The British high street would be a in a much better place if Peter Alexander opened more stores here. For the time-being though, we will have to make do with three. The Australian entrepreneur, famous (literally) in his home country for his brightly optimistic pyjamas and equally brightly optimistic personality, has finally brought his brand and unique approach to retail to these shores, with a dedicated e-store and physical stores in Westfield London, Westfield Stratford and Bluewater, Kent.
In his home market of Australia and neighbouring New Zealand, Peter Alexander operates some 135 stores and, while we may never experience that level of market coverage here, it would be nice to think we will get a few more stores in the future. Peter Alexander stores are special and a living embodiment of the founder’s approach to life. Every inch of the Westfield London store is packed with surprises, be it the pyjamas in every colour and print imaginable, sweet-smelling candles, cosy slippers and beautifully packaged gifts (including plenty of treats for dogs – Alexander is as passionate about canines as is his about PJs).
The biggest surprise, though, is the staff – they are good (and as we know in retail that is not always the case). These staff know their product and no customer visiting the store is left un-greeted and unattended. While waiting for Alexander to start the interview, one team member invites me to feel the cuff of her sleeve and proceeds to tell me what makes the fabric so soft and warm but, crucially, not too warm that you can’t sleep (it’s all thanks to the bamboo flannelette). Then, while I was examining a candle, another team member leapt into view and asked me if I would like a quick sniff of it. The candles had been flying out of the store since it opened, he told me.
The front of the Peter Alexander store in Westfield London
They weren’t the only things flying out of the store. TheIndustry.fashion visited the Westfield London store just after opening time on a Monday morning, when the rest of the mall was quiet. and there was already a buzz about the store and the brand’s distinctive pink carrier bags adorned with the Penny the Dachshund logo (a tribute to Alexander’s former beloved pet) could be seen on the arms of shoppers across the mall.
But the brand’s success almost came about by accident and it’s also testament to Alexander’s admirable ability to find opportunity in adversity, which he has honed since childhood. “I had a learning disability at school, I was gay, I stuttered, I was a Jewish kid in a Christian school, I had everything held against me and I learnt very quickly how to navigate stuff that I can’t really control,” Alexander explains. “When I finished school, I vowed I would never study again. In fact they tried to kick me out of school and said I wouldn’t pass my [exams] but I said ‘no, I’m going to stay’. And I passed, so that was a real sense of achievement for me.”
After school he tried many jobs from real estate to hand modelling and nothing inspired him. Until he went into retail, that is. “It clicked into place immediately, the VM, the colours… I just loved it. Then at the age of 23, being a confident young fool, I decided to go into business on my own.
Peter Alexander “stumbled” into pyjamas
“I stumbled into pyjamas for two reasons. I had bought a pair of pyjamas in Hong Kong a few years previously and I didn’t really wear pyjamas then but there was something about them that I loved. And when I wanted my own business, I remembered these pyjamas and I asked myself what was it about them that made me buy them. And I remembered – it was like a nostalgic kick in my gut – the pyjamas reminded me of when I was young and life was so optimistic and simpler. With my entrepreneurial skills, I thought perhaps other people would feel the same way.”
This was 1986 and, as Alexander says, there wasn’t much on the market in terms of sleepwear at that stage, so there was certainly a gap for him. At the beginning he kept the business small, doing everything himself from design to selling. He started in wholesale, hitting the phones himself to drum up orders from retailers. When a major department store cancelled a big order and he was left with 2,000 pairs of unsold pyjamas, he ventured into what we would now call DTC and started a mail order business. He placed an ad in a magazine and was flooded with 6,000 orders.
The appeal of his products likely lay in the fact that Alexander approached his designs from the position of a layperson. “I broke every single rule that I didn’t know existed. Like it it was sleepwear you were meant to use Peter Pan collars. I did one size fits all and you weren’t meant to use a new fabric called viscose or rayon. You weren’t meant to use green, you were meant to use pale blue and pale pink. Anyway, I didn’t know all these rules, I just did what I liked, but it was the fact that I broke them that was the success,” he explains.
Best-selling satin pyjamas at Peter Alexander
It took a good three to four years before Alexander felt he had a true success on his hands. There had been up many ups and downs but he always found the right way. “I came to a lot of crossroads where I thought ‘do I go this way or do I go that way?’ For some reason I always went the right way and I don’t know why, it’s not because I was that smart! Maybe something was guiding me,” he jokes.
He may not think he is ‘smart’ (even though he is) but Alexander certainly has smarts, plenty of them, and good instincts. The inspiration for his designs comes from everywhere and he just seems to understand what people want. For instance, his best-selling cloud print was inspired by a suit once worn by Prince back in the 1980s and he says his brain is never fully switched off from coming up with ideas. He says: “I’ll see someone with a yellow pair of pants on and a red jumper tied around their waist with a shirt and I’ll see that as a stripe or I’ll see that as a tartan.” This constant stream of inspiration is evidenced when, part way through the interview, he is distracted by the sight of a group of teenage girls heading to his store wearing identical baggy blue jeans, black bomber jackets and white tops. “Look, they are all dressed exactly the same! I just think that’s fantastic,” he whispers, almost in awe. No doubt, we will see the pyjama version of this look in-store soon.
For his stores, his inspiration comes from story-telling. It was a long time after its founding that the Peter Alexander brand ventured into physical retail. His DTC business had centred on a beautifully shot catalogue and a website (he was early into e-commerce entering the space in the 90s), so when he came to opening stores in the early 2000s, he was initially wary. The move into retail was brought about by the brand’s acquisition by retail giant The Just Group, which also owns names such as the hugely popular stationery and lifestyle brand Smiggle.
