A day with David Hieatt in Cardigan
Down the factory, in the morn
Getting to Cardigan from London involves a train to Swansea and then a drive. The satnav takes me over country roads and through a myriad of junctions and hamlets. At times trees grow over the top of the road forming a tunnel. I have just finished reading Holloways by Robert Macfarlane and I wonder whether these lanes qualify as ancient footpaths. They must be old as they are well set into the earth and surely the road builders followed the old carriageways that in turn followed the tracks of farmers moving crops and livestock around over thousands of years.
It’s the summer of 2013 and I’m going to Cardigan to meet a brand creation machine called David Hieatt. He has launched four since 1995. They are Howies, The Do Lectures, 25 Mile and Hiut Denim. Howies, he no longer has anything to do with while the other three are at various stages of development. It is Hiut Denim I am particularly interested in.
While his partner Claire looks after the business side of things, David does the marketing, which involves generating word of mouth by talking, tweeting and blogging rather than expensive advertising campaigns. The Hieatt’s build the kind of brands that venture capitalists love to buy but can rarely create themselves. They are businesses that make profit because they did not set out with profit as their sole purpose. They are companies that start off as passion projects, which want to make some aspect of the world better or just do business in a better way. They are full of soul these sort of brands.
All of these companies have global resonance but all are very specific to a locality. David calls them “town experiments”.
Cardigan is a market town of about 4000 people out on the western edge of Wales. Animals are still brought into the town to be sold once every week. Cardigan was a port until the railway arrived in 1886 and sea trade went into decline. The last passenger train ran into Cardigan in 1962 and the last goods train in 1963. Sea gave way to rail which way to the road and with each shift the town moved further to the edge.
The main employer in Cardigan used to be Dewhirst, a jeans manufacturer who supplied Marks and Spencer. A decade ago they closed down and 400 jobs were lost. When 10% of a town’s population find themselves suddenly unemployed there is a knock-on effect. There is less money around, which is bad for the high street. The businesses that supplied the jeans factory are also hit, more jobs are lost and so it goes. The impact is more than financial. The people who lost their jobs find that there is no market for the skill they have spent a lifetime mastering. Their self-worth takes a hit. This industry has been a source of some pride for the town for decades. It is something to tell outsiders about — “I come from Cardigan where we make 35,000 pairs of jeans a week.” That is now in the past. A town loses some of its sense of purpose when a major business goes under.
Just when it feels like the country roads will go on forever I am suddenly in the High Street and following directions from the hotel: past the nail bar, almost double back at the factory shop then left into the car park.
It’s one of those coastal summer evenings where shafts of hot sunshine cut sharply through thick white clouds. I had imagined a seaside town but Cardigan is actually a mile or so up the river Teifi. Anglers fish from a road bridge in the town centre.
The place is full of retail: shops, bars, banks, chippies, curry houses, hotels, cafes, coffeeshops, markets, factory outlets, small trader outlets, hairdressers, the nail bar, an outdoor adventure place, a ‘Teepee Pizza” restaurant, a two-screen cinema, an angling shop, an outdoor activities shop and a sports shop full of guns. There are a few of the usual chains — Specsavers, Tesco, Co-op– but maybe fewer than you would expect in a British town in 2013. There seems to be a lot of independent businesses. The town has a lot of retailers for its size but I guess it serves a wide rural community.
I want to eat. I look at the menus of a few places. One stands out as being both more adventurous and more expensive than the rest. I’ll find out the next day it is owned by David Hieatt. I opt for local-caught mackerel from the hotel by the river for £6.95. It came with peas and potatoes and was good in a completely unfucked-about-with way. The clientele in the hotel seem to be mostly tradesmen from outside the town. There is a regeneration project underway.
I tweet David, asking where and when tomorrow. He replies, “down the factory, in the morn”.
There’s no specific time or address so I ask the hotel barmaid where the Hiut Denim factory was. She’s never heard of it.
I start to wonder if this is real? Is the factory an invention? Is the only thing being manufactured here a clever bit of marketing? Are the jeans imported from China? I Google the address before I get too paranoid.
