Max and the city

By JANET McALLISTER

In 1985, long before the current trend for random irony, David Wright christened his new womenswear chain with a man's name. Why is Max called Max?

"We just really liked the name," says Wright.

Uh-huh. Can you expand on why? "We just liked that it was short and sweet," he offers. End of explanation.

Short, if not sweet, is how Wright - still Max Fashions' owner and managing director - would also like this interview to be. Wright has never been profiled before, and his nervousness about talking to the media is making him reticent. Getting answers out of him is as laborious as getting a really bad wine stain out of your favourite cream-coloured wrap-around shirt.

A devotee of the hands-on approach to business, Wright's having a busy day and halfway through the scheduled interview, he's already asking when it'll be finished, like a schoolboy on detention. Apparently he's quarter of an hour late for a photo shoot for the new advertising campaign. Yet it was his last-minute request that our appointment be delayed by an hour. He stays on, squirming. In spite of the casual look - black jeans, open-necked shirt - this tall, grey-haired 45-year-old is hardly relaxed.

But by all accounts, Wright behind the scenes is very different from Wright under the spotlight. He's the reason, say his loyal staff, why Max has spanned three decades in a fickle industry, why it employs over 250 staff in 29 stores nationwide, and is the only privately-owned New Zealand clothing chain. And he's also the reason this fashion company owns the art equivalent of several haute-couture creations.

In the head office above Max's Queen St store, the reception area alone displays a corrugated piece by Ralph Hotere, marae photographs by Marti Friedlander and one of Bill Hammond's birds-in-profile paintings. Wright, who once wanted to be an architect and whose favourite part of the job is designing, is a passionate art collector. And that's not all.

"He's a natural leader," says Sandy Burgham, an independent brand strategist contracted to Max. "He makes people feel like they're part of a team. I admire the way he makes outsiders feel welcome."

Even if you want to be cynical about the rhetoric of a marketing specialist, the low staff turnover speaks for itself: merchandiser Rosemary Tickner estimates the average length of stay for a Max employee at five to six years. Tickner started as a shop assistant with the company 12 years ago, meaning to go on to university after a year. She got promoted instead - Wright likes to spot talent and promote internally so that the people up top know the brand and the customer inside out.

"David lets you run with your ideas," Tickner says. "He doesn't tell you what to do, he's always asking what you think. And so you think, 'Cripes! This has to be right!' You want to do your best because he gives you complete ownership."

And the lines of communication extend down to the shop floor. According to Tickner, it's no big deal for store managers to call Wright directly and have a chat.

"He's constantly around the stores, not shut up in the office," Tickner says. "It breaks down the barriers of 'That's my boss'. It's just 'Oh, that's David'."

Wright's currently the only male working at Max and he has three daughters aged between 11 and 16, but his family name is famous for attire of the masculine persuasion. His grandfather, Hugh Wright, opened his tailor's shop in 1904 and his father, Hugh Wright jnr, took over what had become a clothing store 24 years later and opened other branches.

From 1976, his brother John was the chain's managing director until Hugh Wright's went into receivership in September last year. (Although Wright's not forthcoming on this. When asked if all of his siblings followed their forebears into fashion, he answers somewhat disingenuously, "No, I'm the only one in the rag trade".)

The third generation of Wrights - Hugh, John, David and their sister Elizabeth - grew up in Auckland. David went to Sacred Heart College and did a Bachelor of Commerce in marketing at the University of Auckland. He finished his degree in Sydney, where he worked on the shop floor at renowned department store David Jones.

Back home, he worked for Hugh Wright's in the early 1980s as a shop manager and later as a sportswear buyer. Then he and John bought a failed womenswear chain, its five stores and manufacturing plant, and transformed the sappy-sounding Estelle Rose into the much snappier Max. A few years later, the businesses separated and Wright continued with Max on his own.

"I had a view that [womenswear] was going to be more interesting, more exciting, more creative," says Wright, about the change from Hugh Wright's. "You go look at a menswear store, year in and year out, and they don't look that different, but you go and look at a women's fashion store and they look completely different every two weeks."

To find new ideas to feed such a constantly hungry market, every year Wright takes four exhausting trips of three weeks each to cities like Los Angeles, London, Paris and New York, with a designer and visual merchandiser in tow. They tour ordinary malls and main-drag retailers to discover what's hot on the street, rather than on the catwalk.

What the team finds inspires New Zealand's next season. They design much of the range on the run - hotel rooms get filled with sketches, photographs and samples. New Zealand manufacturers fly over to join the collaborative design party (two thirds of Max garments are made overseas, one third here for quick turnaround).

But while the trips minimise risk, there's no guarantee a garment's success overseas will be replicated here. "Last summer was all about the peasant look, embroidery, Indian-made looking garments harking back to the70s," says Wright.

"We thought it was a strong fashion look and we thought we could interpret it well for our market. And it was an absolute disaster [for us] as it was for a lot of people. I'm still puzzled by it to a certain extent. It had done really well overseas and had gone right through the season, yet here it bombed for us immediately, day one."

