Date: 1997/11/01
I have to be honest. I've never owned a Jenni Button garment, even though there are all manner of superbly cut little Jenni Button seal melange wool crepe suits that I know I'd look great in. And double breasted pinstripe suits and black brocade waistcoats and narrow Lycra pants.
But whenever I've wandered into any of the minimalist designer masterpieces in mental and beech that are the Jenni Button shops and been subjected to that faintly superior attitude you get from the minions of celebrity designers in emporiums all over the world, I've tended to wander out again.
The surprising thing is that Jenni herself is not pretentious.
Self-assured and strong-minded maybe, confident in her creativity and appeal. But she's too honest to fall for the normal rag trade bullshit. At the Fair Lady Fashion Awards for example, where everyone attempts to be dropdead stylish (no mean feat for terminally under-dressed Cape Town) I've seen her arrive once wearing what I can only presume was her own fashion-is-dead statement, an anonymous costume in which she melted admirably into the background, while the rest of us swanned around checking out each other's labels.
What's interesting is that she doesn't need to sell herself any more. Time has done that for her. It's eleven years since the kugels first gasped with delight at Jenni Button's brilliant tlatties in not one but three shades of beige. And in that time, while the photogenic blonde has been churning up the media sand, the Jenni Button behind the jacket has been quietly turning into a lifestyle.
Its an image of class, quality and trend that you buy into. The feeling that this outfit you've just spent a whack on puts you a cut above the rest. Forget the designer herself. The brand has now superseded the person.
Jenni Bulton is one of life's talented survivors. But like businesses all over the country, hers has seen a few changes. In the past few years things have been tough, She was affected by the revamp of the two shopping centres where her most lucrative outlets are based-Cavendish Square and, before that, Hyde Park. A lot of the customers on her mailing list are now in Toronto, La Jolla, Montreal and Sydney. And on top of all of this, her JB Inc label, a great concept in keeping with the worldwide trend towards leisurewear basics, turned out to be a bit of an albatross.
Denim is, by all accounts, a strange animal to work with, requiring an enormous investment until you've mastered the different colour reactions. Jenni's financiers Phil and Liz Biden, who'd came in when she was "young and insolvent" with only one shop, and who over 10 years helped her expand her outlets to six, were reluctant to outlay any more on JB Inc and what they saw as a shrinking market. Liz anyway wanted to get into property development. It was time to part amicably and let Jenni find someone to back her who was more hands-on.
Jenni admits she'd reached the point where she'd begun to fall out of love with the industry.
"We'd worked so hard for so many years without structures. Then Marcel and Moira phoned out of the blue and I knew immediately the chemistry was right. It was like a fairy story."
Which brings us to the turbocharged 32-year-old fairy godfather who's just acquired her gratitude and 70 percent of her business. No-one had heard of Marcel Joubert and Moira O'Reilly until they bought Hilton
Weiner for R750 000 two years ago. Their Vertigo stores had been around for years in Cape Town's Gardens Centre and Rondebosch Main Road. They successfully traded in nice little casual classics for the teen market and even for parents with small butts and smaller budgets. But the English speaking boykie from Brakpan and his energetic young Irish-Italian fiancee and business partner, Moira O'Reilly, had always kept a low profile out of all proportion to the size of their aspirations.
Then they acquired the 16 Hilton Weiner stores and the fun really started. Whereas Bergers had reportedly lost R2 million a year on Hilton Weiner, within only six months the business news pages were noting a significant rise in Hilton Weiner's sales under the new young owners.
Press profiles began appearing, in which Joubert was quite frank about his expansion philosophy. "Intelligent acquisition is the least risky way to expand. It would take years to build up the same structures. That way they're all set up for you."
Very soon the expansion plans started rolling in earnest. Followed immediately by excited press releases on the desks of the media.
These announced the Emergence of a Revolutionary New Designer Retail Grouping: "In a fortnight of high. pressure negotiation and fortuitous timing, the Hilton Weiner, Vertigo, Aca Joe and .lenni Button groups have succeeded in pulling off a dramatic and far-reaching coup by forging the creation of a new branded designer retail grouping so exciting it must surely be said to have a significant impact on the face of retail for years to come."
They were understandably elated.
Volume is the name of the game, especially as the rag trade gets increasingly difficult. If you're not doing volume you're not in the race.
With this coup they'd succeeded in extending their retail network from 18 to 38, with the acquisition of five .lenni Button stores, 14 Aca Joe (seven franchised) and three Fossil watch stores. They'd made themselves a major force in the marketplace. Now they could go into the factories with a lot more clout than before and order the kind of small, special runs no-one wants to make, like 100 pairs of tailored pants with 16 panels.
At the same time they'd put together what must be, at least locally, a unique empire of niche
market fashion independents who all trade in the same shopping centres, to the same kind of disposable income customer. It's a clever idea with advantages all round, similar to the American group who have Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy.
Thirty-eight stores might seem like small potatoes compared with the 200 that Bergers had when they originally acquired Hilton Weiner.
"But, Moira tells me one morning, where the three of us are exploring over a hotel breakfast what makes this unusual couple tick, "we believe the market penetration of the new labels is still in its infancy."
