Peter Williams — Founder of Aubin and Jack Wills

0:00Hello and welcome to the Gentleman's Journal podcast. We're sitting here in the beautiful Aubyn store below Newburgh Street in Soho. And today we're going to be talking to Peter Williams, the founder of Aubyn, and before that, Jack Wills, about all sorts of things, how he grew his brands, why the colour yellow should be introduced to all our wardrobes, the new range of Aubyn, the spring range, everything he's excited for this year, and why he finds zen calm in driving a tractor.

0:39But before we begin, I'd love to tell you about Gentleman's Journal's Clubhouse. This is our full membership package, which unlocks a whole host of benefits across print and digital, including two magazine issues per year, full access to all our paywalled content, exclusive invites to in-person events, including live panel shows, for example, with some of our podcast guests, and a newsletter in your inbox every single week full of the best stories on Gentleman's Journal. At the moment, we're doing an offer where you can get 20 % off the usual price of the Clubhouse membership using code POD20 at checkout.

1:15So go to Gentleman'sJournal.com and use POD20, that's P-O-D-20, for 20 % off the usual price of a Clubhouse membership. Pete, Peter, Peter Williams, thank you very much for joining us here. That's my pleasure. On the Gentleman's Journey. Yeah. I mean, so we're sitting in your store beneath Newburgh Street, Carnaby Street, in the heart of London, if people don't know. What does it make you think? When you look around this store that we're sitting now, what does it make you think about how far you've come, everything you've done, where you are right now? What does it feel like? Gosh, that's a big question.

1:50Yeah, that's not big. That's a punchy opening question. Do they get lighter from this? They do, yeah. By the end, it's favourite ice cream. So think of that now. Okay, all right. Yeah, fine. Rum and raisin. Is it? Yeah. Okay. My children hate me for that. Rum and raisin. There's a lot of follow-ups to that. It's such an old vanilla and rum and raisin. To me, there are no ice cream flavours that come anywhere near either of those two. And my children and my wife hate me for having that thought. Do you ever buy Neapolitan ice cream, the one that's the chocolate, vanilla, strawberry? That's very old-fashioned.

2:22I don't like other ice cream flavours. Sure. But it's inconceivable to me when offered a ray of ice creams. If there was vanilla and rum and anise and that wouldn't go for it. Okay. There's a lot I'd like to talk about there, but that's for our other podcast. Yeah, okay. Ice cream of the month. That's the run-in. How does it make me feel in here? I really, really, I actually don't like shopping, but I love shops. Okay. If that's a weird, not weird to say. Yeah, that does sound weird. What do you mean by that? Well, because I'm just like every other bloke. I just can't be asked to go shopping and it's always too hot.

2:52Yeah. to be people know where to sit people say things like can I help you or no and all those sort of things just I'm just like every other bloke right but what's really fabulous about you know my own shops is it's the it's where the the whole brand proposition comes together within four walls and a roof and a floor okay in fact we were talking about it yesterday um because there's a there's quite a lot of there's quite a lot of there's an awful lot of parts in fact almost all parts of the business have to work together to bring it all into a shop. So it's quite a good test case for how would you make the whole business work cross-functionally and across processes really, really well.

3:37Because you've got, in this building, you've got a finance component, obviously, and logistics and operations through there, and we've got a load of creativity. you've got people you know staffing and so on marketing shop fitting all that you know all of these things have come together and it you open the doors on the first day and it all works brilliantly and it's like slamming the conductor for the orchestra yeah and what's it like being on the high street right now 2026 we know that pubs are finding that very difficult how are shops faring do you think I'm not sure class Newburgh street as the high street, actually.

4:19Although it can be quite quiet. I think that, in fact, literally, I just picked my phone up to turn it off. Yeah. And someone had sent me an article that Knight Frank has just produced a thing saying, shops are back and shop lettings are back up. And actually, shops get a bad press. I think that there is absolutely, there is no better retail experience experience than being in a like like a sublime retail experience for what notwithstanding what i just said actually it really is a great yeah way of communicating a brand and selling stuff and making money yeah and so the real there's always going to be a role for really good shops i completely agree there's just if there used to be a capacity in the uk for i don't know a million shops yeah maybe it's now 700 000 yeah because they invented the internet and all that kind of thing well we'll get to the internet in time um i completely agree with you and when you're in a foreign country and the shops are new to you even if it's a supermarket how exciting is a french supermarket yeah and it's because i think a lot of shops perhaps lack creativity as you're saying they're lacking the sort of human touch that that's when we get inured to the beauty of shops but walking down a street in rome and going into a tiny little i don't know pasta shop or something yeah and and i you know people always going on about oh it's different now you know because this is because we've got the internet, we've got social media, we've got influencers, you know, all these new things that happen.

