The Drapers Interview: Jeff Banks

This year's Drapers Lifetime Achievement Award winner has done it all, from a sell-out 1960s store to his own TV show.

Jeff Banks is trading cycling stories with his local window cleaner, another bike nut, between takes on his photo shoot for Drapers. The conversation begins when Banks spots the sponge man's two wheeler – a quality vehicle, apparently.

Banks is no weekend cyclist. He has completed 1,000km rides and, at the age of 64, spent his one day off on a recent work trip to Australia cycling 80km in the driving rain on Melbourne's infamous coastal road. He agrees with the window cleaner's assertion that it is the feeling of freedom when out on the road that is one of cycling's biggest attractions.

Freedom to do and say what he wants has been a characteristic of Banks' career. Always outspoken, he has been self-employed for almost all of his working life and notes that he was probably only unhappy in the short time that he spent as an employee – shortly after Warehouse, the chain he founded with brothers Maurice and Michael Bennett, was bought out by Sears.

"I think people who have worked with me would agree that you don't get the benefit of what I can do for you by nailing one of my feet to the floor," he says.

When Drapers rang Banks to ask if he would accept our Lifetime Achievement Award, he was genuinely surprised and delighted. Drapers pressed him about that surprise during this interview, and his reply was characteristically frank. "I tend to speak my mind and when something annoys me I say so. It is that which understandably can ruffle people's feathers," he says wryly.

The launch of Kate Moss's collection at Topshop was an example of Banks making his feelings known when he questioned the supermodel's level of input to the range.

"Philip [Green] called me. He wasn't very happy. But I speak as I find," he says.

Banks has not always gone for the popular vote. But this man has been an independent retailer, he has run his own international label, founded high street chain Warehouse and launched the ground-breaking fashion mail-order operation Bymail, as well as raising the profile of British fashion and designers by hosting fashion TV phenomenon The Clothes Show.

He has also spent years working in fashion education and was one of the founders of Graduate Fashion Week. He chaired the event for 15 years, and saw it grow from a small exhibition to the essential industry recruitment ground it is today.

Yet he fell into fashion as a career entirely by chance. He wanted to be a painter, he says, but was simply not good enough. He then studied interior structural design with a view to training as an architect, but when he left Central Saint Martins College in London in 1963 he couldn't get a job. So a year later he set up a boutique called Clobber in Blackheath in south-east London with a friend, and persuaded his contemporaries at college – who included the likes of Ossie Clark and Jean Muir – to design for it.

"It took us a year to get the stock and we sold out in a week. We didn't have a bank account – it was all cash," he says. "It was mayhem. Boutiques were a phenomenon and we persuaded the 1960s mob to turn up for the opening. George Harrison and John Lennon were there, as well as Glenda Jackson and Terence Stamp. There were mounted policemen to control the crowds.

"We were so busy that we used to allow people in for 20 minutes, then we'd blow a whistle and they'd have to leave, whether they had bought something or not, so we could let the next lot in. It was stupidly easy."

Running out of stock to sell was the salutary lesson that eventually led Banks to set up an own-label business at Clobber, which sold in boutiques and top-line department stores in the UK and the US.

He says: "I met up with Mary Quant's design manager and she suggested I make my own stuff. I hadn't a clue how to do it, but she told me that if I could draw what I wanted, someone else could make it up for me. That's how my life in design started."

Banks quickly prospered. "I bought a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith and stuck two broom handles in the back to act as clothes rails, then went on the road in Europe and the UK selling the Clobber collection. Back then there was so little competition and the market was so small – it was just northern Europe and the US eastern seaboard really. We had it all our own way."

In 1969 he sold his share in Clobber to his business partner Tony Harvey and set up his own top-end label, showing his first collection at Prét â Porter in Paris. "I was showing with British brands such as Quorum and Stirling Cooper, and we decided to set up a trade body because the government would pay half our stand cost if we had one," he says. That group, The Clothing Export Council, was a forerunner of the British Fashion Council and helped to promote UK fashion overseas.

Banks' label was riding high. At the height of its success it had 600 accounts and was hanging against the likes of Cacharel. He had set up his own manufacturing business called the International Clothing Company and opened a Jeff Banks store in London's Duke Street. But in 1974, in the midst of the three-day week, he lost everything when the business HQ was burnt down by an arsonist.
 
