Kathryn Wilson - On shoes and business

12 May 2015

 Article by Catherine Bibbey – Barrister

Kathryn Wilson is one of the speakers at the Professional Women’s conference organised by the Canterbury Womens Legal Association to be held on 9 October this year.  The keynote speaker is Rabia Siddique (the author of “Equal Justice”).  Mark your diaries now!

Kathryn Wilson (http://www.kathrynwilson.com/page/about.aspx) is undoubtedly NZ’s premier footwear designer.  Most women, particularly the shoe fiends amongst us, will know who she is.  I was fortunate to hear her speak at a conference in Queenstown in 2014. There Kathryn outlined her path from being a passionate “graduate with big dreams” to becoming an influential business woman with an expanding fashion empire.

Kathryn told us that she wanted to be a footwear designer from the start, and the fact that she couldn’t study footwear design in NZ “was a hard one to accept”. This didn’t deter her as she persuaded her supervisors at design school to allow her to focus on footwear design wherever possible. She was granted a scholarship in her second year of university to Nottingham in the United Kingdom. Again in the fashion school there they let her focus on footwear. She said that the United Kingdom opened her eyes and she came back to NZ “busting to go”. Initially the shoes were a part time business for her while she worked in a fashion house in NZ. Now she is 12 years into the business and her designs are in high demand.  Under her main label, ‘Kathryn Wilson’, she has always insisted on limiting the number of shoes in any design as she placed herself in her consumers’ shoes. She always wanted to be “the person at the party” with different shoes so didn’t want her shoes to end up being worn by everyone at the party.

Kathryn has been the instigator of new ways of selling your products in the most unlikely places.  Most readers will be familiar with “the shoe box” that started its life at the Britomart precinct, moved to Wellington briefly and then became a fixture in the Restart Mall for a year here in Christchurch. In addition, Kathryn changed the way the industry runs fashion shows in NZ, first by hosting the country’s first ever footwear-only show at New Zealand Fashion Week, then by integrating her fashion week show the following year with social media – the show was completely open to the public, instigated through an open Facebook event.  Sponsors both local and international flocked to be a part of both events, sighting a shift in the scale of the shows Kathryn was putting on and an insatiable appetite from the public for what Kathryn was doing in fashion.

When speaking to Kathryn recently, I asked her how other professionals, like lawyers, assisted her meteoric rise.  Did she see them as enablers or as people putting up hurdles she had to overcome?

Kathryn told me that to help run her business, she has an advisory board where four people advise and guide her but do not have the same constraints/responsibilities as being a board of directors.  She has a lawyer and some financial advisors on this board. Some of the financial advisors were retired who wanted to stay involved in some sort of business. She had decided on an advisory board early on and made up a short list of people she respected in business and then individually contacted them in order of their ranking on the list.

She said she certainly didn’t need creative people on the board given her role but she needed people with whom she could “shoot the breeze”. Generally the board meet four times a year but sometimes she would meet or consult with a board member one on one if it was an issue that that board member specialised in.

Initially her biggest fear was that this type of make-up of a board would “take the fun out of it”. However over time she has realised the importance of the advisory board to her business and the benefits to her business. She freely admits that she needs the input of the minds on the advisory board and that, without their advice, she would be “upside down”.

Certainly she saw accountants and financial analysts as pessimists compared to her, but she realistically knows that she needs this sort of input. With her optimistic and creative input, she needs to be “brought down to earth” and for the non-creative persons in her business she sees herself constantly challenging them and vice versa.  However the end result is a compromise that means that her business can stay profitable and expand globally. In this regard with her relationship with her legal advisors she has become more and more dependent upon legal advisors helping her structure her business given that she now has responsibilities as an employer to many staff and has to be particular in protecting her brand as she exports and develops it into a global brand.

She has an intellectual property lawyer with whom she has a good working relationship. While sometimes for her it’s frustrating the hurdles that the lawyer puts up, she appreciates that to protect her brand, she needs to be very particular in terms of intellectual property and protecting her business.

Kathryn said that as she is a creative type, she needed her advisors to be able to do their job, but to keep it “simple” when explaining matters to her so she could understand what was happening or needed.  She appreciated that they needed to do their job and this was not simple but the additional art for them was explaining it in simple terms to her.

Finally, she acknowledged that with the benefit of experience in her business, she appreciates more and more that the success of her business is due to her creative side - but this must be tempered with or challenged by those seeking to assist her.

Kathryn Wilson – photography by Gath Badger

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