The Eric Musgrave Interview: Derek Rose CEO Sacha Rose 'I think of end users, not customers'
This year’s centenary celebrations for premium British brand Derek Rose are being guided by Sacha Rose, the third generation to run the family-owned business. Putting people before profit and product before price, he has transformed the fortunes of the company once known only for its pyjamas.
Seven years working as a lawyer in corporate finance and in a hedge fund satisfied Sacha Rose’s need for intellectual challenges but provided little stimulus for his creative tendencies. In October 2003, at the age of 30, he joined the family business, Derek Rose Ltd, which had a worldwide reputation for fine pyjamas and dressing gowns.
It was, he recalls, “not in a good state” and radical restructuring was needed before he could indulge his interest in creating a wider selection of high-quality, functional products. Initially he worked with his father, Derek, and his sister Nancy (“she is older in age but younger in spirit than me”, he says), but by 2005-06 he was in sole charge of the business that traced its heritage back to his grandfather Lou Rose, who had started making shirts in 1926, later specialising in nightwear.
Derek joined Lou in 1953. By the early 1970s the company had been restructured and the immaculately-dressed and always charming Derek took over to create the global reputation of Derek Rose nightwear as a classic British brand of quality and taste. Derek died on August 29, 2025, aged 92. The many obituaries for him included ones in The Daily Telegraph and The New York Times.
Sacha, who has two sons aged 17 and 20 with his Swiss-born wife Claudine, has been much less high-profile than his legendary father but his achievements have been equally impressive. He has taken the sales of the company from £3m 20 years ago to £14m today, expanding its product range and introducing direct-to-the-consumer sales while retaining a significant wholesale business.
With micromodal T-shirts retailing at £105 and brushed cotton PJs selling for £260, Derek Rose is unashamedly premium. Sacha Rose likes to think of the products as “good value”.
Sales are split 80:20 men's to women's, 70:30 retail versus wholesale, and about 35:65 UK against international. Back around 2005, sleepwear accounted for around 97% of sales; today it’s around 30% but the CEO admits categorising Derek Rose’s products across sleepwear, loungewear, leisurewear, resortwear and underwear is difficult.
Crucially, all are designed, as the company says, “with the goal of enriching a customer’s enjoyment of their free time”. The important point, says Rose, is always to consider what is the desired end use.
Congratulations on the centenary of your family’s involvement in the industry. How does it feel?
It's quite exciting and special to be the third generation of a family enterprise and to be able to celebrate a landmark like this with so many people who have been with us in the business for such a long time. At Christmas we’ll be releasing a special centenary capsule collection.
My grandfather was Jack Lewis Rose, but everyone called him Lou. He was born in the East End of London in 1900, so he was quite young when he started his shirt-making business in 1926. We think he always made the shirts in the north-west of England, close to the mills weaving cotton fabrics in those days. Lou jumped on the idea of pyjamas after seeing the higher echelons of the British Army bringing the garments back to England after serving in India. He was a smart man and one of his innovations was to have the buttonholes horizontal, not vertical, to allow a little more movement and so comfort when the wearer was in bed.
I spoke to my father about this last year when he was on his deathbed, which was so typical of him – always talking shop. Derek joined Lou in 1953 and after splitting from some partners they set up Derek Rose Ltd in the early 1970s and concentrated on nightwear. Dad was fantastic designing the prints and handling the worldwide sales. He was so happy just meeting and talking to people. He would absolutely remember what a buyer had selected from him in 1977 or whenever!
Why did you take so long to join him?
It was never my intention to be in the business. I studied French at university and then studied law. I wanted to be a lawyer and, more importantly, I wanted the training and the qualification. I qualified as a corporate finance solicitor and the work was fascinating. I learned a huge amount. It was a very privileged way to start my working education. Then I did something called structured finance in a hedge fund, which again was really interesting work as hedge funds were just taking off. It was a great learning curve.