The barmaid tells me the town might be charming looking but its boring. Half of the shops on the high street never open. She tells me that tourism has been poor the last couple of years with the summers being rubbish. People are hoping things will pick up with the good weather we’re having this year. The beaches are beautiful but she is in her twenties and she’d like to live somewhere big like Birmingham. Her friends in Birmingham think she’s mad and would love to live in Cardigan but they don’t know what its really like to live somewhere where half the town is out of work especially the young and a lot of them are druggies, smoking dope all the time and occasionally going on the rampage wrecking cars. I can sympathise as I grew up in a similar place.
I wake early in the morning and not wanting to be sitting outside the factory as it opens, I drive out to see the beach at Poppit.
It is long and flat and the horizon is broad. The surf is low and rolls in long gentle waves. A mother plays with her toddler. Someone walks a dog. Lifeguards are sorting out their kit. There’s a campsite behind with a few tents and camper vans, one of two with dinghies beside them. There is a small island off the shore that is flat, treeless and looks a bit Hebridean. It’s easy to see the attraction of living here.
Cardigan hasn’t benefitted from the trend for people taking their holidays in the UK that has been growing since the crash. Perhaps it is too hard to reach, too far out on the edge or maybe its just not on the holidaymakers map yet. It is a shame, because the beach is amazing.
Later in the morning I find myself in the industrial estate driving around and around looking for the factory. I know it is here because it says so on their website. It also says so on the big sign by the entrance to the estate. But can I find it?
I drive up to every single unit, stare at the name and turn around. Eventually I realise that the tatty, nondescript little unit that I have passed several times and rejected, with no sign or any identifying feature must, by a process of elimination, be the place I’m looking for.
From the outside it looks nothing. In the door, past the office and into the factory itself it looks great.
There are two large rooms. One is full of workstations the other contains a large cutting table and what looks like a very wide roller printer. The workstations are built of pitch pine and the walls are lined with it.
One of those walls is full of large pictures of the likes of Kermit, Blake, De Niro, Hepburn, The Shining. It is like some weird office game is being played out. “I take your Muppet and raise you Jack Nicholson.” It turns out it’s a wall of motivation. The characters are the products of creative minds, just like the jeans.
There is a turntable and a pile of vinyl is stacked on a shelf. “That’s a Linn, I must get a stylus for it” David Hieatt says as he shows me around. Meanwhile, ELO’s Mr Blue Sky plays on the radio, loudly. I’m guessing the staff are in charge of musical motivation.
In the cutting room, Claudio the cutter does his cutting. He’ll print a pattern off the roller printer, which is described to me as a giant fax machine. Over the pattern, Claudio will place multiple layers of denim and cut with what looks to me like a vertical saw.
This is highly skilled work and Claudio’s role is clearly important. He is the master craftsman here. He understands concepts like sizing. Its explained to me that sizing is a real skill in fashion, as just because one person is two inches taller than another, it doesn’t mean their fly is two inches longer. It takes expertise and experience to size properly.
Once the various pieces of denim are cut, they are moved next door to the machinists. There are maybe 15 stations and at 5 are machinists working away. Finished jeans are hung on rails and piled on shelves ready to be shipped.
In bigger factories, a machinist will be one part of a production line, responsible for stitching up two or three of the many pieces of cloth that make up a pair of jeans. Here, each machinist will stitch up a complete pair of jeans. This effectively reverses the Fordist system of production where a task was broken down into component parts.
Production line systems created alienation because the worker never got the satisfaction of making a complete product. Craftsman got to see their skill produce a whole, finished thing. They could say with pride, “I made that.” They would put their mark on it to prove its authenticity. For the craftsman, things weren’t made solely for money, they were also made to demonstrate skill and to build reputation. It was part commercial and part sentimental. The factory system stripped out the emotional benefits in favour of efficiency. There was no place for sentiment in the factory.
The Hiut Denim system is closer to the pre-industrial, cottage industry. Machinists are not called machinists here, instead they are The Grand Masters. The Grand Masters get the satisfaction that comes with being responsible for a whole product. They get to feel like craftsmen. Accordingly, they sign every pair of jeans they make because, as it says inside, “an artist always signs their work.”
Sentiment is returning to manufacturing.
In this little factory, patterns are printed, cloth is cut, jeans are assembled and sent out to customers around the world. This is a small company with a long reach. It is one of a new type of manufacturer– micro in scale and global in ambition. It could not exist without the Internet. It is like a globally networked cottage industry.