5:46And I'm always like, no, what Gordon Selfridge used to bang on about 150 years ago, or whatever it was he opened Selfridges, you know, find great product, sell it at a great price, and present it in a way which is really appealing to customers. That's not new news. No. We're still trying to do that today. Yeah. So, excuse me, a lot of the principles of old school retailing I mean, all of them apply today. Absolutely. So if the UK, you used to have a capacity to have a business in our kind of market position, you say, I don't know, let's say, so you once upon a time, we'd be able to have 100 shops.

6:25Now, no way would you open 100 shops, but you might open 40. And we will probably not open 40, but you just sort of take my point is, there's not, you just, and you want every one of them to be absolutely brilliant. Well, that's it, isn't it? because then they become sort of 3D billboards. But even that doesn't really do it justice. The trend in luxury or even in consumerism now is just tangible things, authenticity, real world things, community, as much as these are kind of buzzwords. And that's why LVMH are buying restaurants, individual restaurants that are 200 years old in Paris, because they know that that is really what people are after, that kind of thing.

7:04And when I walk in a shop like this with these beautiful mid-century leather armchairs we're sitting in, you think yeah this kind of chimes with my view of the world i could spend time here yeah and that makes a huge difference yeah so so i mean i'm i always reckon that at any one point in time you might get run over on my driveway by an amazon delivery driver because some member of my family has just ordered something and you know amazon and and the like is absolutely brilliant for for what it's brilliant at but it's you know like why would anyone ever go to a supermarket to go and buy toilet rolls and bleach.

7:39That's why, why don't you just go with someone to deliver it to your house? But if you're going to come and buy clothing and really nice clothing and you want advice and you want to try it on and you want to feel it and all that sort of stuff and you want the whole experiential part of it, which is, it's not just a shirt, it's, you know, it's associated with all the things that the brand stands for. Can't beat a shop. You can't beat a shop. That should be the headline. So let's go back right to the start if you're happy to. You've had one of the more unconventional routes into fashion and style that i think of anyone we've interviewed probably rugby playing university boy having a good time and essentially you just didn't want the party to end rugby playing economist okay it's a good combo yeah economics degree um yeah i i mean the the amusement hilarity and just sort of dumbfoundedness that my friends and family had when i said I'm going to start a clothing brand.

8:36Did you have an innate sort of personal style as a 19, 20-year-old? It was just a typical rugby-playing bloke. What position did you pay? Losing. Number eight? Six and a half. Six and a half. I was never really big enough for a six, never really fast enough for a seven. Okay. But I'd throw my hand anywhere in the back row. That's good. I can see that. That might sum you up then as sort of guile but also persistence and tenacity, a bit of craftiness. It's just a bit of a misfit, never really fitting anywhere. I don't know. Yeah, so I said, really bizarrely, I'm going to start a clothing brand. I always say, I've got three kids.

9:13So you slightly look to your own parents for how to do it or how not to do it, whatever. And I always think my parents, it's an amazing parenting lesson. I'm the youngest. And I think my parents probably thought, I'm two older brothers. I'd left university. I'd got a job. And I think they probably thought, our work is now done. Yeah. And then I sort of reappear one day and go, I'm going to throw it all away and start a clothing brand. And my dad was an engineer. Okay. And I could tell he was looking at me, basically having chest pains and thinking, what? Yeah. So you were working quite a sense.

9:51You were a consultant, really. I had a strategy consulting job. Strategy consulting. Sounds very grown up, doesn't it? Yeah, it was brilliant. I loved it. I got paid a fortune. And it was really interesting work. I really liked the people I worked with. i just didn't i mean it was it was i always talked about midlife crisis the first of many i was 23 or 22 23 it was there was absolutely nothing wrong with the job it was great it was really interesting it was well absolutely nothing wrong with the job absolutely there's absolutely nothing wrong with the job i got paid a fortune i really like the people i work with work was really interesting but when i i just want to sort of look through the windscreen if you like as opposed to the rear view mirror i was like i really i don't really want i don't really want to do this for the rest of my life i was like ah shit yeah but when i when i looked yeah sort of metaphorically in the rear view mirror i'd be like that bit that that bit of university that was amazing and and it wasn't just for all the obvious also obvious fun bits of university it was although they were good it was it was more the spirit that we had it was the kind of um spontaneity you're an adult but you're not a proper grown-up so something really went wrong you know you kind of you'd get some help from your parents yeah you didn't pay tax to have a mortgage didn't have kids you basically had no responsibilities but all of the independence of adulthood yeah my eldest son is in that oh sweet and i it's just i'm just like just so jealous it's great it's really good now as it was do you think for you that's a bigger question but like does he still got that sense of independence the stuff that's better and the stuff that's not as good yeah of which of which the kind of the mobile phone probably sits right in the middle of that and there's positives and negatives of of that but he seems to have a pretty good time yeah yeah well he's learned from the best so you you saw that and you you sort of thought i'll bottle this up but before i ask that question actually it's amazingly um perceptive of you at 23 to realize that you don't want to do that because the easy thing to do and what so many people do i think most people is they have that realization of 43 and they and they get on the treadmill that's properly known as a midlife that is that's official mine was the sort of mini yeah you but you got out first which is great but a lot of people do something that's pretty good six seven out of ten and it pays them enough And then once they're on the treadmill of a mortgage, you know, living in London, maybe kids and school fees and stuff like that, they have no opportunity to get off.

