Wayne Hemingway: What I wish I'd known
Article Date: Mar 15 2007Wayne Hemingway and his wife Gerardine founded fashion label Red or Dead in 1982 and won the British Fashion Council’s Street Style Designer of the Year award three times in a row. After selling the company in 1999 they set up Hemingway Design, which focuses on affordable and social design.
We started Red or Dead because we were short of cash, selling a few clothes that we’d made in Camden Market to clear out our wardrobe a bit. I think we brought in about £100 the first day and thought, ‘hang on, we could make a bit of money out of this’, so it went from there.
I didn’t really come from a business background and had no business training – but who really does? The closest I came was being able to run the pub I grew up in and counting the money at the end of the day. I know lots of people wouldn’t agree, but I don’t really think business success comes from studying. It comes from hard work and passion.
You have to be passionate about what you decide to do, otherwise you might as well go and work for someone else. I remember even when Red or Dead was growing really quickly it didn’t seem like a business strategy; I don’t ever remember it seeming like work.
Having a personal mission that you care about helps too; in the beginning it gave us focus. We wanted our work to be challenging and political and we wanted to be the first designer label that was affordable. It gave us a unique selling point and drove us on.
Stick to your beliefs
I think if you can develop an ethos that is close to your heart, the public will respond better because they can relate to what you’re doing. You should stick to it, too, over and above monetary gain. You could make up a company ethos for the sake of it, but you’d have to be a very good actor to pull it off. If you think of Stuart Rose and what he’s done at M&S, I don’t think he’s being cynical; he’s just understanding the market and reacting to it – it’s something he cares about. It’s like Hemingway Design and our work on the regeneration of housing estates: yes, we saw a gap in the market, but it’s also something in which we have a genuine interest.
Age and experience have a double effect on you. The longer you run a business, the more you lose that innocence you have when you’re young and throwing yourself into a project, but you also continue to learn. You learn a great deal about relationships and realise that you’re only as good as the people around you.
Surround yourself with people who share your attitude and beliefs. In fact, (and I don’t want to sound like a hippy here) I think generally you gravitate towards like-minded people anyway; and the ones who aren’t, don’t work with them – life’s too short.
What it boils down to is that if the people we hire lack motivation for what they do, they shouldn’t really be here. And that’s one of the skills you learn over time: saying ‘no’.
Obviously that’s a lot easier when you’ve got financial clout behind you. Lots of people are frightened of mistakes, especially financial ones, but you learn the most by making them. Don’t be afraid – just be brave enough to say ‘no’, and go in another direction when things don’t turn out as you expected.
Free and loose
I think what we do is quite exciting. We’ve never had a rigid structure or strategy to the way we work; it’s fairly organic and I’m proud of that. I’ve never read a business magazine in my life: the way we go about our business is free and loose. If someone wants to go out for lunch or work from home on a Friday they can, as long as they get the work done. We do, and it has helped with creativity, so why shouldn’t they?
But allowing your staff that freedom does mean that you have to be willing to embrace the technology that’s available, which allows you to work more flexibly. I remember having my first mobile phone. It cost £2,200 and was huge, but it allowed me to be in contact with work whenever I needed, which was a real help.