The Hiut Yearbook is arriving today. It is an annual publication and this will be the second edition. It is both a catalogue and a book of ideas and inspirations. There are articles, Bukowski quotes and pictures from a photo-shoot on the Hieatt’s farm where young fans of the brand wear the jeans as they help build a pizza oven. It costs £7.50 and they will ship a couple of thousand copies.
Life is complicated, sport is simple.
David and I walk into town for breakfast. I mention an old Howies ad I like. It was a film of a bloke riding a mountain bike through a forest. It said: “life is complicated, sport is simple.” It is on YouTube.
David tells me how much of a struggle it was to convince his colleagues at Howies to let him make it. Despite running his own business, he was having the same battles he would have had when he worked in advertising except rather than having to convince clients of the merits of an execution that tries to be more subtle than shouting buy more stuff, now he was trying to convince his partners. The basic problem was the same, “they didn’t understand that you have to make people feel something.”
David isn’t from around here. He grew up in the South Wales Valleys and used to visit Cardigan as a teenager. He moved here with Claire in 2001 when he packed in his job as an advertising copywriter and went on the payroll of Howies, the company he had launched in 1995.
David puts his success down to a stubborn streak. As a 16 year old he had wanted to leave school and start his own sports shop. His dad gave him £500 and he got a stall and six months later he had lost all his Dad’s money.
He went back to school, got some A levels, went to college, dropped out and spent a year and a half on the dole before getting a job as a advertising copywriter at Saatchi and Saatchi when he was only 21, which is quite an achievement.
He set up Howies while working at his next agency, AMV. He was open with his new bosses about what he was doing and they were relaxed about it. “Which was handy because I probably burnt out the photocopier”
Howies began as a T-shirt brand. In London in the late 90’s, T-shirts were very fashionable and cycle couriers were the epitome of street cool so David gave free t-shirts to the couriers. At one point, he says. It felt like every courier in London was wearing Howies.
He then gave them to the famously cool like Thom Yorke who wore his and instantly made the brand a bit cooler. He also sent one to Banksy but who knows whether he wore his.
He did a “shoplifter” T that was intended to set off shop alarms. It also set off alarms in the minds of the press and got the brand more publicity.
By the end of the decade Howies were growing at a furious rate. They branched out into jeans, jackets and tops for mountain bikers, surfers and skateboarders. The rate of growth was exhilarating but it felt out of control. “It was like cycling downhill and we didn’t know whether we should put the brakes on or not.”
David began to develop the brand. He wanted it to be a business that produced a quality product while treating people well, respecting the planet and generally being a force for good. “I hadn’t heard of Patagonia at the time but that is what I was trying to be.”
Patagonia is ethical and green. They are an outdoor activities clothing brand who do as little harm to the environment as possible. They insist on a fair wage for the workers who make its products, which are well made from quality materials. Howies were heading down the same road.
First the company needed to develop some driving skills. The downhill freewheeling bike ride was going far too fast. They were chancing their luck, rebadging own label jeans and they were falling behind fashion. To cap it all, two of their main suppliers in the UK closed down. Fashion manufacturing was all but dead in Britain. It had moved to the east and Howies was beginning to look stranded.
David decided he needed help. He wanted to hire an experienced fashion designer. Gideon Day had worked with Paul Smith and fitted the bill, but was expensive. David had to convince his partners who argued that they had done it all themselves so far and wanted to continue doing so. David argued they couldn’t afford not to hire him. His stubbornness won the day, so to speak. If any further proof of the need for some expertise was needed, the morning Day joined a case of shorts arrived from a manufacturer which were all sized wrong.
David and Gideon immediately flew to Hong Kong to meet one of the best jeans makers in the world. While out there Day started work a new range for Howies. “He designed two seasons in two days and saved the company,” says David.
Howies continued to grow. They opened a flagship store in Carnaby Street and, in 2006, sold to Timberland. The dream was to create a global, ethical, high quality brand. However, tension was building between the values that David wanted to instil into the brand and the growth rate of the business. David uses the analogy of the natural muscle stretch of an athlete who can train hard and make themselves 10% faster. 10% is possible, but they can’t do 20%. This holds for business too. Grow too fast and something will break.