12:20Was there something in you that was sort of oddly wise beyond your years or was it pure blind panic? I think it was genuinely a bit of panic. Yeah. It was a bit of panic because my life, in inverted commas, had gone pretty well. You know, I did well at school, had a good time at school. I really enjoyed my rugby. I had a great time at university. It was all good. And it was the first thing where I was just like, oh my God, this is awful. I don't want to do this. And so I went into a bit of a panic, I think. And so that was just why I did this ridiculous knee-jerk reaction to go, I'll throw all of this away and go start clothing around in Devon.

13:07and so you jack wills then if there was an idea behind it was trying to bottle up it was entirely about that it was entirely and it was quite hard to i mean i've sort of retrospectively articulated all of this but at the time all of that that was exactly what was going on and that was why it wasn't that i was passionate about clothes particularly it was but I was really passionate about this spirit. But that is what... So arrogance and naivety of youth, so I kind of bottled it up. Yeah. And then that world of, you know, the kid on his gap year or her gap year, you know, anyone sort of can take a gap year at any point in their life if they can find a way of making it happen.

13:52But it's never going to be like it is when you're 18. No, no. And I'm sort of living it firsthand with my kids now. it's just so intoxicating yeah because you can you can really see that they're gonna I was talking to Mimi about it yesterday she'd just she'd just been on holiday in Thailand and the last time she was there she was on her gap year and she's like I just would it was so good then and I couldn't do it like that now you wouldn't drink out of a plastic bucket kind of you know amphetamine Red Bull in it you wouldn't do a shooey a shooey yeah so it was new to me actually I learned about that recently that's when you drink out of a shoe you drink out of a shoe yeah this is what it this is what it sounds like I've never done that I've never done it but it seems like I saw the pair of Stan Smith that my son came back from Australia in and he'd done shoeies in and I was like so I mean they're disgusting those those shoes and and then you did a shoeie out of them and then you put it back on and came home and you've still got it now two months later good times good times the best times I agree with you there's I mean the poles of emotion at that age are much higher the highs are higher the lows are lower you find yourself caring about stuff you would never worry about now and likewise you find yourself being excited by things that might you'd be dull to now and all the cliches like you know you don't sort of see the dangers of things especially kids and get old yeah but that's it isn't it I mean as you say the naivety of youth as an entrepreneur that's kind of an amazing thing to have in your in your sort of quiver of arrows or tool belts.

15:31You've got this kind of fearlessness and you don't really need much of a safety net because, yeah, you haven't got much to lose. And that's exactly the point. I didn't really have anything to lose. So if I lose it, well, I lose a bit of money. I just started going to get a job and I'm back. Yeah. You know, I'm not, I don't have a farm to bet. No. You know, so it was all, so we did everything super on a shoestring and whatever and learned the whole thing, broke loads of rules because we didn't even really know what the rules were. Yeah. Because we just made it up as we went along. Yeah. Had you worked in fashion for 20 years, you would have learned all the very usual ways.

