In My View by Eric Musgrave: Next turns 40

Significant anniversaries have been on my mind.

On 28 January it was 42 years since I joined Drapers Record as a news reporter. I have had a brilliant time observing and writing about the fashion business since 1980.

Early in my career I wrote the first trade mag feature about what I regard as the most influential launch of the past four decades – the arrival of Next.

Can anyone think of a more important new arrival?

Only a fashion retail nerd like me remembers the first seven Next womenswear shops were opened on Friday 12 February 1982, so almost exactly 40 years ago.

The initial branches were in Burton-on-Trent, Coventry, Douglas (Isle of Man), Eastbourne, Harrogate, Newport and Slough.

By the end of March there were around 80 branches of Next around the UK, including only one in London (in Victoria Street, near Victoria Station in case you were wondering). That amazing roll-out was only the start of seven years of frantic expansion driven by the creator of Next, George Davies.

Hill Street Shopping Centre, Middlesbrough, 19th November 1982. Image: Alamy

I have always got on well with George – who is not everyone’s cup of tea – since I travelled up to Leicester early in 1982 to hear from him about the mysterious new concept and to see a mock shop where it was refined.

My double-page spread in DR was published on 12 February, the launch date.

Hilariously, an exclusive article about a retailer introducing a colour-coordinated concept to the UK high street was presented in black-and-white. We rarely printed colour in those days. How things have changed for magazines as well as retailing.

The headline – “The Next move aims at a largely untapped market” – was accurate enough but I doubt anyone, including Davies, was prepared for what an impact the new business would have in aiming a fashion chain at women aged 25-plus.

Younger readers may not appreciate the original Next brought to the UK high street a much more sophisticated approach to fashion retailing, centred around colour-coordinated stories that were presented in-store as stories.

If this sounds obvious today, it was not so in 1982 when the usual practice was for “separates” (to use the jargon of time) to be shown separately.

The presentation in the shops was clean and uncluttered, with very light density of stock on the floor and lots of use of perimeter pigeonholes. The lighting was excellent. The windows had no backs and no mannequins, allowing the entire shop to be a window.

The clothes were well-made – often in the UK in those early days – and well-priced. Everything worked with everything else.

Next shops looked better and fresher than any of the fashion multiples of the day. They were an instant success.

On the launch day, George Davies was in Newport, South Wales. When I spoke with him recently, he could not remember why he picked that branch to visit but thought he might have been seeing manufacturers in the area. (Yes, we used to have clothing factories in south Wales).

George admits he was too nervous about the reaction to go into the 800sq ft shop at first. When he finally ventured in and heard from the manager about the very positive response, his fears evaporated.

Some £4,000 (about £15,000 in today’s values) had been predicted as takings across the seven shops for the day. Cash in the tills was 2.5 times that by closing time.

George Davies at the launch of the Next Directory. Image: Alamy

Given the upcoming anniversary, I have just re-read George’s book, What Next?, which he published soon after being fired from Next in 1988. It is a fascinating and detailed account of his life and early career – from his viewpoint, of course.

It is ironic this great womenswear revolution should have been prompted by a menswear group, J Hepworth and Son, the Leeds-based menswear chain traced its origins back to 1864.

Founder Joseph Hepworth was one of the first clothing manufacturers to open his own shops rather than only supplying wholesale. In the late 1950s the Leeds-based business was one of the first chains to employ a “designer name”, in this case Royal couturier Hardy Amies.

Amies recalled in his 1984 autobiography Still Here the difficulties of introducing a style-led approach to Hepworths: “Fashion was not a word much-loved in Leeds. It scared them.”

By the early 1980s the menswear group wanted to get into the much larger womenswear market and so bought a chain of about 80 shops called Kendalls from Combined English Stores, a medium-sized group.

Loss-making Kendalls sold only rainwear. The coordinated approach of Next was to hasten the demise of such single-category retailers.

Early in 1981 Davies was hired as a consultant to Hepworths by main board director Trevor Morgan. His task was to research a new format for the Kendalls shops.

In May 1981 Davies was appointed full-time at Leicester-based Kendalls as merchandise director and deputy to Morgan, who had been made MD of the Hepworth subsidiary.

One of the more remarkable aspects of the Next story was that it took only nine months to deliver from conception to the first openings.

Although he was not known on high-street retailing at the time, George brought 20 years of fashion industry experience with him. He was – and is – primarily a product man, which is always a good place to start.

Having dropped out of a dentistry course at Birmingham University  - “Dentistry was my mother’s idea more than mine,” he told me – in 1962 the Liverpudlian joined Littlewoods, the Liverpool-based mail order and retailing group, as a stock controller of white socks. Within 18 months he was a buyer, ending up specialising in schoolwear and kidswear.

He became good at developing long-term relationships with reliable suppliers, who he likes to call partners.

Linda Evangelista models for the Next Directory

After nine years at Littlewoods, for four years he ran his own mail order schoolwear business called School Care. Problems with his financial backers ended that venture. This provided useful experience of delivering tight packages of well-priced goods on time.