All of us have this creative element within us. The one thing I didn't have from law and finance was any sort of creative output. I knew as soon as I got involved in the business that it was a really important thing to have.
I joined the business in October 2003, when it was not in a good state. Talking to my dad beforehand I had wondered, Can I do something? Can I help fix it? Can I move it forward? Going through historical board meeting minutes, I saw the decision had been taken to shut our UK production, which was based in Congleton, Cheshire. But no one had the heart to execute what was the correct decision.
I presented a slightly different argument, which was, if we don't do this, instead of losing some jobs, we will lose all the jobs. These were people's livelihoods and the episode shaped my thinking around what the priorities of any business should be. It's why I feel so strongly about people being at the heart of a business. Back then we had about 120 people in Congleton. I knew we couldn’t keep production here, but we could retain sampling and development. I said if we get it right, if we do the right products, we may be able to build that team again. That section, which we call The Silk Studio, was initially just five people: now it’s 18. We now employ about 50 people in Congleton, including warehousing and office staff. We make all our silk products and our woven cashmere garments, and it’s where we do the fun stuff – our three types of personalisation on garments.
Of things that have made me happy over the years, the revival of Congleton production is possibly close to being number one on the list. Maybe it's the emotions around having to close our UK production in the first place.
The Derek Rose Centenary Campaign
When did you take full control?
With my legal background, I said I can only join the business on the basis that I have control from day one. By 2006 my sister Nancy left to do what she’s very good at, helping cancer patients with palliative care. Dad stepped down around the same time but of course I’d have been mad not to massively rely on and leverage the experience of my father and my sister. But my position meant if we ever had a disagreement, I could push ahead with something and I had the bandwidth to make mistakes.
Seeing the difference of how things are done in this industry and how it is in a big corporate environment was interesting. It’s part of the charm of the fashion industry and a challenge at the same time. It was fun to be able to marry the best bits of both.
How did you go about changing the company?
I went around the business and asked, What are we doing? Everybody said, Oh, we make the best pyjamas and dressing gowns in the world. No one was thinking, We help people enjoy their free time. Everything was product-centric, not end-user focused or use-focused.
My business plan from 2003 said, We want people to be comfortable and enjoy their free time more.
Business is really simple and can be summed up in three questions: What am I selling? Who am I selling it to? How am I selling it? When you are a business that is nearly 99% sleepwear your channels are limited because your sales are so biased towards Q4 and the winter months. If you had your own shops, you’d run out of cash during the rest of the year.
I wanted to do more channels than wholesale, but I had to walk before I could run. We needed a viable product strategy, but before product comes people. So I had to make a few adjustments in terms of personnel within the business, filling gaps and so on.
How did we get sales from £3m to £14m? It had to be a mixture of what products am I selling, and through what channels? The hardest bit was getting from £3m to £4m because at the early stage you don't have the product mix and the product pipeline. On top of that we were losing money and we didn’t have the cash. When I joined the business, one guy said to me, Good luck, you’re working with vapour.
On your website there is a lot about putting people before profit. Is that the modern Derek Rose ethos?
It's a really good question: what is the purpose of the business? Internally and externally, we serve two masters. Internally – and I don't care if people disagree – my thinking is we're here to protect and create jobs. With that as our focus, I need to have a decent balance sheet, I need to have cash in the business. That's part of the mindset of the small management team of six that runs the business with me. That's really important.
Of course, we could make more money, but that's not our priority. When we're looking at our decision making, it's not profit first. Profits are a byproduct of our decision making. We have this team-centric thinking, which slightly changes the way you approach things. We have the luxury of being a privately-held business and having a group of people around the table who feel the same way – if we go down this path, we're looking after people better. A great example is us making our cashmere and silk garments in Congleton. Of course, we could make them for less and make more profit by manufacturing abroad. But how nice to grow that business in the UK, how nice to grow that team in the UK…
Our external mindset reflects the fact I'm a bit of a nerd. People talk to me about the customer or the consumer; I'll talk about the end user. I'm very, very functional in my thinking and my design. Great design is huge amounts of function combined with the very important skill of wrapping the form around it. You could add function as an afterthought.