16:05We would never have done the innovative stuff that we did because it's not how you do it. You do it like this. Yeah. That's how the industry does it. So I always used to, people, classic thing, people used to say, oh yeah, I want to start my own business. I'm going to get a few years experience first in industry and then I'm going to do it. I'm like, no, you're not. Jump now. Great. I completely agree. and when and people would say if the the 51 year old me would say to my 23 year old self what do you mean you're gonna start a fashion brand oh this is why it won't work and this is why it won't work whereas the 23 year old me was like i it was inconceivable to me that it wasn't gonna work yeah and it turns out it did so where did where does jack wills come from as a name what a powerful name that is by the way also was there something deliberate around prince william at that time in his vogue no i mean it that occurred to me just now by the way it's always embarrassing when you kind of unveil the curtain behind these things i was sitting around the sunday lunch table at my parents house and i was talking about was my dad sort of getting over his chest pains from this sort of announcement i'm going to start clothing man and i think someone might have said what are you going to call it presumably you need a name for this yeah yeah and i and i was like well i don't i don't know and i was playing around with a few things and my mum said um why don't you pick a family name and i'm the williams family and i and i was like well peter williams is a bit of a shit name for a brand isn't it although paul smith's dollars seems to have done right that's pretty sure probably put them in the same category so very you know very close family wants to be non-partisan so jack was my mother's father ah nice and we are the williams family we're all known as the willses so i just put the two together yeah and then the shorthand became it was my grandfather because you know you in a sound by terms you kind of can't go through that little narrative every time and then i get into these years later i get these weird conversations where people would go oh you're you're close to your grandfather and you know he must have been really great he must be so proud of what you've done with his name and all that and i'd be like yeah yeah yeah yeah why are you digging to that can't kind of can't unravel all that's too weird but it's one of those names that feels yeah very very evocative of a certain thing and has an englishness to it which is powerful in the same way that ralph lauren that's a fictional name isn't it he just yeah yeah yeah Yeah, and people do retrospectively go, that's a brilliant name for lots of brands, people say that.

18:43And I always think there's lots of quite crap names in a way that are brands. The Beatles. I mean, yeah, okay. The Beatles is as good enough, for example, as anyone else. But it's really what the brand is that then you retrofit the brand to the name and you go, oh, so it was a very visionary name. Yeah, yeah. Brilliant. Yeah. but there is something and it does have well actually maybe I'm just constantly retrofitting it but it has Orbin the story behind Orbin was I I was I'm so old that we used to use roadmaps in the early days of my marriage and I've been married 22 years and we were driving somewhere in the West Country and my wife was map reading god those days amazing and had one of those we used to get given a road atlas for Christmas great people are all far too young to know about this No, I've never had a road out.

19:33I love one. Did you have a torch? What about when it got dark? A little torch? Maybe, yeah. In the glove compartment? I'm just thinking. Yeah, probably in the glove compartment. A wind-up or something. And I said, I need a name for my new brand. And she was calling names out off the map. And we were down somewhere in Cornwall, and there was St. Orbin. She said, Orbin? I was like, what else can I name you? Orbin. And I'd like to say it was more exciting and depth-ridden than that. but it's not but even though it came about slightly by chance the recognising that's a good name is there's a lot in Auburn like Auburn kind of sounds English but maybe slightly continental exotic exotic Auburn so you opened a store your first store 1999 Sulcum April 2nd 99 yeah okay how did you fund that store back then do you remember did you was it savings I had a friend of mine from university joined me guy called Rob Shaw and we scraped together so i was well paid inherited a little bit of money and we managed to scrape together 40 000 pounds altogether and that was you know we grew the business quite some size off off off that original never taking investment in the end not taking any any money into the business because we which is remarkable really um i used to say you can prize my equity out of my cold dead fingers because it's so fucking difficult building a business from scratch especially when you've got no money that you know they're very hard yards yeah and um so yeah we started with 40 grand first year we turned over 56 000 pounds second year we turned over 59 000 pounds and what we said to rob but i mean we we didn't make any money we were sort of starving to death was the shop expensive no i was dying he was like it was like literally half the size of this room, maybe two thirds of the size of this room.

21:35And how did you deck it out? Just things? Yeah. We pay, we spent, I remember we spent of the 40 ,000 pounds, we spent 2000 pounds fitting it out. Most of which was spent on mate of my parents who was like, did woodwork and he made some oak shelves for me. Nice. They were lovely. Yeah. But the location did a lot of the work. But the location did a lot of the work. Yeah. Beautiful. And, And I said to Rob at the end of our second year, I said, the worst thing that can happen next year is we do£62 ,000 of sales, because by that point we'll have both starved to death. Okay. So we've got to go for it.

22:07Are we going to make it successful or we'll go down in flames? And on the third year we did£259 ,000. So what happened between... We opened another shop. Wow. And it was quite a fairy tale, sort of Hollywood rom-com-esque moment, because a friend of mine, actually he carries the name, he called Jack, who's from Norfolk. Yeah. And I said, I've never been to Norfolk, but I hear it's quite posh. Can you show me around Norfolk and Suffolk? He said, yeah, I'd love to. So we drove around Norfolk and Suffolk and we were driving into Oldborough one day, this day, on this day. And literally as we were driving into, I can remember this like it was yesterday.

