Agi Mudumulla and Sam Cotton, a.k.a. Agi & Sam, are known for not taking fashion too seriously—the “How To Wear” section of their site is jokes—and for making fashion-forward, but well tailored and eminently wearable threads. In their garms, you’ll always look on top of your style game, but you’ll never appear to be one of those guys who cares just that little bit too much. After pioneering a fresh approach to print in menswear, and riding that wave as the trend went global, the guys have risen with the exponential growth of London’s menswear scene, to become one of the biggest names, and fastest rising fashion businesses from the UK in recent years. We caught up with Agi & Sam, just as they were about to give a talk on “brand building and bold business decision making,” as part of a series of events at Vitamin Water’s Shine Bright Studio, a pop-up hub of exhibitions and mentoring, in art, fashion, and music, that runs until mid-September. Here the guys give Complex UK their 10 points on building a brand.
Work Out Your Unique Selling Point
Agi: Know who you are as brand, that’s the most integral thing, to know what it is that sets you apart, as cheesy as it is, know your unique selling point. There are so many other brands out there, why would someone buy you, over someone else? We were lucky in that print stood out.
Sam: Just to supplement that, don’t look at a brand, and want to be like that, you will just end up constantly fighting that brand. You need to forge a path that makes you stand out. We knew that we were gonna do print, because I did print. And the humour thing just marketed it.
1.
Bloggers Are Important
Sam: First, we made a point to speak to the bloggers, that was literally the first stepping stone, having the blogs talking about us.
Be Funny
Sam: We did a lookbook, even though we didn’t have a collection, to convince the guys at Vauxhall Fashion Scout to give us a show slot. Luke Stephenson the photographer, normally takes these very bright, colourful photos of birds, the lookbook was really bright, it was a juxtaposition of cowboys from the old West, and like the Western world. And you know we just had a model shitting in a bucket.
Agi: The cowboys were just doing like random things, like trying to catch a cow or whatever. I think a lot of lookbooks at that time were quite static, menswear was just starting to pick up and it was all a bit dry, and a bit samey.
Luxury Doesn’t Make Money
Agi: We’re definitely not luxury, look at us. We looked on Mr Porter, and looked at brands like Carven, Acne, and PS by Paul Smith, and their price points. Then we spoke to the factories, and risked upping the numbers, so we could reduce the prices to a level where we could sell at much higher volumes.
Sam: We’re small and we put a lot of work in, and the fabric makes it expensive, but, seeing other designers never really growing, because they’re too expensive, we decided we’re not a luxury company, we’re a contemporary company.
2.
Work Out What Your Guy Wants
Sam: Menswear is primarily about function, how it treats you, how you wear it. Men appreciate brands they feel fit their lifestyle, and suit them. So, for us, developing a connection with a customer, the person we’re trying to get in touch with, means that the person will potentially respect our brand, for longer. When they wear it, they’re not going to get sick of not having enough room, or pockets, or whatever.
Inherently every collection should look, and feel like our collection, but you also have to change, and keeping people on their toes, develop new products, in new ways, keep the customer intrigued, and that builds longevity. People will buy Paul Smith forever, because they’re a Paul Smith customer, because they love how he works, and his branding, that’s what we are trying to build.
Agi: That’s really quite a difficult thing, because it changes so much. We’ve always said that we’re a company that wants to push but not too far. There’s no point doing a coat with 17 sleeves, although creatively that’s amazing, that’s not new to us. New for us, is pushing forward, but staying within the realms of menswear.
Find a Good PR
Sam: Picking out a PR was quite hard, we wanted to go somewhere that could help our business grow. Exposure can assist us in building our business and they think about product.
Agi: Some of the other companies that we met were very fashion-ey, and we’re not really. Thinking about who's writing what is boring, we want to work on business.
I think it’s just infusing our messaging with that humour element. We’ve never had a strategy, we just put it out there, and it’s good to get it in different sorts of publications, somewhere like GQ, Esquire, or Fantastic Man for the older guy, and into the younger magazines like i-D and Dazed.
The Importance of Collabs
Agi: Collaborations allow you to expand your range as designers. We wanted to do footwear and technical sportswear. Associating Agi & Sam with a big brand, with a massive outreach to amazing customers, enables us to do pretty much anything. Like with Topman for example, we’ve been able to sell in all their stores, and the press that they get globally, is incredible.
It also comes down to cash flow. Even at this stage, a season can cost well over a hundred thousand pounds before you make any sales. The small boutiques we started out with, would pay a deposit, and that would fund production. Now you do a show at great cost, and you don’t actually know if anyone’s going to buy it, if the bigger stores buy it, which is great for numbers, you have to front all the production, and they don’t pay until after delivery.
Sam: It’s also good experience working with brands, who work in a very different way, or design in a very different way. With Topman you do have to design to a price, which actually makes you more creative in some ways.
Think Globally
Sam: In America they don’t pay that much attention to press, the stores are really reserved, and they’ll sit and watch designers for season after season, before they buy.
Agi: Whereas in Japan, we had stores from the beginning, and once stores like United Arrows and Beams buy you, other stores follow.
Sam: The stores that we sell to in Japan, or in Korea, they’re actually constantly saying please come over, and put on an event, we need to see who you are. So, we need to get to a position with the company where we can afford to go out there more, and start to grow the business from the inside.
3.
Keep Talking To The Stores
Agi: It’s just talking to them throughout the season, and trying to get reports, and asking whether we can use our social media to help boost our sales. Although you have to be careful not to have favourites.
You get one store that loves all the prints, and won’t touch any of the block colours, and then there’s another store that will only buy a couple of printed pieces, and then another store, might never have bought us before, and will buy all the prints. Last season was all tone on tone, but then speaking to buyers they’re like, 'we want the big jazzy prints.' So, you always need a balance. You need to have core products that they can come back to. So, it’s making sure that every season we still have those. You go to like the Dries Van Noten showroom, and it’s literally four floors, 700 products, it’s the same jacket but across however many different fabrics, and colours. We can’t afford to do that, but we try and bare it in mind. Like, this season we had a lot of loose fit trousers, but then we also offered a slim cropped trouser in the showroom, because that’s what everyone is wearing.
Good Marketing is About Telling A Story
Sam: Marketing is something we’re looking at, we’ve actually got someone in this season to help us a little bit. It’s about developing stories, and giving the press something new. For example with the Topman collection, there were so many stories built into the collaboration, that it warranted being written about. The football stickers of me and Agi looking ridiculous, or the Subbuteo characters, are things we’d never really built into our own collection before, but it’s kind of fun, and people can relate to it.
Agi: If we ever became a luxury brand, that was quite hard faced, it wouldn’t work because that’s not us. It’s important for us to mess around with certain types of digital technology, and try and think of ways for the consumer to really absorb what we’re doing.
Sam: We always thought Paul Smith was amazing, but we never really thought about the connection between Agi & Sam and his brand. Charlie Porter called us the new Paul Smith, and as we’ve grown we’re just like fuck yeah, he built Paul Smith around personality, he built it around fun, and directly targeting the market with who he is, and that’s something we’re trying to do now.