At the same time it felt to David like they had stood back from the edge. They were so busy growing, they were failing to be truly innovative. They had the potential to be great, to be a globally successful brand that did things properly, that was ethical, that was green at a time when these values were beginning to really matter. Instead, growth was prioritised and corners were cut. Promises that had been made at the time of the Timberland deal had been forgotten. Compromises had been made. It stopped feeling like the company David had originally dreamt of creating.
There was a lesson here about the difference between doers and advisors and the importance of not listening too much to experts. Advisors tend not to be entrepreneurs. They advise but they don’t do. It was important for David to know when not to be cautious as well as when not to take risks. He had to trust his doing instinct.
In 2010 David and Claire left Howies, the company they had formed 15 years earlier. He says, “for 10 years I loved Howies and it didn’t love me back”
The first thing they did after leaving was create a festival for doers.
The Do Lectures
The Do Lectures are a weekend festival of talks from “people who do things that can inspire the rest of us to go and do things.”
David and Claire had launched the Do Lectures over a year earlier, in 2008. Its easy to imagine them scouring the web for inspiration about what to do next themselves, discovering loads of people who have done cool stuff and thinking it would be great to meet them all and loads of other people would love to hear these people’s stories too and oh wait a minute, there’s an idea in that…
The spirit of the Do Lectures is follow your heart and the money will come. They have been happening on a farm outside Cardigan since 2008 and the website has accumulated an amazing catalogue of films of previous speakers.
They are aimed at people who want to find their own passion or who have a passion but want to know how to do something about it. People come to listen to stories that “light a fire in your belly to go and do your thing, the thing that sits in the back of your head each day, just waiting and waiting for you to follow your heart.”
Since launch, the business has expanded and diversified and now includes workshops offering help on subjects ranging from pulling ideas together to actually securing funding and launching a businesses. There is also a small publishing wing and a series of pamphlets.
In the spring of 2013 the theme was 72-hour start-up. The idea was to get businesses from concept to funding over the weekend. In the autumn of the same year the first US Do Lectures took place in California. The next phase will be to launch a school-cum-incubator for “purpose businesses” in 2014.
This seems a natural step. From creating a forum where prospective do-ers can be inspired, to running workshops to help them get off the ground to creating a place where they can get advice and support and also meet potential investors.
It also feels innovative. There are plenty of incubators for tech start-ups, especially in east London. There is not much in the way of support for businesses who are about purpose and who are run by those who want to change something.
Get Our Town Making Jeans Again
By 2011 David had a new idea. He wrote a business plan then sat on it for a year. He hesitated partly because he was still a bit burnt by his Howies experience and partly because he wasn’t entirely sure why he was doing it. His plan lacked purpose.
He knew what he wanted to do — he’d make jeans. He knew how he would do it — he’d make them here in Cardigan. He hadn’t worked out why and this mattered to him. Simply setting up a business to make money wasn’t enough. There’s nothing romantic about profit. “Make me richer” is unlikely to capture the public imagination.
He spoke to his designer friend Gideon Day. He told Gideon about Cardigan, about how there used to be 400 people employed making jeans in the town and how those jobs have all gone and all that expertise is going to waste. And Gideon said “isn’t that why you want to make jeans, to bring back jeans-making to Cardigan?”
That was it. Hiut Denim would get the town making jeans again.
They raised capital by selling shares, but only non-voting shares. The founders had learned from experience and wanted their shareholders to trust them to run the company. The pitch to investors was to invest for the long term. The company would not pay dividends. They wanted to plough profit back into the business. The reward would come when they became a global brand. The pitch to shareholders in the Users Manual said, “the compound interest of investing back into the business will over time be far greater than giving dividends to shareholders.”
Most of the investors turned out to be friends. In David’s view, non-voting helped protect them from themselves, as they would not feel a duty to get actively involved with management decision-making.
The brand was pre-launched online by David announcing it on his blog then talking about it regularly on Twitter. This proved to be a particular effective strategy as the company was hit with a deluge of orders as soon as they opened for business.
In fact, they took 6 months of orders in the first month of trading and were struggling to cope. They had started out with 3 machinists, a cutter and a mechanic and had to find more people and equipment quickly.
Rather than battening down the hatches, David turned the crisis into a drama.
On twitter he kept customers up to date with their struggles to hire extra machinists and find more equipment. On one occasion he needed a truck to pick up a machine, he asked for help and someone responded.