22:49A guy puts a sign up in the window of this lovely shop saying, shop to let. And so like, I'm like is your shop is your shop to let he goes yeah I said you can only have it for two years because I'm going to knock the building down I was like that's alright I said how much do you want for it he said 10 ,000 pounds a year all in I was like done wow and we did the deal that was the shortest marketing campaign in history he didn't even have to buy Blu-Tac he didn't even have to buy Blu-Tac and we opened a second shop Rob borrowed one of his parents friends had a caravan that they were trying to get rid of so he took the caravan up to us they thought it was a one way they were very surprised to get it back they definitely weren't hoping to get it back but he took the caravan up there and he lived in the caravan and he I lived down in Salkham and he lived up in Albro and just discovered the joy of having two shops instead of one amazing and perfect locations and it took it probably took us because we didn't know what we were doing so it took us two or three years to work out how to make the stuff and make better stuff and all that what was the kind of hero product at the start if ralph lauren has the polo what was your hoodies we sold a lot we made a lot of money out of hoodies and gelets and they just said jack wills or wills jack was variants yeah and it was very it was and actually i've got a 15 this week 15 year old daughter um and i sort of look at the stuff that her and her mates wear and it it it's interesting that world it's not moved on that much i mean the sweatpants are even even more massive than they were yeah yeah yeah um but it's still people kind of like an american almost collegiate look it is that kind of driven by that yeah yeah uh and all of this all of it was driven by me sort of perceiving that the end of that in part of the industry had been you know the world of american prep it was all started by ralph lauren the visionary that he is getting completely intoxicated by british heritage to get warden heritage and on the boat on the way home in the 60s kind of concocted this fantasy world that was sort of quite what you know wasp world gatsby-esque world that was then replicated in numerous guises by you know all the american brands that we're familiar with this sort of gantt hill figure um j crew uh the abercrombie brands and so on they actually really all started with ralph's obsession with british heritage and you looked around you know hack it existed at the time but it was you know it was a particular thing um but an older as well older much more formal um under was going a bit football terrace at the time it was having a difficult moment um because it had this sort ofst george's cross it had a sort of tweet really lovely high-end tweed but then it also had this kind of it was a bit like what happened to burberry when it had its burberry check moment um so i thought there was opportunity if it the american brands all felt really american to me and i thought there was opportunity to create something that felt authentically british which wasn't about sticking Union Jacks on it.

26:09It was all of the subtle nuances about what makes British heritage uniquely British, which are quite idiosyncratic, quite subtle, quite hard to execute. Definitely. And in simple terms, it was... You know, if you go into a Ralph Lauren townhouse, it is amazing. And it's so millimetre perfect. and the quality of the execution is just perfect. But to me, that seems really, it's fake. Yeah. Because it's very Upper East Side. Yeah. But if you go to the equivalent British version of that, the British aristocracy hasn't had any money for 100 years. So it's quite threadbare. It's got a pattern of age to it.

26:57And each generation has laid its own mark on that environment. And that's amazing. that's like a store that is a complete story in itself so that's why our stores and all the stuff that we did was very much trying to kind of replicate all of that yeah use lots of vintage furniture yeah absolutely hello and just a quick reminder about the gentleman's journal clubhouse it's our membership package which unlocks a whole host of benefits across the world of gentleman's journal including two magazine issues per year full access to all our payawalled content membership invites to exclusive events and a weekly newsletter direct to your inbox enter pod 20 at the gentlemansjournal.com to get 20 off the usual price for a clubhouse membership so i must have been your complete target market i was how old are you i'm 35 so i was born in 1990 so when i was turning 13 yeah the status symbol was a jack wills hoodie and a friend of mine And Alec Plint got a, on his 14th or 15th birthday, got a red Jack Will's gilet.

28:04And I never even heard that word before. But he turned up on his own 15th birthday party, this red gilet with Jack Will's there. And I think he kissed a few girls that night. And I think the gilet was 90 % of it, if you know Alec. But so many points in my teenage years were dictated by that. And I think about the touch points, the catalogs you did. Do you recall them catalogs or handbooks? I mean, when that landed, it was a portal, almost editorial magazine, cinematic portal to the most idealized version of how I wanted to live my life, which was in some fictional boarding school, maybe having a party or something.

28:38It was incredible. Did that feel different? I mean, if you said to someone, now I'm going to do a printed handbook and send it, mail it directly out, people might think you're mad. Well, it's all coming back, isn't it? It is direct mail. People love it. People like print. Yeah, they do. And I wanted to do some print this year. Good. For Aubyn. Yes, because with Aubyn we had the Almanac, which was the first one. But that was all the stuff. And I had this... I've met quite a few successful entrepreneurs in my time. And with some notable exceptions, I normally get on really... There's a common brotherhood, sisterhood.

