us to talk and communicate with people in a fundamentally different way. BT: In terms of global business markets, how do you change your message from country to country? DP: At the moment, we’re not in any other country, but what’s amazing is if you go onto our website, what you can see is that each country and each culture has quirks. In China, for example, people talk about dialing up and dialing down certain attributes according to where you go. What you see in PYE is the message that we are for a better future and acting as an enabler toward a better tomorrow; that’s something that is surprisingly common across cultures and is quite global. In today’s world, a lot of people share visions and ideals that perhaps historically weren’t as obvious. Maybe it’s apparent now because we’re connected by the Internet, or maybe it’s because of globalization, but because we’re from so many places, we have a very broad message. BT: How are you guys different than some of the other companies such as G2000, Giordano, Zara, and all those major chain stores in Hong Kong that focus on formal clothes? DP: We’re very differently positioned than them. If you just look at where our stores are, where our pricing is, where our product is; we’re pretty much doing everything different from Giordano or G2000. Zara is so ubiquitous that you can’t exactly say that we’re not in the same places and same malls, but I really think that we do things that are different than G2000 and Giordano because they’re a lot more massive than we are. Whether it’s about how we shoot our ads, how we create our campaigns, where we put our product in stores, what goes into the product, what type of things our type of customer will want – all of that is very different than Giordano and G2000. Even if you look at the number of sizes and the way that they fit, they’re clearly more targeted toward the mass audience and we’re in the designer category or, at least, a bridge between the two categories. BT: Can you talk about your decision to locate yourselves in, for example, Pacific Place in Hong Kong, and how you designed your shop? DP: Retail in Asia is exceptionally competitive, and it’s hard to get good retail space. Pacific Place is a fantastic mall, and has always been a very well- managed mall. I think we’re very lucky to get a space there, and there are a number of places where I would have said it would be suitable for us. One of the main reasons we picked Pacific Place and decided to run with it is also because there’s a wide reach of consumers at Pacific Place: global travelers, Mainland Chinese travelers, a lot of Hong Kong people, ex-pats. Everybody converges at Pacific Place, so their traffic is not as high as other malls such as Harbor City or IFC (International Finance Center), and it’s not as high-lux as Landmark Mall, but it’s a very good come-together spot where you get to see a bit of the market from a lot of different perspectives. As to the shop design, if you look at our website, you can see how many versions of this shop that we’ve done, and I think it’s an evolution. We like to think about ground-breaking ideas and talk about retail formats, but in reality, sometimes that mindset is a little idealistic and you do have to play to the market in terms of what customers are used to. I think our architect has fantastic talent; he’s very good at designing spaces, so we’re lucky to work with him because he’s been able to bring the brand alive. Now, when we’re working on our future shops, you will see more technology and more differentiation in how we put merchandise out, but Pacific Place in particular was a very small place for us – only 480 square feet – so we really had to maximize our space. The actual innovation, what you see – the transition before and after Pacific Place – is more from the brand point-of-view. Before Pacific Place, all of the stores you could see were targeted toward older customers and playing up a lot more of the heritage rather than a concept of lightness and modernity, which we try to push, starting with the Pacific Place store. BT: When it comes to design aesthetics, some designers have a very strong sense of aesthetic that attracts a very certain type of clientele. Others design toward the client’s tastes in mind, going with what’s considered fashionable at that time. What does PYE do? DP: I would definitely say that we have quite a strong aesthetic. We only design shirts, so some point there’s only so far that you can go. It’s not as obvious if you compare it to Gucci, Dolce & Gabbana, or Dior. There you feel like these guys have very strong design statements. But if you look at just their shirts, you start to question if the differences are as strong. They actually are. For PYE, we’re not just pushing product to the market – seeing what people want and making more of that. Even if you look at our color palette, at the types of things that we do and we don’t do, it’s not a rulebook. There is a definite vision for what this brand will mean from an aesthetic point of view: it’s contemporary and clean. However, we do find ourselves reacting a lot; every time you try to do something new, you end up reacting to what’s already there. If you look at men’s fashion, there are things that come down from lineage – there’s the preppy style, British tailoring, Italian tailoring – there’s all these lines of design. And then there’s fashion, like Jeremy Scott and his street style, but that’s not the category we’re in. We’re in the category for professionals, for suit-wearers. When you start looking, it goes back to that identity question – who are we? So much of fashion is being pushed into Asia, and you realize that the reason some of it looks off is because these are clothes that are traditionally associated with a particular way of life and a particular style. For example, look at red Nantucket pants. It looks super preppy. It becomes a fashion statement; it’s not a natural emanation of where they came from, and that’s what I think we spend a lot of time thinking about: how to balance fashion, influence, legacies, and a culture that has changed so much over the last hundred years. Asia is very focused on the future, but we also have so many traditions. How that translates into aesthetic is not very clear. So we spend a lot of time thinking about who we are, where we are, and how aesthetically to represent a new vision for our customers and ourselves. That’s where it really comes from. Even though it’s not all fashion driven, there’s a lot aesthetic judgments that we make and that we move toward. There’s no name for it; it’s not like we’re preppy, we’re fashionable, or we’re urban. It’s none of that. But we definitely have a distinctive space. BT: As a final question, could you talk about the decisions behind naming the store? DP: The name PYE came about in 1984. This was the period of, looking economically, China “opening up.” Young men are coming back to Asia from all around the world, and they see so much excitement and opportunity. We wanted to do something that’s relevant to who we are and to what we wanted to represent: the Chinese character 派 (pài), the Greek letter π, the English name Pai – all of these go together to represent who we are. We’re not going to bring out a label that’s something referential to something that isn’t part of what we are, and that’s why there’s the Chinese character in our own name. Of course the Chinese character 派 means having character, having your own sense of flair, so it works very well for a fashion brand. So we integrated that with the Greek letter π, which represents science, math, technology, and knowledge. π goes on forever, and it’s an infinite quest toward something; it never stops, so we bring together the technical components of business and fashion, and tie it with the symbolic to show how we are trying to go forward and do things better for the future. That’s where the name comes from.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Nov 2014 18:16:36 +0000
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