There is a well-used analogy in business of a well-run company being like a duck moving through water. Under the surface it is all frenetic equipment but the part that is visible to the world glides calmly along. Hiut Denim was an upside down duck. The furiously paddling legs were on display and it was all the more interesting for it.
The result was that rather than feeling resentful that their jeans were not ready on time, most of those waiting felt they were in on the adventure.
Building tolerance among customers proved to be invaluable for a company this size operating on such a big stage. Hiut Denim’s business model doesn’t allow them to stockpile raw material. They are a small company and prefer to pay a surcharge for materials than carry the risk of holding too much stock. They prefer peace of mind to risk.
Demand isn’t consistent, though. When the weather gets hot, order for heavyweight jeans declines. Then they get some publicity, maybe a style mag picks up on their story, and there will be a surge in orders.
The type of crisis they experienced at launch will happen again, there will be another rush and orders may well be delayed. The most effective thing they can do about it is build a relationship with customers that gives them some leeway.
The flurry of media coverage that accompanied the launch and the subsequent rushes of orders show that the ideas behind the brand were resonating. It wasn’t one idea, it was many. Some stories were about Cardigan, some were more interested in raw denim and others wanted to talk about what the Howies founders were now up to. As time passed, other ideas would generate publicity. Even the washing instructions got people talking. By surrounding his product with lots of ideas, David sowed the seeds of lots of different stories, gave the media plenty of angles and gave potential customers lots of reasons to like and talk about the brand.
Do One Thing Well
Howies had spread from t-shirts to jeans out across general fashion and even bags. It had tried to do too much. Hiut Denim would be a specialist, making jeans and nothing else. In doing so, it would put craft on a pedestal. At launch David said, “We will spend the next 20 years becoming good at jeans. We won’t be duped into doing too much.”
Doing things properly has been a recurring theme since the recession. Proper burgers and pizzas, stripped-down and pared-back proper bikes, proper beer, proper coffee, proper 35mm film photography, a proper record shop selling vinyl, the proper medium. We have discovered an appetite for things done properly, for older ideals for ideas that had almost been lost. We are going back in time, looking for something authentic from the past and then making it relevant to the modern world.
Consumers have the appetite, entrepreneurs and artists feed the demand, stimulating more consumer interest. This dialectic is one way to create growth out of stagnation.
Hiut launched with just two products. Both were raw denim. There was a selvedge product and an organic denim. Each came in regular and slim. Both were for men. That was it. A women’s range came out a year later.
Raw is how denim started. Raw means heavy denim material with a natural indigo dye. Raw denim is hard wearing and long-lasting as befits a product that was popular with Klondike gold miners. Raw denim will shrink and should be worn damp after the first wash for a perfect fit. Raw denim is the authentic version of jeans.
In a famous Levis ad from the 1980’s, a guy gets into the bath wearing his jeans in order to shrink them to fit. This was harking back to raw denim, although the Levis they advertised now came pre-shrunk. Which was how we preferred our jeans in the 80’s, along with stone washed, bleached, torn off-the-peg. With raw denim, wearing gets you the same effect, it just takes a bit longer and when you get there, your jeans are completely unique.
A pair of Hiut jeans comes with very clear washing instruction — don’t. At least not until they have been worn for six months. Wash them too soon and the indigo will wash off evenly and they won’t look so interesting. If they smell, hang them out on the line or stick them in the freezer where the cold will kill the odorous bacteria.
The jeans start off stiff as cardboard and gradually soften. Lines are worn into them where they crease according to how you walk and sit and only become visible after that first wash.
By wearing them unwashed for half a year and then reshaping them to your body while damp, the jeans become uniquely yours, reflecting how you alone sit and move. The romantic story of a company getting a town making jeans again evolves into a romantic story of how you made a pair of jeans uniquely yours.
Going that long without washing a pair of jeans may seem gross but, in the days before washing machines in the home were popular, people didn’t wash their clothes nearly so much. Modern attitudes to washing clothes are equivalent to a sort of built-in obsolescence; we have conditioned ourselves to wear our clothes out faster than need be. Washing jeans less frequently is, like raw denim, an old idea that has new relevance today.