29:21you just tend to get on quite well because you're a lot of similar personality traits and one of them is the one of the least ones you like uh there's generally a sense of like imposter syndrome and i've met some really really successful people and they and you're always a bit kind of in a quiet moment you get them and they would probably not admit this outwardly to someone who wasn't yeah you know like in their brotherhood of entrepreneurs yeah and i just yeah i mean i just always think i'm gonna get found out found out for what well yeah i'd like like little old me i can't believe what i've built this sort of business and so when i was saying all that stuff to you you were sort of thinking that sounds like that was someone else well i had that all the whole of my career yeah the whole jack was because i couldn't i couldn't really believe how it was it was weird how successful it was and but i think at the heart of it was that because rob and i were like we don't really know what we're doing although obviously we had a decent instinct for it and so on we we used to empower these 20-somethings and they'd come up with all these like really amazing ideas and i'd be like yeah give it a go and so it was brilliant for them but it was brilliant for us because most of the i think most of the coolest stuff that we did i didn't come up with the idea okay but but i did create the environment that allowed the ideas yeah of course so i'd like to take some credit You should do.

30:43You should do. But it was, it's the, there was a period in my life where I got invited to go and speak to the Women's Wear Daily annual conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Yeah. That sounds terrifying. Where all of the greats of the industry have spoken. And I was invited to go because I was seen as a visionary in social media in fashion. I mean, have you ever, have you ever considered anything more absurd? i can see it and and it was because we were the first and and maybe someone was before us but it was generally thought that we were the first fashion business to be using social media and it came about because a guy called ollie finding brilliant guy he was early 20s at the time and he was right in the harville that season air sort of thing he came to my office one day and He said, Pete, we should open a Facebook page.

31:38And I said, what the fuck's Facebook? And he said, it's social media. And I was like, what the fuck's social media? And he goes, we should do it honestly. And I'm like, cool, give it a go. I mean, yeah. And we got something like, we went to like 200 ,000 followers, like almost immediate. It was so weird. And at the time, all brands were going, oh no, no, you can't use social media because what happens if someone says something bad about your brand? This is 20 years ago. It was like an entirely different planet. Yeah. And that would have been when it was prime. It was really university students and then.

32:14Yeah. I mean, Jack Wills was the Facebook generation. Yeah, it really was. Because Facebook was the first proper. Yeah, definitely. First formal one, really. And then over then they all sort of bailed. Yeah. And so your growth during those years was pretty, it was pretty rapid. Yeah. What was the height of your stores? I think 77 in the UK? Is that right? I can't quite remember. We had stores, I think, 12 in the US, about seven or eight in Asia, in Hong Kong and Singapore, about 10 in the Middle East. Yeah. And then, yes, 70 or 80 in the US. So about 100 stores. We had about 100 stores. Which is, as you said earlier, that's an unthinkable number now, and it's incredibly impressive to have sustained that.

33:02And yeah, and I visited every one of them, and I was really in Tokyo, with two exceptions. One was Lebanon, and the other was Abasoc. You never went to Abasoc? Well, I had been to Abasoc, but we did the deal, and I never went back because I was just a real commitment to get up there. It's a long way. It's a long way. That's why it's nice, though. It's tucked away. You think you're nearly there, and then you realise it's another two hours. But I wonder, most of that growth happened in your 20s, really. In the 30s, probably. So it took us, I don't know, probably, I could probably do that. It took about seven years to probably get to a million pounds of sales, something like that.

33:41And then it was pretty quick. We went sort of 4 million, 11 million, 25, 45, 70. I mean, it's weird. What do you remember of the texture of those days? Was that incredibly energizing? Was it very stressful? Were you working all around the clock? It was, yeah, of course. I mean, and you slightly look through Rose Tintin Spectacles in those times. It was really, really hard work. It was really stressful. It was really fun. Yeah. You know, we never had any money because although the business was generating a lot of cash, you know, to grow the business, double the business year on year, it just sucks all the cash that generates.

34:23And you didn't take too much outside finance. and we yeah you know we got money out along the way and so on but it was it that ride is really exhilarating but it's yes it's hard work and I was also having babies you know I had three kids at the time so it's a lot I always used to say that we kind of go to bed in the evening and America was on the phone yeah and you wake up in the morning and Asia's on the phone and you did it with the UK and Europe during the day it was just it was utterly relentless which has probably my wife got occasionally a little bit pissed off with me about. But it's addictive.

