UW Co-director and Designer and David Keyte was recently interviewed by Daniel Giacopelli on The Entrepreneurs show for Monocle 24 Radio sharing his thoughts on growing up, influences, lessons learnt and how Universal Works began.

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David Keyte:
I grew up in and around the city of Birmingham. We lived in a very idyllic village just outside the metropolis that is Birmingham… I’ve lived in smaller places around the Midlands and eventually ended up in Nottingham.

Daniel Giacopelli:
And at some point, you discovered the wide world of clothing. When was that? Do you remember when you discovered clothing?

DK
I was…nineish, my mother presented me with a pair of green corduroy shorts to wear to school. I decided from that moment that no one was going to buy my clothes ever again.

DG
Did you ever give thought of, this might be a career at some point? Or was it just purely hobby, passion, and a lifestyle thing?

DK
Absolutely not no, I didn’t know anyone that had been to college, university. I didn’t know anyone that had a career that wasn’t a profession in manual labour. My family, they were builders, carpenters and bricklayers. My Father was a baker, my mother was a cake-maker, they met at bakery.
I ended up training to be a sign-writer because people told me that if you’re interested in graphics and letters maybe you’ll be a sign-writer.

DG
And this was after you left school at the age of sixteen? And you spent a year as a miner?

DK
Yeah, I started the sign-writing apprenticeship the day after I left school that included painting and decorating, and coach painting, the moment that ended there wasn’t a job. By then somehow, I’d got married, got a mortgage, all the things that small town kids do really. There was one place locally that was hiring that was the coalmine. So, I went there and got a job and dug coal for a year. It was horrible... it made me realise I didn’t want to do that, I wanted to do something else.

DG
You made some cash from it?

DK
I was reasonably well paid at the time, which was good and I spent most of it on clothing. I ended up not in a marriage any more, I think I was growing up and realising that maybe where I wanted to be was to somehow get into this industry of clothing, probably because I was spending so much money on it, that made me think if I worked in it, I’d have a better chance. I literally persuaded someone that I could work in a store because it’s the only way in that I knew.

DG
So, you got a job in a shop?

DK
I got a job in a shop, initially at the weekend then took over a small shop and very quickly moved onto a small company called Paul Smith who had one shop in Nottingham. I was interviewed by Paul wearing the same jacket that he was wearing, that probably got me the job…and ridiculous amounts of enthusiasm, I think he knew that I no idea but my enthusiasm and the jacket won him over.

DG
So, you became the manager of the original Paul Smith shop in Nottingham?

DK
Yes, he’d moved to London, they’d opened the store in Covent Garden but the original Nottingham shop was still there. I think they probably at the time were considering moving the whole operation but were giving that store one sort of last chance. My naïve enthusiasm that the entire world wanted to wear Paul Smith sweaters meant that I went into that store and actually we did pretty well. Because we continued to grow, there new opportunities for people within the company so I went from being a shop guy to working on wholesale sales, working in production, to working alongside the designers, and whilst I never designed anything there at all, I was purely a production guy, I got to learn how things were made.
It was great fun, working for Paul was really exciting, I got to travel and I was joking with someone recently that I’d never been out to a restaurant until I went with Paul Smith. I was a young guy but my family didn’t go out to restaurants it’s not something we did as a family ever. So, when you’re asked, ‘come for dinner with me’… ok, what does that mean? Where am I going! I learnt so much about life and things from working for him.

DG
At some point along this line, you said ‘right, time for me to do my own thing’…

DK
No, I don’t think I did…

DG
There was no moment down at the pub? In the office? Where you said ‘I got to get out here and do my own thing’?

DK
No, I think I always thought I knew better than the people I was working for, which was just being bolshie, or self-belief of something. I didn’t think that was ever going to be me doing it, I just thought I was probably the guy that would tell them how they should do it, and one day someone would listen to me. I didn’t ever think that was going to be my name above the door, hence the fact my name isn’t above the door, I didn’t want it to be my name personally.
I left there for lots of reasons, way too many to think about right now, but I was working for another start-up company on the basis of owning part of that company, so I was kind of going in that direction, but at that point I didn’t have ownership of it, or part ownership, or shares, I was just an employee. After six or seven months, I realised I still hadn’t been paid, one of the guys I was working with, who was a manufacturer in the UK said to me ‘well, why aren’t you doing this for yourself?’. Maybe no one had ever said it, but it dawned on me to do it for myself.