The No Wash Club is a blog on the Hiut website for people who adhere to the 6-month rule and want to share their stories. Each pair of jeans has a unique History Tag number. That number can be used to set up a page on HistoryTag.com. Here an owner of a pair of Hiuts can chronicle the lifespan of the jeans using photos and tweets. Like all the ideas around this brand, this is an experiment. The thinking appears sound on paper: people love the way their jeans wear and become more personalised with time. Everyone has a mobile with a camera and internet access. Put the two together and people can document the life of their jeans. If they for any reason pass them on to someone or give them to a charity shop, then the story of the jeans will live on because its all based on that unique number. It makes sense logically but it isn’t really taking off so far. Maybe it just needs a few more people to do it for it to catch on or maybe it is just too much effort. Social media marketing is littered with ideas that died because they asked too much of people. Even the biggest fans are reluctant to do much more than click “like” or “share” on behalf of a brand.
For Creative Workers
Jeans from Hiut Denim will mostly be worn by designers, programmers, media workers and generally people who can wear jeans to the office. The wear and tear of the first six months will likely be around the backside from sitting at a desk too long. Few pairs of these jeans will ever see a building site, scale scaffolding while building skyscrapers or cross rivers in spate. They may get scuffed by the act of pedalling a mountain bike but it will probably happen on the morning commute rather than on scree slopes.
The clever thing about the 6-month no wash rule is that it imposes a bit of hardship on the wearer. The jeans may not be put through their paces as part of a tough lifestyle, but they will have an alternative legend attached to them — “I wore them almost constantly for six months. When I washed them I was excited and nervous. What would they turn out like?”
The no wash rule romanticises the product. It brings the owner into the story and makes them the protagonist with hardship, hurdles to overcome, turning points, drama, comedy and an uncertain ending.
Denim Breakers Wanted
No Wash is maybe the most memorable thing about Hiut Denim. It is such a jarring notion yet it came about due to what can be described as a fortuitous coincidence. Local regulations in Cardigan stopped Hiut’s from washing denim. The dye pollutes the river. This was potentially a massive problem for a jeans maker. David’s response was to turn it to his advantage. A limitation was turned into a point of differentiation.
People are now asking Hiut for pre-washed jeans. David’s response is a sort of surrogacy scheme called The Denim Breakers Club. The idea is to recruit people to wear a pair of jeans for 6 months then wash them. They then get a share of the profit when the jeans are sold on. The end-buyer gets a pair of perfectly broken in Hiut’s, albeit second-hand (or pre-loved as the vintage shops prefer) and the river doesn’t get polluted.
Everyone in Denim
Jeans are the most ubiquitous fashion item on the planet. It’s estimated that half the world wears jeans. Yet they are also the most personal of products. We all have our favourite fit and look. The desire for that personal authenticity is so keen that jeans manufacturers long ago built it into their production process. With raw denim, the consumer has to do some of the production themselves. By making them your own jeans, you share in the creation and increase their authenticity.
Authenticity is an odd notion. It is always an invented concept. Jeans were originally work wear, not ubiquitous yet personalised fashion items. They were a hardwearing product for manual work. The original jeans wearers wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing them for anything other than work. They couldn’t have anyway as they were often banned in restaurants, theatres and the like. The fact they shrunk and faded was a design flaw that no one worried too much about because they were, after all, only for work. The brands that first pre-shrunk and pre-washed jeans before selling them were making life a bit easier for the consumer by making the product more convenient.
Made in Britain
Hiut share a commitment to quality of manufacturing and attention to detail with other British menswear brands that have been appearing recently but they are also the only company in the UK both making and selling their own jeans.
One of the knock-on effects of fashion manufacturing being relocated to places like China is that it becomes very time-consuming to get anything made. A domestic fashion industry would be useful for domestic designers. London Fashion Week has helped put the British fashion design on a world stage again. There are plenty of people with design ideas around, there is just not so many people capable of making those ideas. Hiut Denim can now do in three days what it may well take months to achieve in Asia. That is the advantage of being small, you can experiment, run up a one off and see how it looks. It helps to have machinists who can each sew up a complete pair of jeans. In China the production process is so broken down that getting a few items made quickly is so complicated it is almost impossible.
Fashion manufacturing needs infrastructure; it needs the likes of pattern makers, graders and machinists. There is a lot of skill and judgement involved and the fact that these skills are dying is a real worry. If the Hieatt’s had waited a few more years a lot of the skilled people in Cardigan would have retired. They now need to work out how to train the next generation.