35:02Yeah, it is. I wonder if during that time... Something's going wrong somewhere, 24 hours a day. Of course it is. But it must, yeah, as you say, people do become... The stress is a form of adrenaline and that's quite addictive. I've been thinking about it. They call it the politicians just this last few days. I mean, it's just the relentlessness of that. I can never imagine how you'd do that. I don't know how. I mean, it must be addictive and awful. Yeah, yeah. You must be some consolation, you know, that you probably, it's not going to be for long. It's like four years, maybe. But during that time, because of all that stuff, what you've described so beautifully is the sort of power of youth and the beauty of youth.

35:38Did you ever stop and think, I'm 28 or 29 or 30? This kind of is you. Like, I wonder if you got a time, if you, by trying to bottle it for other people, you ever felt you missed a portion of it yourself? No, I had a great time. I honestly had a great time and I worked and it was I worked with some absolutely brilliant people and they just across, and that's a lot of part of the Auburn story this time was how it came about was loads of brilliant people and loads of people who we just loved working together, it was really fun I've been friends with people for 25 years, 20-25 years as a result of that we had a reunion here Old Traveller's reunion here in the autumn when we opened this part of the store and you know there's a WhatsApp group with a couple of hundred people on it you know and a lot of a lot of people had a great time I bet they did particularly the season air lot because well yeah a couple of my friends were like that they would go off to Nantucket what a thing that was and Martha's Vineyard at our expense yeah live in a sort of big brother house drive those pink and blue stripy Land Rovers around that's it and and hand out party pants well that's what I was going to ask you a friend of mine was was one of the Durham seasonaires if you had little pods up there and he threw all these parties throwing out fluorescent pants and I must have had I mean that's quite a good example it's incredible Ollie I think came up with that he said we should do party pants I'm like what party pants because we should do fluoro jersey pants we should call them party pants and I'm like they sound awful yeah I wore those probably until I was like 24 I had like 10 this guy are you okay you've gone yeah i don't think i should be wearing fluorescent pants anymore but they were they were that was a staple and you know jack wills every day in some capacity it's very clever and they must have cost not much to make we sold millions yeah brilliant millions of those jersey pants yeah yeah yeah and so you were talking about then the foundations of albin what brought you back in it's like um the godfather isn't it it's just when i thought i was getting out they'd bring me back in what brought you back into the world of retail after after you you sort of extricated yourself from jack wills and maybe we could talk about the jack wills as well what happened with orbin was i mean i was very aware that you know we deliberately created a brand that had a very strong point of view which means people loved it and biglady did it and those are great brands but they're nerve-wracking because you know at some point you know the worm could turn against you wow but also we didn't really know i reckon to keep the brand successful in the long term you didn't want it to get too big yeah and so in order to keep growing the business we would have we would have to grow it internationally and we didn't i thought it was going to work internationally but we didn't know that and so i also wanted to it seems like a little bit of an old-fashioned way of looking at it but it was at the time that nothing kills a youth brand more than it becoming a dad's brand so you really wanted people to grow into the brand and then to leave it right and because there were quite a few other brands around at the time which had started out quite authentically cool as youth brands and they very much were not in that space what kind of what what can we think of i'll probably just keep those internalized internalize those names and um so i created orbin because i wanted a place for someone to get for them to go so kid goes to university has a great time school university we've acquired them as a customer if we just sort of say goodbye to them it's a bit of a flawed business model so we wanted to create a place for them to go and orbin was a a more sophisticated elder sibling much more grown up much sort of more sophisticated taste level much more that life stage when university is just all about your mates and you're kind of in a tribe of mates all the time the next life stage you know maybe you've got a girlfriend boyfriend you maybe you live by yourself maybe you live with a friend you start thinking about your built environment it it's not all about the tribe of university mates um and that was that was what we we created orbit for that and in fact what happened was jack started to really take off internationally and it was quite hard i was sort of limbering up to sell the business and tidy up so orbin became a little bit it became a little bit difficult to manage it's quite hard to do two brands to be honest it's quite it's quite hard to keep them different yeah it's quite hard however hard you try to not go well it's worked in that brand so let's do that one and then they merge and and in a slightly brutal way we decided to pull the plug on orbin close it down so we could really focus on jack and then sell it what year was this 2013 that was yeah about that 2013 and um it was it was the first thing i mean we had a sort of an ulterior motive because i was to tidy the business up to sell it um but it was sort of seen as a failure and you know we had to make pimp redundant one thing like that it was it was horrible yeah um but that's what we did but we it was just starting to take off i mean it was not i should be doing about 10 million of sales or something like that we invested an awful lot of money in it yeah you had that incredible thing in shoreditch great thing with so house yeah and and you know we've done a lot of partly we've done a lot of things very well with orbit that we hadn't had the money or experience to do first time with jack so we were doing a lot of things much better so we really did build a lovely lovely brand and then we killed it prematurely um which turned out giving it a bit of a cult status because yeah because when we announced we were going to and then i kept all the ip 10 years later decided to restart it and all of the when it got out that we were going to restart it all these people were contacting us saying oh my god i love that brand i've got this cardigan or jumper or jacket i did this covered in moth holes by covering myself to throw away because i love it and that was so we had so many of those messages it was lovely people who must have been yeah it's like that one jump you know you're never going to buy again because the brand's gone and suddenly you've got another chance and part of the challenge with orbit was the product was really over-engineered it was really too good for the price that we were selling it and that's i think testament to why so many people really like yeah so what was the what was your how did your involvement with jack will's end did you you didn't make that sale did you make the sale well we had a bit of a is it complex it's quite complex we don't have to go into it it's too you probably on some sort of like couch with a cold flannel over my head wasn't a textbook exit it was a clumsy departure uh and i'd say chapter one of jack wills was utterly exhilarating and brilliant and chapter two was bloody awful oh well i mean there was more than two chapters but you know yeah uh and actually i think the big learning from it was um you i i said with orbin when we were talking i said i only want to work with people that i really like that i really trust that are really good at what they do because life's too short so yeah so when greg approached me and his greg was uh an ex-colleague from jack and he said i'd really like to restart orbit and And I was like, I'm done, mate.