DG
And this was around 2008?

DK
Yeah 2008, our first collection was 2009. The nature of the fashion industry, it takes a year to start something for it actually be in the public eye. I had about six weeks from start to finish to put a collection together and put it in someone’s showroom.
And it was every favour I could pull with every maker that I knew, here in the UK, and one in Portugal and the guys I had been working with in India for six years with Maharishi all helped me put something together in weeks.

DG
You guys now have three stores, did you plan to do that when you launched? What was the initial business plan, was it launch store? Or was it to just have a product you would sell to retailers?

DK
The initial plan was, if I can get ten customers, I’ll do it again. I got nine, I’m still here. I often say to people, the only plan I have is to not have a plan. Not that we don’t plan what’s going to happen next week or next year sometimes, but if you have a plan ‘I need to open five stores’, if I open four I’m just going to be disappointed. If I open six maybe I’m overstretching myself. So, I just want to take the opportunities that come along and the direction might change from time to time.
The first store we happened upon, someone kind of gifted it to us. They had the store, they wanted to open a bigger store across the street, they said ‘come on, you take this one, we’ll help you’ and we took it and they said, ‘we’re too busy, we can’t help you, you do it on your own’ So they kind of threw it at us! And it worked. It’s a tiny store on a lovely street, we are very happy to be there, it’s never going to make us rich but it’s nice to be there and it’s great that it works in a really small space.
We took on an old friend who was a really great retailer and said, ‘come and work for us, this store is well too small for you... we’ll open another one, anyway come and work for us.’ So, we felt obliged to open another store because I’d said I was going to open another store, so now we’ve got two in London.

DG
The factories that you have, you make an attempt to visit all of them, why is that important for you?

DK
I don’t want to make anything that I can’t look at being made, that I can’t see the people who are making it, at least have some understanding of them and that I’m not exploiting them, ruining their lives, I’m hopefully adding to their lives by giving them work. That sound profound and I don’t mean to be such in that sense. I don’t want to be faceless. I want people to want to make our garments right and I want to make long-lasting things.

DG
Has it become difficult for you as more and more menswear and workwear brands pop up on every corner, for you guys to be successful or now that menswear is ‘popular’, the more customers you get offsets the loss the competitors?

DK
We are in a world where we are making some clothing with some honesty and integrity and it lasts but at the end of the day you probably don’t need a new sweater. You probably want a new sweater, but you don’t need a new sweater so my competition for that sweater is also the pub, it’s also the coffee bar, it’s also the magazine rack, everything you have to spend your money on. I’m very aware my competition might come from a restaurant as much as another clothing brand.

DG
Where do you get most of your inspiration from? Day to day, month to month, year to year. Has it changed in the past ten years?

DK
One of the things you try and do when designing a collection is not look too much at all those things happening, you don’t want to do what everyone else is doing. At the same time, you are aware of it, you’re immersed in it. It’s a difficult one, something I’m very aware of because the first few collections were things that were in my head and had been for years. I guess the analogy with a band making music, those first couple albums are things they’ve been playing for years and they know them all, then suddenly they go to write new material and it gets harder. The lucky thing is that I’ve got a huge love of clothing, I like things from the 50’s and 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and I can find inspiration quite quickly and easily just by delving into some of that past. One of the things I’m very careful about is trying to make it relevant now, trying to make it modern, not historical, not mimicking something from the past, being able to understand those aesthetics from the past and try and update it.


DG
If you were to advise your twenty-year-old self or a current or future menswear entrepreneur, what would you tell them?

DK
Go work for someone else and learn how to do it. Before you start.

I was in Japan recently, I met some guys in a coffee bar, I said:
‘can I have a cappuccino’
they said ‘no, we don’t make drinks with milk’,
‘you’ve got milk?’,
‘Yeah we can give you cold milk but we can make any drinks with milk because the owner doesn’t think we are good enough yet. We’re good with espresso, we’re not good enough with the milk yet’,
‘how long have you been open?’
‘six months’.

That to me said something, until they were right they weren’t going to do it. 

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