Karen Walker's brand building ambition

Karen Walker. Picture / Brett Phibbs

The husband calls it "a ma and pa business". The Westie couple do a bit of everything: ma creates house paints, sunglasses, overnight bags, and charm bracelets that hold novelty skull-and-crossbones and stubbed-out cigarette charms. Pa helps her out, and also holds down a second job. It's hard graft — 14 hours a day, seven days a week.

Oh, that's right, they also produce a few clothes — dungarees, cardies, check shirts and the like. Sold around 30,000 of them in the last year in fact. Ma began making them in the kitchen of pa's first business 17 years ago, starting her company with just $100. You may have heard of her: Karen Walker.

In among the Sylvesters and the Cherrys and the L'Estrange-Corbets it's a bread-and-butter, plain kind of name. But that ordinary name is so remarkably strong in international fashion circles that the ma and pa business is on its way to becoming a mini-empire. And although Walker doesn't want to become the Pierre Cardin of the South Pacific — the fashion doyen puts his name on everything from mobile phones to lingerie to jet engines — "she has potential to be New Zealand's first superbrand," says Patty Huntington, Woman's Wear Daily Australasian correspondent.

Walker herself can think of eight to 10 product lines which would be a "natural fit" for her brand and in the past four years has already started three lines. First came Karen Walker paints for Resene — a collection of deliberately dusty, muddy colours, so that walls fade into the background and don't try to compete with any artworks. Then it was her jewellery line, which matches pearls and diamonds with pop culture symbols. This year came the eyewear: a "bargain" at $299 a pair. "It's not like you have to sell a kidney to buy them," said Walker at the launch — so you can buy several pairs to match your moods. Next year, in March, "Swanndri by Karen Walker" a lifestyle range of outdoor clothing and luggage will arrive, designed to bring Swanndri, that faithful friend of hunter and farmer, into the urban market.

So far, Walker is committed to designing six womenswear, two menswear, two Swanndri, one eyewear and four mini jewellery collections every year, and a paint collection every three years — about 800 different designs go to market annually. The Southern Hemisphere womenswear collections are simply the Northern Hemisphere ones tweaked for seasonal difference but still, it's an ambitious schedule. Add her directorship of New Zealand vodka and gin company 42 Below (another luxury brand equally export-focused) and her association with Range Rover, and Walker's interests, much like her clothes, are broad and have a touch of the tomboy about them.

So why diversify? No other New Zealand designer has so many product lines, although Trelise Cooper does lingerie and has just announced she's also launching an eyewear range. Fashion for Walker has always been about ideas and not just trousers. "Fashion spreads its tentacles way beyond clothes," she says. "Your choice of kettle is a style-driven choice, for most people." Besides which, as her husband and label creative director Mikhail Gherman says, the lines are "lucrative bits of business".

Somewhat surprisingly, other companies have approached Walker about collaborating before she went to them. Many of the frequent approaches made to the label are "weird" says Gherman (although you can't blame the companies for trying — Walker did say yes to paints).

But when they do commit, they do it properly. "We've started a conversation and got married" is how Walker describes it. "It's a great way to work. Two partners bringing two different skill sets to the table and creating something together that you would never have been able to create for yourself. I don't know how to make sunglasses!"

Unlike other licensing deals — Cardin's for example — Walker is hands-on throughout the production process, "not just in the design, but where it sits in the market, how we communicate it, how we distribute it". She provides the creativity and the brand, her partners provide the production and distribution infrastructure. As is standard, Walker gets a guaranteed fee until a certain amount of units have been sold and after that point, she gets commission on every extra unit.

Her partners are impressed. Walker did a lot of research into stones, cuts and settings before she started designing the jewellery, and her jewellery manufacturing partner Worth and Douglas is "thrilled" with her styles, says managing director John Worth, who meets with Walker every three weeks. "It was good to have a female perspective," he says. "She came up with designs we'd never normally think of."

Meanwhile, Swanndri CEO Julian Bowden says Walker had an understanding of Swanndri right from the start. After all, way back in 1998 Walker suggested that "Swannie" jackets would make good gifts for delegates to Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) summit the following year, because Swanndri was recognisably a part of New Zealand heritage. And as Swanndri looks to expand its exports, being associated with a glamour label already recognised overseas is a bonus.

With such a lot going on, Walker avoids split focus by compartmentalising. "It's not multi-tasking, it's about going, 'OK that needs to be attended to and I'm not going to think about it now, I'm going to deal with it tomorrow morning' [because I'm going to concentrate on this today]."

Walker was working collaboratively long before she looked beyond clothes. "Karen Walker [the label] has never just been about one person," says Gherman, convivial, chattier than Walker, and in possession of a slightly geeky sense of humour.

