Looking snappy birthday

Published on Wednesday 11 August 2004 13:07

THE loudest rumble in Scotland’s retail jungle in ages was sparked by the much-heralded arrival of Harvey Nicks. A brand new bag for Edinburgh. The fact that the nationally-known institution had deigned to cross the Border at all was fodder enough for the chattering classes.

For head office in London to announce that it had chosen Edinburgh and not Glasgow as the location for the new store had shoppers choking on their carrier bags.

It seems like quite a while ago now, considering the hoo-hah before the first stone was laid and the controversial media gossip about "special deals" negotiated between the mighty retailer and Edinburgh City Council.

In fact, Harvey Nichols, with a 7000-strong store card base, is about to celebrate the second anniversary of opening its doors on St Andrew Street.

They had a top-hatted gent in a grey frock-coat on duty at the entrance on day one, on August 20, 2002, and he was still there the other day to steer me to the general manager’s office.

That office is closer to minimal, almost spartan, than grand. But considering you get no airs and graces from Gordon Drummond, the accommodation seemed perfectly adequate.

Mr Drummond: an Englishman with a Scottish-sounding name. Although he is a product of Durham, it’s somehow easy to surmise that, given the choice, he would have been happier with a birthplace north of the Border.

He is an affable sort, with a smile that’s never far away, but it does initially sound like he’ll clam up and be short on comment.

For starters, will he rattle off details of the store’s turnover?

"Sorry, but now that we are a private company we don’t give out hard and fast figures. What I would say is that we are currently running above sales targets, well into double-digit growth on last year."

So we’re talking about ten per cent growth?

Mr Drummond proves to be forthcoming after all, it being against his nature, one suspects, to clam up completely on anything with anybody.

"The figures for retail growth in Scotland were up 8.2 per cent and I can confirm that here we were running at well over double that. So we are happy. Not jubilant. Happy. Not complacent. Happy."

He needs to be posting healthy figures; he has some substantial overheads.

"We have a staff of just under 400 and the payroll is fairly steady at that. When we opened we were overwhelmed with job applications and, no, we didn’t have to resort to poaching. People interested in fashion wanted to work for Harvey Nichols because we’re seen as operating at the top end of the spectrum.

"Even people from Glasgow come through here to work for us and they’re happy coping with commuting.

"We take particular delight in this because Glasgow at one time was regarded as more fashionable for shopping than Edinburgh."

About those so-called special deals, the initial bargaining that saw Harvey Nicks established in the Capital, Drummond is matter-of-fact in his description of the building’s creation.

"It was a property deal that provided us with a completely new building which, to my knowledge, just would not have been available to us in Glasgow at the time. In effect Edinburgh’s bus station was razed to the ground, leaving us free to erect this fabulous cube of a building. Fabulous in that we have a selling space of 65,000 square feet smack in the centre of a fabulous city," he says.

"Often when a retailer goes into a property the property developer will pay for a lot of the fit-out costs and fixtures. In our case we paid all of those, to the tune of between 20m and 25m, and consequently we got a better deal on the rent.

"It seems to be fairly widely known that we’ll be on a pretty low rent for 100 years. We make up for that because we paid for the actual set-up cost. So, yes, we got a good deal, whereas many another retailers would get a good deal on the initial development, then have to pay the market rent.

"But there really wasn’t anything ‘mysterious’ or ‘dodgy’ about the city council and Harvey Nichols in the beginning."

Despite its cosmopolitan image, the Capital is in many respects a small town. Two years ago the eternal "village" was buzzing with Jenners v Harvey Nicks tittle-tattle. The talk was of intense rivalry between the city’s oldest and largest department store and the new boys on the block.

This brings a wry smile from Mr Drummond. "Frankly I don’t see the two stores as competitors. I feel, rather, that they compliment each other. We attract different custom," he says.

If his custom differs from Jenners, who, then, is his target customer?

"It would be well nigh impossible to put an age group on it but we have found that the customer who comes in here is somebody who enjoys life and has a zest for living. They like to look good and they like to be first with fashion.

"The pace of living now is faster, significantly faster, than it was as we knew it when I was in the retail trade ten, even five years ago and here we attract those people who are habitually on the prowl for the new season’s merchandise."

Drummond has breathed life into a store that from inception had seemed somewhat breathless. It needed to come up for air. He has established the Forth Floor ("some think that’s a spelling mistake but it’s our top floor, with views of the River Forth") in the happening store.

The shop now accommodates fashion shows, food and wine tastings and themed Scottish evenings. For most of September the theme will be Australian with, in addition to wine and food, an exhibition of the world’s rarest opals.

One-off events so far have included pole-dancing lessons, speed dating and "clickety chick" bingo. A retailer night involved the Institute of Directors and sales directors from various Edinburgh department stores - including Jenners.

While I’m there, Mr Drummond calls though his seemingly always-open door to his sales manager. What are the colours for this autumn-into-winter? "Browns and tweedy colours," came the snappy reply. "Teal green, burnt orange and, for a real splash of colour, raspberry."

No raspberries have been blown at Mr Drummond since he took over the GM’s mantle. Indeed, he is prone to blow a few himself, notably in the direction of the authorities intent on introducing to Edinburgh traffic congestion charges.

"I see this as a truly serious threat to trading in the heart of the city, a threat to society itself as Edinburghers know it."

And for once the smile has vanished.

City retailing Drummond into him

GORDON DRUMMOND, 51, started in retailing in the late 70s. A product of Durham University, he went directly into a graduate training scheme run by Littlewoods in Sunderland.

From Teesside he shifted to Edinburgh to manage Goldbergs, at Tollcross. "I managed Goldbergs for two years but its history was all too brief and, in a way, tragic. Its owners were under a clear impression that it was going to be surrounded, a sort of centrepiece, by a major retail development.

"There was then a lot of derelict ground on its doorstep, and that was ultimately given to housing and office development."

Mr Drummond progressed from Goldbergs to the Edinburgh Woollen Mill, as operations director at its Borders headquarters in Langholm.

From there, he came back to Edinburgh to House of Fraser, working as manager of its northern region for nine years, with an office in the store at the West End.

His appointment to the Harvey Nicks post came through a head-hunting retail management consultancy in Stirling, run by former Goldbergs colleagues.

At Durham University, Mr Drummond studied geology - "a help to me in retail because I’ve studied the fabric of this building and it looks like limestone to me" - and zoology - "we don’t sell any animal skin goods, so that hasn’t been of much use".

He and wife Sarah, a nurse, and their two younger children live in Haddington. Their eldest daughter and only son are at university.