Before the trip, colours may be chosen and fabrics bought, based on magazine pictures and previous experience of what sells and what doesn't. That experience includes Wright's ownership of a DKNY outlet in Parnell in the late 90s and his purchase of part of the Amazon surfwear chain from Stephen Alach two years ago.

There was a Max store in Sydney for a while in the 1990s, but Wright closed it because of the commitment involved and the huge competition. "I wouldn't attempt to do it again unless I lived over there - you need to be on the ground," he says.

The transtasman door can slam both ways. When Portmans, Sportsgirl, Jeanswest and Sussan all broke on to New Zealand shores at once, their tidal wave of garments looked set to swamp the small New Zealand market. (Fellow compatriot Just Jeans had established itself on this side of the ditch about five years before.)

And yet, "some found it more difficult than they had thought," says Tickner. "They had to tweak their formula considerably to make it work here." Sportsgirl, troubled at home as well as in New Zealand, shut up shop here three years ago. The Australians had found New Zealand consumers were more independent than the ones they were used to serving at home.

"In Australia, women see the clothes in the shops and in the mags and therefore think 'I've got to have it'," continues Tickner. "They don't stop to think, does this suit me and my lifestyle? Or, do I like that? They're dictated to a lot more, they jump on the bandwagon and they'll buy the whole head-to-toe thing.

"New Zealanders are more selective, and make more intelligent spending choices. They like to know the garments are being made for them."

New Zealand-owned chains which withstood that Australian deluge include Glassons, Principals, Stax and of course, Max. Max was saved from drowning through old-fashioned hard work, says David Wright. "We knuckled down and made sure we stacked up to any of those [Australian] guys."

As for high-end Antipodean design, he says New Zealand designers increasingly have their own style. "It's certainly darker than Australian fashion, moodier, quite imaginative, casual - it reflects our climate and reflects our youth as a country and as a culture. It's very contemporary and cutting-edge."

Burgham, who over the past four years has "sexed up" the Max brand and increased its "level of talkability", notes that Max is somewhere between Glassons and those high-end designers. As far as marketing goes, "sometimes the middle is a dangerous place to be. We're balancing delivering a brand the consumer likes and being one step ahead of people, leading them."

The sponsorship of Sex and the City as the programme moved from being a cult hit to a mainstream must-see worked well, but that's now passe. Max remains a major sponsor of L'Oreal Fashion Week, for the second time. The company has naming rights to the Aotea Square marquee, and is supporting the shows of established designer Nick Blanchet and emerging talent Adrian Hailwood.

It has also sponsored the student competition to design the official Fashion Week T-shirt given to delegates and worn by event staff. The winning design by Leila Rawnsley-Mason from the Auckland University of Technology has a shawl of ferns printed around the shoulders. It's available from Max during Fashion Week, along with the official Fashion Week bag designed by Roanne Jacobson of Saben. Hailwood's diffusion range of James Bond-inspired T-shirts will be available afterwards. Wright describes Hailwood's style as unique and "very creative from a graphic art point of view".

As Fashion Week is largely a media and not a public event, the idea is for Max to become the access point to the festivity for shoppers from Auckland to Invercargill. Max gets fashion kudos by rubbing shoulders with the high-end labels and, at the same time Wright, genuinely impressed by Fashion Week, sees it as an opportunity to give back to the industry.

Meanwhile, to replace the Sex and the City and New York ads, Max's new advertising campaign goes by the name Angels, Saints and Sinners. It features two female models, one dark, one fair, posed as fighting angels on one poster and then suggestively draped over each other on a bed - or is it an altar? - on another. Burgham calls the campaign "edgy".

And she calls Wright "modest". Even if by the end of the interview I'm thinking "edgy" would be a better fit for him, it's obvious he's not blase or resting on his laurels.

"I think fashion's all about tomorrow. If you get through tomorrow you're doing well," Wright says. "It's like going to the casino every day in this business. We've been around for a while, and we intend to be around for a while longer."

Are you a Max woman?

"We know exactly who our customer is," says Wright. Thanks to tools such as biennial customer focus groups, Max's core consumer is described as a woman in her mid-20s to early 30s, independent, confident and fun, with her feet on the ground.

She appreciates a "design edge". And she has a fairly high income - she's "establishing" herself, rather than starting out. "Probably 70 per cent of the country perceives us as being quite expensive," says Wright.

How are such qualities reflected in Max clothes? A casual observer might describe most of the store's garments as quality, sober basics occasionally incorporating strong design features.

For Tickner, the fun factor is displayed in a series of printed T-shirts featuring slogans such as "New Lynn charm school" and "Famous for bending over backwards".

This is not to say that Max doesn't capture a wider market outside its core demographic. "Older customers are buying into that independent spirit," says Burgham. They might soon be able to buy it in a bottle, too - Max is thinking about launching its own perfume.

Herald Feature: New Zealand Fashion Week

L'Oreal New Zealand Fashion Week official site