"One of the girls in our accounts department had met a guy in a local pub and started seeing him. He got upset when she dumped him and started a fire in some bins outside the office, which spread and decimated the business. It ruined me personally – I was left with £200 in my pocket and nowhere to live."

But Banks bounced back when his business partners needed something to fill the shop in Duke Street and a supplier offered him a floor in his factory. "I got credit from piece good makers so I put a collection together and started again. We built the wholesale business up, then I met Maurice Bennett. He started buying seconds from me because he'd had his fingers burnt in the property crash and needed to fill some empty stores with something.

"We came up with the business idea for Warehouse as a sideline really. For me it was a way of using fabric leftovers and for him it was a way of filling empty shops. It turned into something that paved the way for the shape of today's high street, a business with its own designers producing one label for its stores."

The way forward
Banks cites Terence Conran's Habitat, based on low cost and high design, as inspiration for his decision in 1981 to scrap his own label and concentrate on Warehouse. He says: "I remember thinking how ludicrous it was that I could go into Harrods and see one of my coats on a rail for £2,000. At that time if I had to buy it for my wife I wouldn't have been able to afford it.

"We had a great design team behind Warehouse, including Lyn Burstall, who went on to head design at Oasis, and Carol Robb who went to Monsoon. We came up with this marketing idea for a magazine because we couldn't afford to advertise, which became the fashion mail-order booklet Bymail."

Bymail, with its design-forward approach and its use of US supermodels, attracted a great deal of interest in the home shopping industry and Banks and the Bennetts found themselves in dispute with mail-order giant Freemans after they accused it of copyright misdemeanours. Banks says: "We went to see Freemans threatening to sue and came out with a deal to do a joint venture."

Bymail preceded the Next Directory and Banks says that at one stage Next founder George Davies tried to buy the business. But in 1987 Freemans bought Warehouse and Bymail to expand both. However, less than a year later it was bought out itself by UK clothing giant Sears, which is how Banks found himself an employee for the first time.

"The problem with Bymail was that it never made any money. Just as it was on the verge of hitting it big it got swallowed up by Sears, where it was bottom of the priority list. I was very unhappy with the way things turned out and I'm still bitter about the way I was treated," he says.

During this time Banks had been building himself another career as a TV presenter, starting with a regular 10-minute fashion slot on BBC's lunchtime show Pebble Mill. That escalated into an idea for The Clothes Show. He took the idea to the BBC, which turned it down at first, but a year later in 1986 came back to him with a yes.

"It was the first ever fashion TV show. We had unprecedented access to catwalks because we were the only camera crew there at the beginning. We regularly featured British designers and built the show up from three million to 10m viewers.

"I think a lot of the British designers that are household names today would not have been as well known if it wasn't for The Clothes Show. It was so popular and influential that when the founders of New York Fashion Week wanted to start up their event, they told us that if we agreed to go and film there they would be able to get the likes of Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan to show."

Its success spawned fashion exhibition The Clothes Show Live, another Banks idea, which has continued to raise the profile of the British high street and UK designer fashion among consumers to this day.

But TV and spin-offs were just a sideline for Banks who, after leaving Sears, set up a design studio that forms the basis of his business today. It employs just 16 people but designs more than 30 collections that cover not just fashion but also homewares. All the collections are under licence for businesses across the world thanks to licensing deals in the UK, Australia, Japan and South Africa, and hopefully China in the next 12 months.

"I honestly believe that this is the future for fashion designers," says Banks. "The opportunities in a global market are now immense and the way to capitalise on them as a designer is via this route. We invent brands, design product and come up with the marketing strategies for it, then take the royalties."

The business model suits him because it plays to his strengths of creating and delivering ideas. He says: "I know enough about myself now to realise I'm not a great businessman. I've learned to understand the figures over the years because I've had to, but it's the variety of work that I thrive on.

"The business is successful but profit is not the key driver. I could give up work tomorrow and live pretty comfortably. But I love the fact that we can dream up something in the morning and have something real by the time I walk out of the door at the end of the day."