We want to be looking after people and treating people as best as we possibly can. And, as a company, we make garments so people can make the most of their free time, or the time that they value. We're designing for people to enjoy what we do. If someone wears our PJs and sleeps 1% better because of them, we've done our job.
Derek Rose Knightsbridge
Are you profitable?
Our profits go up and down. It depends on what we want to invest in. We've been investing well over the years, but I've made loads of mistakes that have cost us money. The buck stops with me. We've also been able to invest in people and product and that doesn't always pay off straight away. We've got a new cutting table in Congleton, which is a fantastic piece of technology, but these things cost tens of thousands of pounds.
We employ a little over 90 people in total and we have a fantastic team. We have just recruited so we can start to do marketing and launch our first-ever marketing campaign. Historically, we've been quite comfortable with people finding us through word of mouth. I've always loathed the idea of marketing and I haven't been the greatest fan of social media and its impact on the world, but the reality is, it's part of business and we want to do it well.
We see an opportunity to do marketing well with taste and class. Our first person joined us a few months ago and our second is joining in a couple of months. We're going to build up that team and that function, which is really exciting and again a big investment.
How have you managed to keep wholesale as about 30% of your turnover?
Wholesale is a really important channel because you've got relationships. We enjoy working with people we've known for donkey’s years, such as the Harry Rosen team in Canada, or Harrods and Selfridges, or Toby (Bateman) and Jeremy (Langmead) at Mr Porter. We work with a lot of really nice, decent people who are passionate about the industry. Wholesale is also a window into the world. If you're working with the right people, and they're kind enough to put your brand in front of their customers, it's bit of a privilege. It's a good thing.
Certainly retailing is hard for multi-brand stores. It's a challenging environment and rents are always going up. In the UK, we also have the problem of the removal of the VAT refund scheme for international shoppers. We have singularly shot ourselves in the foot there.
How easy was it to extend the product range from PJs and dressing gowns?
You can't fix a business and you can't develop product well until you've got all the infrastructure, people and processes in place. So in the first few years everything was foundational. It’s particularly important to get in place the mentality that you are in a period of change or development. That took until 2007.
I was adamant any product we wanted to develop and launch could only exist if it's brilliant in its own right. I never wanted anybody to buy anything because it's got our name in it. I always said, if you took the rest of the business away and just had that product, can it justify its existence?
Over the years, we have spent huge amounts of time and energy researching and developing products, and a lot of them never see the light of day.
We were a woven fabrics business and I wanted to expand into loungewear and jersey. The challenge was, why would someone buy a white T-shirt from me, one of the world's most commoditised products? We worked with different mills, then focused in on one and developed a quality that we felt was both unique and worthy of answering that question. It was about a year developing that one fabric.
Similarly, in 2013 we launched underwear after just over two years of research and development. We put together a specialist team of three garment techs who collectively had 122 years of experience in underwear. It's just not in our nature to rush out a product.
You have to benchmark existing products in their space, but by what criteria? Then you must work out how you can do better. Then you have to execute the plans. That's our approach. I can think of many products we could launch tomorrow, but I can't execute all of them at a level better than what's out there.
Overall, we knew we wanted products for the enjoyment of free time, whether you're relaxing on a sofa at home, or taking the dog for a walk, or having dinner by the pool on holiday. We wanted to see if we could design a product that would be brilliant in that moment.
I used to travel by air a lot and I always want to be as practically comfortable as possible. Whether I am on a zero to two-hour flight, a two to five-hour flight, or five hour-plus flight, we have designed different products for them. I’m always paranoid about losing my passport, so all of the products in that category have passport-size pockets using pin lock zippers, which are specialised fasteners where the slider locks in place when the puller is pressed down to prevent accidental opening. That's the kind of thinking behind our products, to make sure they're great in their own right and they fit into the Derek Rose lifestyle.