43:26I'm done. I'm just going to go to the Cotswolds where I live. I'm going to play in my tractors, take the kids to school. Yeah. And I couldn't, you were talking about the sort of addictiveness of the whole thing. You've got to be on it 24-7 to make these businesses work. And it's so addictive and exciting. But it's, you know, I've done 20 years of the coalface. I was pretty broken. and i just wanted i wanted my phone to not ring for a bit and that stuff so i was not doing stuff for a while but and then he got me with this really killer question and i give him 100 credit for this he's good like that and he said how many people have you employed in your life and i was like i don't know i've never added it up he said i have a guess and i said um 10 000 and he said if you could pick the 10 best five or 10 best people you've ever worked with yeah imagine what he could do i was like oh now you got me that's pretty good and it was it was he just hit the nail right on the head because you know how people talk about starting new businesses is so risky and yeah that i mean it is i suppose the stats said it is but the single biggest risk is that the people that you're going to work with you don't really know what they're like because these businesses are all about people all businesses are and we said well if we put together a you know we had this huge like asset base of these people we'd work with all of whom we're all still in touch with all of whom you know you knew who was brilliant and everyone's got their weaknesses right yeah none more so than me and but we put together this little team and our whole thing was we want a really small team of brilliant people the sas of of retail and the and supply base so i start picking up the phone to a few suppliers that are called for 20 years can you give us a bit of credit you know yeah how much you need you can do that first time around no and so that was when was that 20 so there's a bit there's a bit covid stuff going on but we launched yes we had a bit of a false start because of i can't remember when covid was but 20 we launched in 2021 autumn 21 we've just completed our fourth full year of trading amazing and i i can't describe how different it has been second time around so greg runs a business on a day-to-day i didn't want to do that again but i i am executive chairman and i essentially have ultimate responsibility for all things that relates to the brand so brand communications marketing and um we have rachel who's creative director and our twin sister helen and you know worked with them for 20 years and so the product is so good yeah i can tell you in year four of jack will's product was shite well i'm wearing this beautiful beautiful gilet it got much it It got excellent before I had Gerald Rattner myself.

46:29But no, just the amount of expertise that has gone, you know, for the size, we were a startup with zero sales, but you had a historical brand legacy. And the amount of talent, holistic talent and experience that went into putting the first collection together, amazing. So we just hit the ground running from day one. and as I was just saying to you this year just under 60 % light for light amazing and we're profitable we're growing super fast um and there's lots and lots of interest in yeah from around the world yeah doing some good international sales uh UK's our core market at the moment um so you're glad to be back in I am absolutely loving it because what else would you have done tell me about the tractors you love tractors I have a property business as well so the old Jack Wills property team we opened a lot of shops around the world and many a time we'd stand in a building and say if we own this we'd turn the upper parts to residential have the shop on the ground floor so we do a bit of that but also that same team works with Orbin doing that makes sense so do a bit of property stuff but Orbin is yeah I mean do that and Orbin and it's keeping me very happy I'm extremely busy yeah and you and you plough fields and I I do I do a bit of messing about I only ask because I saw that amazing FT piece with you which said it said something which might be an overstretch about you finding peace in ploughing fields no I definitely find find peace and frustration with vintage tractors.