He's Walker's most long-time confederate — the couple met when Walker was just 17 and Ukranian-born Gherman was 22 and had just finished a fine arts degree at Elam. They married four years later in 1991, and for several years Gherman has worked four days a week as creative director for advertising agency Publicis Mojo, and three days a week for Karen Walker.

He does the drawings for Karen Walker screenprints — such as the yetis and campers on the Runaway collection hoodies — and oversees the marketing. But the couple's respective roles are a lot less clear-cut than that. In business, Walker talks about "us", not "me". It's a partnership, a sometimes tempestuous one. When fighting, the couple lob insults at each other like: "You have no talent!"

That statement is about as believable as a Vuitton bag sold on a street corner.

London, February 1999. For the first time, four New Zealand fashion designers show at the city's fashion week. Three of the four stay with friends and base themselves at New Zealand House; the youngest, 29 at the time, stays at official Fashion Week hub the Metropolitan Hotel, 2km away through snarled city traffic. Three bring buyers in to see their collections in the same space models use for fittings; one knows, that unlike in the Southern Hemisphere, here you get an agent to help sell the collection so you and your publicist can concentrate on charming the global media.

Newspapers back home referring to the "New Zealand four" subtly change the order from "Zambesi, Nom*D, World and Karen Walker" to "Karen Walker, Zambesi, Nom*D and World".

Nom*D, World and Zambesi did it "the Kiwi way", as World's Francis Hooper said at the time. It was Number 8 wire bent into safety pins. And the Karen way? Call it imperious, independent or simply international standard practice, it achieved results. Although all the labels increased their orders to some extent, Walker was the one who doubled her standing orders within 10 days of showing the collection.

She's the one who's profiled in English newspapers; who gets spreads in fashion bibles W, id, Elle and Nylon; whose sweatshirts turned up on Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She's the one who's bought and worn by Jennifer Lopez on The Late Show with David Letterman and Kelly Osbourne at the MTV awards; performed in by Madonna and Bjork; modelled in magazines by actresses Sienna Miller, Claire Danes and Mandy Moore. She's thronged by Japanese fans in 500-strong crowds on her biennial trips to Asia; named as one of the 100 best emerging designers of the past five years in sumptuous Phaidon-published Sample; counterfeited in Hong Kong and had to get Lee jeans to drop a product because they'd copied a Karen Walker print too closely.

Six years after that first London Fashion Week, she had people fighting over seats at her show there last month — a sure sign she'd made the big time.

Walker refuses to talk turnover anymore, but the label's exports — which now make up about 80 per cent of the business — were reported as $1.5 million in 2001 by the National Business Review. Extrapolating on that, using Walker's export growth percentages, company exports should now roughly be worth around $3.2 million per annum, and total turnover including the local market should be just over $4 million. (This is not definite, in 2003 Unlimited reported the 2002 exports were already over $4 million.) Forty per cent of the export revenue is generated in Japan, the same amount in Australia, with the United States and Europe making up most of the rest. This doesn't include the non-clothes lines, which so far are only available in Australasia.

Walker almost certainly isn't the New Zealand top-end designer selling the most clothes internationally — that's probably Trelise Cooper — but make no mistake: internationally, Karen Walker, at 35, is our most respected and celebrated designer. "She's the real deal, one of the freaks" says one New Zealand fashion industry insider".

Her clothes are quality, they're original, but that's not enough to be in Vogue. When Nom*D designer Margi Robertson later reflected on that first London Fashion Week excursion in Undressed by Stacy Gregg, she said Walker "had figured out how things worked in London ... Karen knew the rules."

Rule number one: don't hide your light under a kete; instead, tell the world how good you are. New Zealanders in general are not very good at that, but Walker has a network of publicists ("press offices") and showrooms in London, New York and Sydney, as well as a distributor in Tokyo. She once impressed American buyers with a picture of President Bill Clinton giving her a kiss, taken when the President was in Auckland for Apec in 1999, with a disposable camera that Gherman had smuggled into an event in defiance of a camera prohibition.

Walker is perfectly fitted to be a tall poppy. She's ambitious. She hustles. She's shrewd. They're attributes her country looks askance at. People get jealous about her success, and there'll always be stories around that she drives a hard bargain with her fabric suppliers and that she keeps an eagle-eye on the length of her employees' lunch times. Local magazines who use Karen Walker clothes in a number of stories can expect to receive letters running Walker down. The letters are anonymous, but editors know a certain other fashion house is behind the sour grapes.

Walker is not ungenerous — she was one of the first celebrities to design a T-shirt for the Glassons Breast Cancer Research Trust campaign and shared her 2004 Fashion Week Export Growth Award with designer Adrian Hailwood so that he could go with her to London Fashion Week last February — he'll go again next year. The nation admires her but we're not quite sure we love her. We're not sure she even wants our love. Is she "our Karen"? Has she succeeded because of or in spite of her country?