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How easy has it been to extend into womenswear?
It’s growing but it’s only 20% of sales. I don't think I'm saying anything radical to state women shop differently from men. They are more fashion-led, they have less brand loyalty and they are prepared to wear things, comparatively speaking, of lower quality, in synthetic fabrics. It’s a more competitive marketplace with more price pressure. Our challenge is to bring across our standards from the men's side, the passion for natural fibres and the emphasis on quality and longevity. We won't compromise on quality or price. We serve a more discerning female customer. Alongside this, we have only a tiny business in kidswear, but our family pyjama sets are fun to do, so once again not being solely profit-driven, we get the enjoyment of offering these.
Beyond pyjamas and dressing gowns, your product range is tricky to categorise…
It's actually a bit of a nightmare. Currently we have our T-shirts in our loungewear category. We sell huge quantities of T-shirts, but people are not buying them just for loungewear or sleepwear. They're buying them as part of their daywear, they wear them with jeans, some do sport in them. We really struggle with categorisation and how to present it online. There's a project ongoing to effectively redefine all that stuff.
Defining our customer base is the same. In the space of 15 minutes at a trunk show I’ve sold the same navy jersey T shirt to a 16-year-old and a 76-year-old. How do you narrow that down? The nice thing about our customers is that they wear it how they want to wear it. I met a 30-year-old man in a Swiss mountain village who was wearing our Derek Rose lounge trousers with a leather jacket, sunglasses, cool necklace and trainers. It turned out he was a mega-fan of the brand who wore them every day because they are so comfortable. Internally we've adopted the phrase "Live as you please" to describe how people buy and wear our products.
Why have you recently added men’s denim jeans at £270?
Over the years, we've been very slowly and very conservatively expanding our product mix. It's always been, what would I like to wear in my free time? I'm not a suit and tie person. I’m a T-shirt and jeans or hoodie and jeans person. Our mindset has always been, I want a really comfortable pair of jeans. I just want it to be function-led and comfort first as an end user experience. How nice to wear the jeans that are the denim equivalent of our beautifully soft T-shirt. I wanted each of our products to be the customer’s favourite, the one they reach for first when fishing clothes out of the cupboard. The jeans are not about attracting new or existing customers. It's just about being able to dress people, head to toe, in products that are each designed and directionally more focused on the end user experience than the average that's out there.
I must mention our AirPod pockets! All of our trousers have a special elasticated mini pocket for your AirPods to sit in because I'm always paranoid about losing mine. Okay, I admit I need to get out more...
Outside the UK, where do you manufacture?
Mainly the Czech Republic and Portugal. We have been in what was Czechoslovakia since the 1970s. We like to find a good partner and then work with them for as long as humanly possible. My dad, or maybe it was my grandfather, always said you make money on your input costs, so we control everything from the ground up. We specify the very core elements of everything we work with. We don't buy a fabric, we will have a fabric made to our specification. We control that all the way through the production. We're hugely obsessed with efficiency and reliability of delivery. If you're not building from the ground up, how do you make it special?
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With your T-shirts at £105 and brushed cotton PJs at £260, do you regard Derek Rose as a luxury or a premium brand?
Luxury is a word that has been abused so horrendously. I'm not interested in whether we are premium or luxury. I am interested in the concept of value, which is the result of price and quality. If I pay £105 for a T-shirt, what am I getting for that versus one that costs, say, £20. Is it just more expensive or is it a different experience? Will it last longer? Will it keep its shape better? Will it keep its colour better? Will it pill less? Will I be wearing that T-shirt in 10 years’ time?
People are so fashionably interested in sustainability, but if you're interested in sustainability, buy quality, make clothing an investment, and make it last. Is £105 good value? If you knew how much that fabric costs per metre, you'd actually find out that this is quite significantly underpriced. It’s phenomenal value!
Your four stores are in prosperous London locations – Hampstead, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill and Marylebone. Are more planned?
