“We’re bringing the sparkle back to Oxford Street,” says Kurt Geiger boss

Oxford Street, the country’s most famous shopping street, has seen better days: it’s lined with sweet shops and some big brands have moved out. Doomsayers predict its demise.

Not so Neil Clifford, the boss of shoe and handbag chain Kurt Geiger. Less than a year ago, when he opened the chain’s biggest and most ostentatious store near Oxford Circus, he made a big show of faith in the High Street.

So far, it appears to have paid off, and that is encouraging for us all, as Oxford Street is a symbol of the health of the British retail sector and consumer confidence.

The store, which welcomes customers with its pretty floral sofas and colourful window displays, is the chain’s top-performing store.

Gloomy scenes of boarded-up windows and American candy stores cast a shadow over the once-glorious commercial street.

Stuart Machin, the head of Marks & Spencer, has gone so far as to call Oxford Street a “national disgrace”. He recently won an appeal against a government order preventing him from demolishing M&S’s iconic art deco store, Marble Arch, and building a new one, a move he says will help revitalise the street.

Clifford, 57, shrugs off the idea that Oxford Street’s future has ever really been in doubt, putting it down to media hype. Sitting on a plush sofa, he acknowledges that Oxford Street had hit rock bottom, which helped him secure a good deal for the 3,000-square-foot store. The chain closed five branches in London during the pandemic, including in Covent Garden and the City, which had made it “invisible” in the capital.

The original Kurt Geiger opened his store in the 1960s on the now much more fashionable Bond Street, home to Chanel and Hermes outlets. So the move to Oxford Street was partly intended to send a message of affordable glamour.

“We wanted to be where everyone is, not just where some people are,” says Clifford, arguing that it’s a perfect location for his “modern interpretation” of the brand.

The street looks set to improve with a £90m revamp due to begin this autumn. A partnership between Westminster City Council and the New West End Company will deliver much-needed changes such as wider pavements, more trees and new pedestrian crossings.

Of course, Oxford Street is far from the only shopping destination to have had a rough time. Brick-and-mortar retailers across the country are feeling the pressure from their online rivals.

But Kurt Geiger is still banking on its stores. Last year it opened eight in the UK, bringing its total to 80 worldwide, of which 73 are British.

The privately-owned company is firing on all cylinders. Last year it celebrated its 60th anniversary with sales up by almost a third to £329.5m. Profits were also impressive, rising 49 per cent to £30m.

This comes at a time when more expensive British brands such as Mulberry and Burberry are suffering from a slowdown in demand for high-end goods. Bags from these brands often cost more than £1,000, while Kurt Geiger’s prices are often in the three figures.

“Everyone wants to look fabulous, but not everyone earns £250,000 a year, do they?” says Clifford. “I think that’s where we’re winning.”

Like many in the retail world, Clifford knows the importance of hard work, having left school in 1983 with just an O-level in art and working his way to the top.

He started out on a youth training programme at Debenhams in his home town of Portsmouth, then spent a stint at Burton Group. In 1995 he joined Kurt Geiger, then owned by the Fayed family. Ten years later he was part of a management buyout.

The group is currently majority-owned by private equity firm Cinven, which holds a 79 percent stake. Clifford and the rest of management own 21 percent.

Nurturing the next generation is part of her passion for fostering British excellence. A talent for design is “deeply ingrained in our DNA,” she says, adding: “We are creative thinkers, we are imaginative. We have a great sense of humour. We are world champions of creativity and we exceed our expectations.”

Clifford spreads dozens of pages on the floor of his office and says, “I carry them around with me and bore all my private equity people with them.”

They are drawings of young people, including fashion lovers and business students, whom he recruited to help him set up his own academy. Every Wednesday, the fashion brand hosts around 20 young people aged between 18 and 20 to learn about the fashion business, from how to manage a PR disaster to how to buy stock or organise a logistics empire. Clifford asked his young gurus to draw what they felt was holding them back.

Over the past two years he has committed £1.5m to the academy. Up to £3 of every item sold goes to fund it as an alternative to what he calls our “Victorian” education system, which he says is not aligned with business.

“We know how to design great bags, stores and marketing campaigns, but not schools,” he says. The academy’s next class of students will double to 40, and he says: “It’s probably the boldest thing we’ve ever done.”

BOLD is a good description of Kurt Geiger’s designs and store fronts, which are an explosion of colour. As we walk between mannequins in bright rainbow swimsuits, he says: “Not everyone wants to be quiet. There are enough black and brown bags in the world.”

The wholesale business is bigger in the United States than in the country itself. In Orlando, Florida, where temperatures often reach above 68 degrees in the dead of winter, shoppers love sandals, Clifford says. But handbags are now a bigger part of the business than shoes.

“The good thing about fashion is that nothing is the same,” she says. “After Covid, we all want to be a little more cheerful. We want to cheer ourselves up. We want to stand out a little. We want to have a little fun.”

“We have found, to be honest, that we are a brand that reflects the sun, even though it seems to always be raining in the UK.”