"The further we go the more I find the homeground can be the toughest because people want to go 'is this for real?'," says Gherman. "People want to know why it's so big."

She's an outsider wherever she goes. In New Zealand, she's the internationalist. In Britain, where she now shows her clothes twice a year at London Fashion Week, she's the New Zealander (she once told the Observer that "Kiwis get all teary" at the sight of blossoming manuka).

It's an aloof identity Walker's worn for a long time — growing up in Remuera and attending Epsom Girls Grammar, she didn't like the "boring, dumb" cool girls at school — and she relishes the image. Maybe her outsider tendencies are the reason she's stayed in New Zealand despite the inconveniences. She and Gherman live in a stylish, curved 1930s art deco bungalow which, like Walker herself, has been transplanted from the Eastern suburbs to the Waitakeres. The decor is rural boho — Grey Lynn meets Swanson — wooden floors, leather couches, velvet sofa, an iron wood burner adorned with griffins. A possum-fur rug here, a Michael Parekowhai print there.

Walker carries the outsider theme into her collections. They are usually tightly based, not around anything ragtrade-obvious such as the fabric or garment utility or other designers' trends, but around a lone character whom she imagines dressing up, often for a cinematic role. Tree Girl was based on the young farm girl in Vincent Ward's Vigil; Living with Cannibals and Other Adventures took "aviatrix" Amelia Earhart as inspiration; her latest collection, Karen in TV Land, updates Alice in Wonderland, with chequered socks, T-shirts printed with bow-ties and afternoon-tea dresses. The tomboy chic, streetwear-meets-luxury, hard-edged glamour and hint of sweetness is designed to appeal to the 1 per cent of the market who are the "fashion tough ... indy girls". Lone wolf clothing for your interesting rather than your popular shopper.

Huntington says opening a Karen Walker store overseas is important for the strength of that brand, so that the label can have total control over how the clothes are presented, rather than sharing rack space with others. Huntington also suggests Walker leave London Fashion Week for the more significant Paris or New York shows. Walker acknowledges that there is "a lot of pressure on us to shift to New York Fashion Week". Stylist Heathermary Jackson who collaborates on and "edits" Walker's collections lives over there and "hates London". But Walker's Japanese buyers go to Europe, not America, and "when that's 40 per cent of your market you have to take that into consideration".

As for opening a store overseas, that would take a lot of money and commitment from somebody on-site. Retail "needs love and nurture", says Walker who, remarkably, has never had a financial backer. She agrees it's a "natural extension' but it's not a priority at the moment. She's focused on growing the wholesale business and getting her other product lines up and running. A new line a year is the aim — next year is Swanndri and 2007 could see Karen Walker optical frames as well as sunglasses, or possibly Karen Walker shoes. But just as easily it could be something as yet undisclosed — a surprise. For "design's all about surprise and delight", says the extraordinary designer with the ordinary name. 

Age of empire

1988 Aged 18, Karen Walker starts her label by buying $100 worth of fabric and making two shirts.

1993 Opens her first store in Newmarket.

1994 Opens her second store in O'Connell St, in Auckland City's fashion hub.

1995 Shows an early flair for publicity by using former Miss New Zealand Lorraine Mexted as a model.

1998 First New Zealand designer to show at Hong Kong Fashion Week. One of several New Zealand designers at Australian Fashion Week, showing to rave reviews, a collection called Live Wire, inspired by Auckland's blackouts the year before. Orders come in from New York and Paris. Madonna wears Karen Walker pants at the MTV awards causing the trousers to sell out in America and Japan.

1999 Has two joint shows, at both London Fashion Weeks, with Zambesi, Nom*D and World.

2000 Accountant Scott Jolly and experienced clothing industry businessman Richard Smith join Walker and her husband Mikhail Gherman as Karen Walker directors, to set up business systems to cope with expansion. Shows at Australian Fashion Week for the last time, preferring to concentrate on the Northern Hemisphere by showing solo off-schedule at London Fashion Week instead.

2001 Opens a third store in Wellington. Launches her paint range with Resene.

2003 After disappointing the local industry by missing the first two New Zealand Fashion Weeks because showing there didn't make economic sense, Walker controversially launches Karen Walker jewellery at her first New Zealand Fashion Week appearance instead of showing a runway clothes collection. Becomes a director of 42 Below.

2005 Shows on schedule for the first time at London Fashion Week with the Tree Girl collection — exports for the season are up by 50 per cent on the season before. Launches eyewear range.

2006 Swanndri range to be launched in March.


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