“The crash was a jolt for a lot of people, but we think more clearly when we are scared,” says David. “We realised that Britain doesn’t make much stuff and that we are over-reliant on the service sector, including financial services, and that we don’t really know what they are doing and they sometimes don’t know what they are doing either. We can’t give up the right to make. We are an island. We’ve learned that we can’t leave ourselves in the hands of the service sector again.”
Change an industry with ideas
Creating more jobs in Cardigan will take a bit of imagination. For jeans, the product itself has been more or less nailed since Levis patented the rivet, so the innovation has to happen around the product. All David’s ideas — History Tag, No Wash Club, Denim Breaker Club — are ways of innovating around the product. He imagines one day having two factories side by side with one making jeans and the other making ideas to sell the jeans.
This is a great time to be making things, argues David, because technology gives you direct access to potential customers like never before. It is like technology offers a 21st century toolkit for innovation, meaning there’s never been a better time to be a small maker.
That toolkit is a smart phone. Every owner of his jeans has legs and a phone. Find an idea that brings the two together and catches the imagination and you have global fame. The playing field is now more level when it comes to taking on bigger brands.
“Can we reignite the town? Buck the manufacturing trend? Be the most creative jeans company in the world? The future is the mobile.”
Breakfast at 25 Mile
After the factory tour, David and I head into town for a late breakfast. The place we go to is an all day eatery doing breakfast, lunch, dinner or just coffee or a drink. It’s got the mid-century modern design and wouldn’t look out of place in Soho, Brooklyn or Berlin. David is the owner.
After Hiut Denim and the Do Lectures, 25 Mile is the third of the trilogy of his big purposeful ideas. The Hiut idea is to get Cardigan making jeans again. The Do Lectures exist so the people who do things can inspire the rest of us to go and do things. 25 Mile is a local eating house that sources its main ingredients from within a 25 mile radius.
The restaurants purpose is to celebrate local produce and support local suppliers. The reason why it is relatively expensive, compared to other places in Cardigan, is because a decent price is paid for the produce.
The place is run by a Michelin starred chef, the menu looks great, there’s wine and local ale and plenty of ideas — a Keralan Curry Night is coming up and there are regular “cause workshops” where people come together to discuss the cause they are working on, share advice, have a meal and the best liked cause gets 25% of the nights profit. (25 miles and 25 per cent? Advertising copywriters do seem to have a mystical attraction to ideas that are symmetrical)
The reviews of the restaurant are positive and it adds something to the town. It is a destination place that fills a gap in the market but its debateable whether, as the saying goes, there is a market in the gap. The obvious issue is whether there is enough money in the town to sustain the business. A business, David say pointedly, can’t be built on sentiment alone.
This is bigger than just one local restaurant, though. Once the model is refined the plan is to roll it out around the country as a franchise. Cardigan is the testing ground. If David can make it work here then there is a good chance it can work in any town.
25 Mile closed in 2014.
Town Projects
At the heart of all David’s ventures is the goal of regenerating a town. Hiut is about getting Cardigan working again. 25 Mile is about supporting producers around the town. The next phase of the Do Lectures will be an incubator, based on the Hieatt’s farm on the edge of Cardigan.
All three ideas also have much wider relevance that Cardigan. If Hiut Denim is successful it will show that it is possible to locate fashion manufacturing on the UK. Similarly 25 mile could prove that people are willing to pay prices that give the producer a decent deal. Finally, the Do Lectures incubator could send a stream of purposeful businesses into the world.
British towns could do with more revival projects. By the crash, what was dubbed Tescoisation had sucked much of the life from them. This was the process where a supermarket opens on the edge of a town and draws business away from the high street. Then the same supermarket opens on the high street and applies another turn of the screw to local businesses some of which close. More chains move in: the off-licence, the chemist, the shoe shop. This demand for space pushes up rates and squeezes out more local businesses and eventually one town look like any other. After the crash many of the chains went bust. They had been dubbed voodoo businesses — so geared up with debt that they could not survive a slump, they were the walking dead. Their legacy was empty shops and high rates — voodoo high streets.