He then had seven vital years at a womenswear company called Pippa Dee, which operated on a party plan model like Tupperware. Agents would hold social gatherings for a group of women in someone’s house and they would order from the selection of samples the agent had brought along.

I was amazed when George told me Pippa Dee – which was part of a public company called Rosgill Holdings –  had 90,000 agents across the UK running these get-togethers. It was here he learned the importance of having tight ranges of good-quality clothes that went with each other. The agents only had a short time to sell the goods to their captive audience.

Also important in the way George worked and still works is to have a small team of trusted associates. When he joined Kendalls he insisted he brought with him a few colleagues from his previous companies, including product developer Liz Deveraux-Batchelor, knitwear expert Bob Williams and merchandise controller Chris Fagan.

During their time at Next, Deveraux-Batchelor became the second of Davies’ four wives. For a time in the heady early days, George and Liz were regarded as Mr and Mrs Next.

I feel it is very significant that before Next most of Davies’ experience was in the north-west of England. He was not part of any London fashion scene. The opportunity he saw for what became Next was in the provinces.

He was also clever at hiring experts to realise his vision. In his book he credits John Stephenson of design agency Conran Associates of coming up with the concept for the stores, which in their first incarnation were a pale grey with burgundy trim.

Stephenson also provide the name Next, which turned out to be so appropriate to the new womenswear chain and lent itself to all the categories that followed, such as menswear, kidswear, interiors…

It was news to me that Stephenson actually dreamed up the name about a decade earlier for a leisurewear project for the Burton chain that never saw the light of day. He did not tell Davies about that until some years later.

Davies’ boss, Trevor Morgan, came up with the idea of having a mock shop at Kendalls’ head office in Leicester so the new concept could be given a test run. It also enabled the designers to refine the modular system that George wanted so that the refit of each Kendalls shop could be achieved in days rather than weeks.

Another key piece in the strategy was promotion. Once again, George turned to an expert, London-based fashion PR Phyllis Walters, who devised and executed a brilliant campaign involving the fashion editors of the daily newspapers, the women’s weekly magazines and, famously, a 6-page promotion in the March 1982 edition of Vogue, which was published in February, the launch month.

Mid-market high street chains did not usually promote themselves in Vogue.

Next in Vogue, March 1982. Image: Eric Musgrave

In another column I can look at “what happened next” (pun intended) as the Hepworths group was renamed Next and the brand was extended in quick succession to menswear, interiors, hair care, floristry, café and, of course, the Next Directory.

Introduced for spring/summer 1987, this magazine-quality production changed the game for mail order as the Next shops changed the game for high-street retailing. One of the things everyone remembers about the Directory is the fabric swatches that were stuck into the first four seasonal catalogues.

George reminded me recently he developed that idea in his Pippa Dee days when the agents would be given swatches of different colourways of the samples they had at the parties.

The Next party ended for George Davies in December 1988 when he was fired from his position of CEO in a boardroom coup led by David Jones, his deputy who had come into the picture when Next bought Grattan, the mail order company, so it could launch the Directory.

His wife Liz was fired at the same time.

The charge against Davies was that he was autocratic and had a style not suitable for running the very large and complicated business Next had become. It was definitely in trouble at the time and he probably had lost control of it.

After his departure the share price fell as low as 7p. The rescue strategy put together by Jones included selling Grattan to the German mail order company Otto Versand, but he cleverly retained Grattan’s advanced mail order facility at Listerhills, Bradford. That has been the foundation of Next’s amazing online performance in the past 20 years.

Jones ran Next for 13 years, handing over the CEO’s chair in 2000 to Simon Wolfson, who has been in charge ever since. Next’s share price today is more than £75, a long way from 7p.

Lord Wolfson, current CEO at Next

The roots of Next’s phenomenal success under Jones and Wolfson can be traced back to Davies’ initial vision.

After Next, Davies quickly bounced back by creating a second shopping revolution with George at Asda, which proved that fashion could be sold in supermarkets. He was involved between 1989 and 2000.

He completed a hat-trick of notable successes with Per Una, which he set up as a supplier to Marks & Spencer in 2001, and then sold to the company in 2004 for £125m.

Today George, who was 80 last year, still has interests in fashion. His brands FG4 and GWD sell womenswear and kidswear to franchise partners in the Middle East.

When, as editor of Drapers (as Drapers Record had become) I instituted the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003, I could think of no better first recipient than George Davies.

Reflecting what David Jones had achieved at Next after George, he was our second recipient,

Third on his prestigious list in 2005 was Bernard Lewis, who after World War II created Lewis Separates, which became Chelsea Girl, which became River Island. Bernard, who is 96 today (February 10), is still involved in the family-owned business.

In my 40-plus years in the industry, I would have to say Bernard Lewis is the most impressive entrepreneur I have met and interviewed, with George Davies a close second.

Both are brave, smart and inspirational visionaries. I wish the industry had more like them today.