Feisty words, but then this youthful-looking granddaughter of a cultivated Sicilian is, I'm about to discover, the one mainly responsible for the miraculous Hilton Weiner turnaround.
I've never met either of them before, but they're so highly motivated and confident of their ability to pull the rabbit out of the hat, that it seems churlish to point out that while they might've succeeded with Hilton Weiner where others failed, they might need some pretty strong magic to keep all their rag trade balls in the air, considering the force of the prevailing winds. But then they've made a career out of swimming upstream.
Everyone in the industry is full of gloom and doom. Factories have closed. Full of antiquated equipment and an under-trained labour force, thanks to years of protectionism, they can't compete with the East-or even America-in either price and quality. It's tough out there, with a lot of factories that supply the chains being shifted out of the country to avoid union action.
The struggle to keep standards up is laborious and the sleepless nights endless. Everything that can go wrong does. Imported fabrics arrive flawed and so late that you miss your place in the queue for Cut, Make and Trim. You have to send everything back because the facing was put in at the wrong temperature, the buttons are already popping off and the hems are wiggly.
But these two remain un fazed. "You find people with all the handicaps in the world who succeed because they have the right attitude," says Joubert. "A passionate belief in what you are doing is crucial"
He gives the impression of being a very different sort of mogul from the others in the trade, possessed of what he'd probably call a counter-culture mindset. By which I don't mean his way of ending his statements with an amiably affirmative "hey" or the fact that in his early days of selling on the fleamarkets, he often went around barefoot because he wanted to remind himself to keep his feet on the ground.
It's an attitude. Whereas for most other businessmen success is basically about how you do your sums, Joubert seems to work on a deeper level.
"You're dead before you've even started", he says, "if you don't understand that you have to have a positive value system throughout the organisation that motivates every single team member. In Eastern philosophy character is the foundation of all leadership. Philosophy and values are everything. They define who you are on a business level and they are absolutely key. Everything else flows from there."
It appears to be a philosophy he developed growing up in a family situation far short of the ideal. As one of the five children of a retrenchment-hit family, he was a kid who spent a large amount of time drawing and reading and on his maternal grandmother's farm in Harrismith, where King George and Queen Elizabeth stayed during the royal visit.
"For me, growing up in the recession in Brakpan, where all the mines were closing. it was a tragedy to see all that potential that was never realised."
He was St Andrews' first matric boy to achieve six As, but he remained a rebellious, angry young man, determined to prove himself. When he got to Cape Town with a huge chip on his shoulder, he hit upon the idea of selling T-shirts to finance his actuarial studies at UCT.
"With the first run I made more in a few weeks than people made in Brakpan the whole year and I realised then there was no turning back. I wasn't ever going to do anything conventional. And I wasn't ever going to be scared to stand up for my rights."
Certainly there's steel under the relaxed exterior. "He'll armwrestle you to the ground in a negotiation," is how someone in the industry puts it. "There's an excitement about Marcel that's so infectious," says Mandy Chemaly, Jenni Button's ex-partner, who got the JB Inc Waterfront shop as part of her settlement and is turning it into a shop full of sexy Italian imports with the titillating label Love Sex Money.
"He's developed a sophisticated retail format - with Moira and his team, including his young brother Darnell. that runs by the book: how the staff looks, their attitude to customers, the overall appearance of the store, who handles the money and so on. No-one breaks the rules and everyone's highly motivated, because Marcel's so motivated himself."
Salie Richards had the first Cut, Make and Trim factory Marcel Joubert ever worked with. "He was pulling himself through varsity," says Richards, "and I remember the first shirt he did had the words I'm From UCT, but the way you read it, if you'll excuse me, was I'm FUCT."
He was IS then and full of spunk. Now he's horrified at the thought of seeing this in print.
Marcel always had ideas that were new," says Salie Richards. "One day he said, 'I'm going to put together a range and sell it upcountry.' He hired a car and went driving right around the whole of South Africa collecting orders. He would phone me in the middle of the night from some little dorp and say 'Salie, now we're up 'to 3 000 units. Be prepared. In the end they did 20 000.
Joubert was one of the first traders on Greenmarket Square. At 22, he met with the then deputy mayor Clive Keegan and city planner David Jack to discuss deregulating fleamarkets to encourage the development of small business.
Many of his suggestions were implemented.
He and Moira opened their first Vertigo store on the corner of Main and Belmont Roads in Rondebosch on a site everyone said was a dud. It's still there doing a bomb eight years later.
When Frank B Ernest went under in 1991, Joubert contacted the liquidators and was offered the entire chain, but reluctantly took over only the Gardens store. Four years later, when Bergers went into liquidation, he and Moira felt the time had arrived for a national venture, so they acquired Hilton Weiner and haven't looked hack.
You can't help wondering which will be the next upmarket fashion chain to be gobbled up by the Fairy Godfather and Superwoman. There aren't that many left.
Meanwhile Jenni Bulton reports that her whole studio has been infused with such energy since the takeover that everyone is working harder than ever before.
"They're both wonderful people and outstanding retailers. I love going to work again. There's a new enthusiasm. They understand communication and they keep you in touch with what's going on all the time. They inspire you to want to do better. It's like being given a second chance. You don't want to screw up."
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