There's an opportunity for us to grow retail, which is another way to create more jobs, which is really exciting. When we opened the first store in Ledbury Road, Notting Hill, in 2016 I didn’t even want to make a profit – sorry to sound like a broken record. The idea was, if we achieved break even, then we’d have created a couple of jobs and have given ourselves some brand marketing in a nice area. The way we look at stores hasn’t really changed much.
Obviously we are also trying to give customers a positive experience. Funnily enough, we've gone full circle and have just finished a redesign for the Notting Hill store that hopefully will be implemented in the next six months. It is a radical redesign of that space, a more experiential approach to retail with less emphasis on volume of product and selling.
We might struggle to do even one or two other locations in London, but higher on the list would be a store in LA, New York or San Francisco. We have never looked outside London because with our prices and product mix we’d struggle elsewhere in the UK.
Tell us about your new part-time role at premium British menswear brand Drake’s. You are now COO, having been appointed soon after the company was acquired privately by Anders Holch Povlsen, billionaire owner of the Danish Bestseller fashion group.
I have a brilliant team here at Derek Rose and I am not 100% occupied. I’ve known and admired Drake’s since the days of founder Michael Drake and I’m friendly with the current CEO Michael Hill, who worked with Michael. They've got a phenomenal brand, brand identity and a product marketing engine. They've got a lot of really exciting and talented people across all the disciplines. Sometimes it's just helpful to have someone in the room who's made all the mistakes and done a lot of the stuff before. That's what I'm contributing.
What your personal strengths and weaknesses as the person running Derek Rose?
I have a relatively simple job in many regards, which is to build a great team around me and then to enable them to do their jobs. We have a management team of six and my job is to support, empower and challenge. I need to know enough about what people are doing and what the team are doing in order to be able to challenge people, to properly support them and empower them. The key is, they know they have to come to me and say, This is what I need. Or can you support me on this? It's a collaborative way of working.
We're all wired differently. I'm very functional, but also creative. I think I have a decent balance, so I'm good on the ideation side and moving things forward. One of my favourite things is to question everything, but I'm very comfortable delegating and empowering people.
What am I not good at? I don't suffer fools. I need people to know their business. I've learned over the years that if you're going to fail, fail fast.
Inside Derek Rose Knightsbridge
What have been the significant high points and low points of your time as CEO?
In the company we say we like to whisper about the wins and shout about the losses. The positives are made up of lots of little wins, while the negatives tend to be bigger impact events.
Going back to around 2004, sterling was devalued against other currencies, including the Czech crown. We make a lot in the Czech Republic and suddenly the exchange rate moved something like 40% overnight. Then the credit crunch of 2008-09 was pretty brutal. Next came Brexit and Covid. I've learned not to stress about such external challenges because they are beyond my control but you still need to find a way to deal with them.
On the plus side, I am really proud to have kept The Silk Studio and have built that up. It was great for us as a group of people, as a business, and for communicating the message of the importance of people.
I'm also really proud of never laying people off, even during the credit crunch of 08-09. I apologised to one of our invoicing staff in Congleton for imposing a wage freeze and she berated me, saying everyone was just pleased to still have a job in a world where friends in other businesses were being laid off.
What has been the biggest mistake?
Hiring is probably one of the hardest things in business. A general mistake is hiring incorrectly. My biggest mistake has been not moving people out quickly enough who weren't up to the job. You like them, you want them to do well, you support them, but deep down you know it’s not working and they’d probably be happier elsewhere.
In your centenary year, what’s the biggest challenge for Derek Rose?
It’s brand awareness. When you've not done marketing for 20 years, that's probably not a surprise. In that 20-year period, the whole media landscape has changed with digital, social media and influencers. It's not enough just to be in the best stores around the world and have people telling their friends, I've got a lovely pair of jeans from Derek Rose. We are aware we are arriving late at the party, but maybe we are, fittingly, fashionably late!
