Thanks to his singular taste and vision, Jeremy Hackett has prospered for 35 years.
When Jeremy Hackett opened his first shop at the ‘wrong end’ of London’s King’s Road in 1979, no one expected much. Rent was GBP60 per week and the previous tenant had been the interior designer Nicky Haslam. “My bank manager told me it was a retail graveyard,” he says. “I thought, ‘Thanks: that’s optimistic’.” Even the new shopkeeper set his sights low. “It was really for fun. And it was good fun. The first week we took about GBP1,000 and thought, ‘This is brilliant!’ And then it absolutely took off.”
In three years, Hackett had five shops within 50m of each other and cab drivers started to refer to the area as Hackett Cross. Ralph Lauren was an early customer. “That was a good day,” Hackett says, “He spent big.” Today, there are 131 Hackett stores across 16 countries and the firm made GBP50 million in the last financial quarter. That’s good going in a retail climate clothing brands euphemistically refer to as ‘challenging’.
This story is from the January 2019 edition of Esquire Singapore.
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This story is from the January 2019 edition of Esquire Singapore.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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