Menswear at Peter Alexander Westfield London
“Retail to me was really scary because I lived in a world of mail order, which was telling a story. You’ve got gorgeous models, in gorgeous locations wearing gorgeous pyjamas and you tell a story and my nightmare for retail was having a shop with a rack of clothes in it. To me that is not what Peter Alexander is. So I spent a good year figuring how how I can grab that emotional piece and turn it into a retail store. Particularly back then (almost 20 years ago) there was a lot of pressure to have a very simple store and I stamped my feet and said ‘no, I want all the senses alive’. I want to be able to smell something, I want people to be able to touch different fabrications, I wanted to delight people,” he says. “The product is what it is, it’s pyjamas. What I keep reinventing is the packaging, the prints, the story I’m telling… I never want anyone to be bored in my stores.
“It’s all about happiness and I must say in London that’s not something you seem to do that well in the retail space, so it was really important to me when I started in the UK that the staff were happy to be there. I hate that static register, there is always something to do. The stores have a sense of who I am, my humour. We are very detail focused, everything from the gift wrapping to the carrier bags. The ideal would be that my bags become as iconic as the Selfridges one.”
Gifts at Peter Alexander Westfield London
It’s been almost 25 years since Peter Alexander was bought by The Just Group and, unlike many other brands that are sucked into a larger conglomerate, the values set out in the 1980s are just as evident today as they were then. The relationship seems to be a harmonious one. “It’s been 25 years of pure growth. The only discussions we have is that I never want my business to be dictated by planning. Often businesses are run by facts and figures and they try to get the creative to fit in with the planning. We do over half a billion dollars in sales now, so we are a big brand now. We have hours of discussions particular over things like Christmas. But I never want it to be a business where the planning wins. The planning has to fit in with the creative and I think that’s the difference between a designer brand and a high street brand,
“Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, But I will always fight. I suppose when I stop fighting there will be a problem as maybe I won’t care anymore. It’s my name on the door, it’s my name on the people’s backs, so people still associate me with it. My whole life I’m going to the be the Pyjama King or the Pyjama Guy, so while I’ve got some control over it, I want to make sure I do the best job that I can. My mum started the business with me and she was very mindful of the legacy, I don’t have kids and I suppose this is going to be my legacy and I just enjoy it still,” he explains.
Peter as a child wearing pyjamas
The launch in London has sparked a further burst of energy in him and has been two years in the planning. The Just Group had had success here with Smiggle and online data showed that, outside of Australia and New Zealand, the UK was the next most enthusiastic for the brand, possibly driven by expats. But also Alexander felt the UK has the same sensibility when it came to humour as the Australians, plus there’s not a lot of competition in the specialist sleepwear market. Whichever market the brand enters there is a wide addressable customer base, given it offers pyjamas and gifts for all the family. “We are literally from birth to death, from size 6 to size 26,” Alexander says.
The other ways that the brand stands out from its potential rivals is the obsession with fabrication and print, as well as product presentation. In the store pyjamas as presented as gifts in boxes made to resemble everything from books to snow covered houses. Boxer shorts are presented in old fashion mail boxes and underwear in Champagne bottles. There are all the expected licensing tie-ups (around 20% of the product assortment is based on licensing deals) such as the ubiquitous Wicked and UK classics Winnie the Pooh and Paddington Bear. Alexander hesitated about whether to stock his famous Vegemite pyjamas in the UK, but they were an instant best-seller as expats turned up to the store to get a taste of nostalgia from home.
But service is a huge deal for Alexander. “The staff are representations of the brand. I am old school when it comes to customers service. I expect a smile if not at least a hello. I expect a thank you at the register and I expect a little bit of acknowledgement and knowledge about what the products are made of. A lot of young people have grown up online and have no knowledge of this kind of service. A store should not be a place where you just go, buy one thing and walk out. If people come to the store and don’t buy anything, I don’t mind, as long as they have had a nice time. It may be they will go away and think about it and buy it online, which is why I wanted to make sure the [dedicated UK] website was ready at the same time,” he says.
The cash register at Peter Alexander Westfield London
To drive traffic to the UK stores a big “advertising blitz” is underway including out of home ads, magazine ads and its first ever TV commercials. The Westfield London store got off to a flying start as a result and doubled its budgeted sales on the first day of opening. But, despite the early positive signs, Alexander is going to take his time before he decides on the next steps for expansion in this market. “It’s going to take a good 12 months to figure out what the UK is attracted to, what fabrics, what prints, whether they need separate designs, I’m going to learn a lot. I’m not coming here knowing everything, I have to learn,” he says.
That said, he has ambitions. “I would love to do a high street, like an Oxford Street but before I do that, I have to learn. We have 10 stores pencilled in for next year but nothing is confirmed, I want to learn about the size of the stores too, as in Australia they vary a lot. We haven’t come in all guns blazing but we haven’t just done one store, we’ve done three, and we’ve invested in the marketing a lot and we’ve had to re-shoot everything for the UK as obviously the seasonality is different, but it’s going to be an interesting time,” he says.
He’s distracted again. “Oh look, it’s a Peter Alexander bag! I’m so excited. I want to run and say thank you, I still appreciate it. Often when I’m driving in Australia, I’ll see someone with a bag and I’ll roll down the window and shout ‘thank you!’… Oh, there’s another one!” he says pointing at yet another pink bag adorned with Penny the Dachshund. All of these bag sightings bode well for his success here and for our chances of getting more his uplifting stores. “If it works the UK population is amazing and it’s also the gateway to Europe, so fingers crossed, legs crossed, everything crossed,” he laughs.
Hopefully it won’t be too long before we see the Penny the Dachshund bags mixing it with the Selfridges bags on Oxford Street and beyond. His energy is just what our high street needs.
