MBS Events
Stephen Marks, Chairman and Chief Executive of The French Connection Group
In conversation with Iain R Webb, Fashion Director, ELLE Magazine
Thu March 29, 2001
| The Fine Art Society, London
On a breezy Thursday night in March I’m talking football with FCUK CEO Stephen Marks. Well, actually he’s talking football with Selfridges CEO Vittorio and I happen to be caught in the crossfire. Half an hour later and I’m talking to Marks again, but this time we’re caught in the spotlight, watched by an audience of high powered movers and shakers at the latest MBS Group event. We both acknowledge the bizarre setting, but Marks likes to talk, so it’s not long before he’s happily telling stories which elicit laughter from the assembled crowd.
“As usual in my life, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”, says Marks when I ask him how he came to be a backer for Guy Ritchie and his Lock Stock movie. “Just being associated with young people with fresh ideas is what I enjoy the most. At French Connection 18-20 year olds can say whatever they want and they are listened to.”
Marks, along with his fashion company French Connection and the FCUK brand, has made a virtue out of understanding what young people want. The clothes which bear the label aren’t really that different to what alot of other retailers are offering just along the high street, yet the mystique surrounding them is so seductive that at the end of last year Marks told a reporter that analysts reckoned the latest FCUK profits would be somewhere in the region of £18million. Not bad for a man who started working in the rag
trade for a mass-market coat company.
So what made him start French Connection?
“I was going backwards and forwards to Paris.”, says Marks. “I looked at the girls in France and they didn’t look like the girls in England. I got the feeling we needed to bring that to England.” And what about FCUK? Who came up with the logo which every fifteen
year old now wants to wear to shock his or her parents? Once again Marks doesn’t make a big deal out of it. “We used to send faxes to Hong Kong saying ‘fchk’. They would reply ‘fcuk’. We didn’t really think about it. Then Trevor Beattie (creative director
of TBWA, the advertising agency behind the FCUK campaign) saw it but didn’t say a thing at first…the rest is history.”
Being an unashamed lover of fashion I tell Marks that I’m quite uncomfortable with the way hype and marketing seem to be everything these days. “I really believe that product is king.”, he says, explaining that one of the people he admires most is French designer and retailer Agnes b. “She’s never advertised, she spends nothing on her shopfits, she opens stores in the middle of nowhere, she does everything opposite to everyone else and yet she’s got one of the best businesses in the world.”
There is, however, still a part of him that obviously sees brand management as a necessary evil. “The minute anybody does anything these days it’s copied.”, he says. “If
you took all the names off and swapped everything around, you wouldn’t know who the hell they were. But if you want a brand…” He stops mid-sentence. “Look I’m the first one to tell anybody I didn’t know what the hell marketing meant. I’m still not quite sure.” Whether you believe him or not, Marks knows good publicity when he sees it. Like the time Lennox Lewis was on TV promoting his world title fight. Wearing a FCUK knitted hat he did much for global brand identification. “It was all a bit of luck really.”, admits Marks before telling another story of how he met a man at a football match who told him he couldn’t get into the Hard Rock Cafe.
“I said ‘I’ll get you a gold card’ and I never heard another word.”, Marks continues. “Then I get a phone call and it’s the same man who says Lennox’s sponsors have backed out and would I like to sponsor him. Lennox is such a gentlemen. The BBC didn’t want to photograph him with his hat on. It was fantastic. That in itself had a bigger impact than the advertising. Advertising is very strange.”
“There are not that many very memorable ads.”, he says. “You certainly can’t actually sell a product from advertising.”
But you can get into very big trouble as Marks recently found out when he launched his ‘fcukinkybugger’ campaign. “Kinkybugger has been a problem. I got a letter from a fan who said, ‘I love French Connection but I’ve got children and they asked me to explain what kinkybugger meant and what do I say? In the dictionary it means anal sex’. That really shocked me and so we took it down and ‘sorry’ went up and well…sorry.”
There is little else Marks can be sorry about. He is married to ex-ELLE Fashion Editor Alisa who he sees as a guiding light in the business (“She’s got a great eye. She’s responsible for helping us create something different.”) and with whom he has three children. He and his family live between London, St. Barts and the Hamptons. He is one of the most respected (and envied) men in British retail. What more could he want?
He offers a clue when I ask him who he would like to play him in a film of
his life? “Pete Sampras”, he answers without thinking. So, having played at junior Wimbledon in 1962 did he still yearn to be a professional tennis player?
“I think it’s my greatest wish.”, he says. And nobody laughs.
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