A regeneration one town at a time is a romantic idea. It is like inverse globalisation. Rather than the same big brand made in one big factory being sold to people everywhere, we would have small businesses each with a local impact, creating employment locally and stimulating the local economy but selling around the world and collectively all these networked shops and factories would have a big impact.
It is a romantic idea and that is its strength. A more rational approach would be focussed on scale and growth rates. This is what Venture Capitalists would focus on. It is the language of financial business. But this thinking doesn’t generate many new ideas. VC’s invest in businesses but they don’t often start them. In David’s view, every VC wanted to buy Patagonia but none could have built it, because none would have had the patience or the long-term view. It takes a romantic imagination and a sense of purpose to conjure an idea out of thin air and make it happen
Make People Feel Something
I had a dream the night before I visited the Hiut factory and I woke struck by how ephemeral and fragile the ideas around this brand are.
The difference between one make of jeans and another is down to elusive, fleeting feelings. There’s a lot feeling and sentient attached to Hiut Denim. The brand is about craftsmanship, quality product, specialist skills all wrapped up in a philosophy about doing something well. It is about a town that once produced a lot of jeans, a town that is now down on its luck. It is about getting that town making jeans again. It is about raw denim, dark indigo jeans that are not to be washed for the first six months, which when washed will be like no othyer pair on the planet, every crease will belong to you. It is about transforming the most ubiquitous fashion item in the world into so ething totally individual and personal.
It takes a romantic mind to tease such notions into existence, to build them into fully-fledged ideas and to take them to the world with confidence.
From the industrial revolution on, British manufacturing was driven as much by romantic dreamers as hardheaded industrialists. Sometimes the one person was both, people like Robert Owen and his model village.
The decline of British manufacturing in the 1980’s was in many ways a failure of the imagination. The thinking that inspired the switch from a manufacturing to a financial and service economy was narrow-minded and completely lacking in romance. The manufacturing businesses that did survive — BAE and Rolls Royce for example — are powerful ideas, part of a national psyche and a source of pride and self-respect. They are premium, quality brands imbued with notions of history, talent and innovation.
It takes a particular mindset to look at manufacturing, see the romance in it and turn that into a brand. Jeans are hard enough to make properly, but the jeans alone are not the brand. The brand has to be made out of not cotton and thread, but ideas and associations.
Brands give people a reason to like a product. Brands are commodities and services we feel something for. They are dreams articulated. To create a brand is to get people to feel something not just about the product they buy but also about what it represents. In Hiut Denim’s case it is about romanticising the making of something and what that means to the people who do the making. It is also about romanticising the owning and what that means to the people who own the jeans. Hiut Denim is a brand that romanticises makers and wearers. In fact, it makes the wearer a maker by virtue of the washing instructions.
Wanting to get a town working again is a romantic notion. But this is not some big fashion brand doing an ad about regenerating a town — like Levis did with their Go Forth and Work campaign where they pledged $1m dollars over two years to the town of Braddock in Pennsylvania in return for featuring it in their advertising. This is a small jeans brand set up in its local town, employing locals and doing it for all for real without the luxury of a big advertising budget.
Getting Cardigan making jeans again is a romantic belief in the power of ideas to make the world a better place. A hard-nosed businessman would say that the world has moved on, that manufacturing in Cardigan is not economically viable, that consumers aren’t willing to pay the higher prices. The romantic believes people can understand the true value of something made well.
For decades the making of the product has been separated from the making of the brand. Nike outsourced manufacturing in the nineties so they could focus totally on being a marketing organisation. Hiut are bringing the two back together again.
Sitting in 25 Mile we discuss what a business should be. Not just an investment mechanism, a means of delivering a fast return on investment or something to be trimmed and stripped and discarded or to be flipped, as the VC’s like to say. Instead, businesses are people’s dreams. They are local pride. They are part of culture, not a parasite upon it. They are a means of turning dreams into a living.
That is the point of town projects, the economy needs new ideas and rationalism alone won’t supply them.
I ask David what his advice would be to anyone starting a business:
Be narrow. You can’t do many things. Apple only really has ten products.
Build a great team
Fight for it
Know there will be ebbs and flows
Understand it takes 10 years to get there
Know what you are doing it for. Have a purpose
Know how creative you need to be. Most company’s can do safe, to succeed you need to be creative enough to make people feel something.
Summer 2013.
