PB: 0:10

Hello, welcome back to another episode of the menswear style podcast. I'm your host Pete Brooker and today on the show I'm talking to one of the cofounders of Blake mill Ken price. And a little bit of information about Blake mill taking inspiration from the world around us and bringing to life stories with bright, bold and beautiful prints. Blake mill makes shirts to suit every personality. From Japanese flowers to the map of the world, you can dress the part from head to toe in a selection of wearable art that will transform the way you feel founded by three friends, Steve French, Ross, French and Ken price with a passion to disrupt the men's fashion industry by making high quality dress shirts for people who want to express their individuality through clothes. And here, in his own words to talk about Blake mill is one of the co founders Ken price.

Unknown: 1:00

So I'm Ken price co founder and CEO of Blake mill, we're a men's fashion brand in In essence, what really differentiates us is our design our original designs. And that's something we put a lot of effort into. Steve and I both come from finance technology and data backgrounds. But we have a lot of interests in things ranging from music and literature, to history and science. And it was those passions and interests that started to result in creation of some of these designs, which ended up on to men's shirts, and started to create quite a lot of interest originally in the retail community and ultimately, through to to our customers directly. So we're really all about original design and creating those original designs and creating an environment for generating those designs, which we can talk about in a little bit.

PB: 1:57

Sure. But how to how old is the brand now then can when did you start this up?

Unknown: 2:05

The company started up quite a while ago. But we really set ourselves up as a direct to consumer business in middle of 2018. So we've been going for the better part of four years. And very, you know, just before COVID. And now just after it. So we had a little bit of a struggle as everybody did in in those two years. But things are just starting to grow really fast at the moment.

PB: 2:30

And I think I'd have to talk about the designs of the shirts, because I think these are the main key elements really, of when people can look at these shirts. And if anyone's on our YouTube channel, and I'm just going through a couple of slides now. I mean, these are some of the more I want to say prestige shirts for the more outgoing flamboyant shirts, but you also do have something some shirts that are a little bit more dialled back where say the pattern would be on the inside of the collar or on the inside of the cuff. But perhaps just just touch upon these ones that are a little bit more outgoing and the design elements please.

Unknown: 3:06

Well, we try to cater to the bold and brave as well as to the more subtle and cool vibes. And as you say, we were noted a lot for the vibrant colours and the bold designs that you're showing here. A lot of these designs start out really from internet searches on things that are inspiring to us as individuals. So my business partner Steve lived in Japan for a while so some of our shirts are Japanese inspired from security to Cherry Blossom Festival. We've got strong interest in science. So we've got some we've got one shirt with computer code written across it. We call that shirt Burn baby burn because that as the name of the software programme, where we got that computer programme and that software, sorry, we got the ones and zeros and that computer programme launched Apollo 11 To the Moon. So we try to put some cheeky meaning into some of our designs. Some of them are just skulls, for example, that are coloured and styled in unique ways. And some of them are just really basic polka dots with a little a for anarchy stuck into them, all kinds of different things. So we try to shake it up and cater to people that want to be really out there as well as people that are trying to be a little bit more reserved. So I'm actually wearing one of our Lex jerseys. And we've got one of our designs built into the the accent of the shirt here. So that's a Marrakech design that we've got, which is, you know, again, when it's another inspiration that we're pulling from, from the world around us. Really.

PB: 4:51

Yeah, I love that. So it's something that's quite personal to you guys, where you're pulling the inspiration like you said, from even places you've lived or or appreciation of the arts or sciences. But I guess a question, how would you draw the line between if they, for example, I love the band Queen? I guess everyone does. But then I'm gonna write, okay, I want to put a mash together of Freddie Mercury, Brian may want to have it all in like one big face. And I'd be like, Well, that looks good to me. That'd be a great show that I would wear. But then how do you decide what is going to be commercial with that as well with those designs?

Unknown: 5:30

It's a great question, Peter. And this is really the beginning of our collaborative design process. And we do a very rudimentary approach to this at the moment. And that's by emailing our list of customers, all of the designs that we're considering for production. So we let them we create a survey and we let them vote on what they liked the most. Then we let them place orders for them. And if anything is, if I can use the term total dog, then we'll we'll just negate that order. But we get our customers involved in our followers in the selection process. The next step, and we're, as we were discussing earlier, we're in the middle of a crowdfunding exercise at the moment, to raise capital to improve the I guess, sophistication by which we can start the collaboration process so that we can start engaging artists from all over the world really, in creating some of these designs and then opening that design gallery up not just to our customers, but to that same community to start contributing to tweaking and then arriving at different designs that we can start to commercialise both physically and digitally. So the whole collaboration and community development of these designs is part of what Stephen I've done for a big chunk of our careers in FinTech. And we're aiming to bring that through to the fashion.

PB: 7:02

Well, the UK is the greatest place for FinTech right now reading the Evening Standard yesterday. Leaders?

Unknown: 7:10

Well, our previous business was a FinTech business in the UK. So

PB: 7:14

you're in good, good ground. So just clarify for me, they say that the crowdfunding campaign that's going on at the moment? Is this designed for artists, any artists that might want to come in and have an idea and go, Hey, guys, can we have a talk about putting my designs on your shirts? Is that how it works?

Unknown: 7:35

Well, the crowdfunding is around raising capital to help us do a number of things that includes expanding our product range and starting to give us the ability to sell more effectively into other geographies, because we are primarily selling into the United Kingdom at the moment. But some of that capital will go toward our community development and our technology development so that we can start to create a platform for these independent artists to come in. We currently work with independent artists, but just a few of them. And that's on a point to point basis. They don't actually collaborate with each other, they they interact with us. So we want to create an environment that will enable artists to collaborate directly with Blake mill, but also with our customers, as well as with other artists, so create cohorts that can start to generate mashups of designs that wouldn't otherwise have come together. And that's really what we're about is the originality and creating an environment where originality can thrive.

PB: 8:32

Fascinating. And so the campaign's going in at the moment, I believe you said it might be running up until Christmas, I forgot that right?

Unknown: 8:39

Yeah, that's exactly right. We're running live on cedars at the moment. So you can go into the cedars.com platform, and you can invest in blackmail, if you choose.

PB: 8:48

And we'll put a link over on the show notes. You can also find a link, I believe over on your site, can Blake mill not code at UK as well as all the other great shirts? How does it work becoming a member? Is it just a case of signing up to the newsletter? Or is there a little special portal?

Unknown: 9:05

Well, the special portal is what we'll be beginning work on in the new year. At this stage, though, we work with our our email list of customers and followers. So all of those people have the opportunity to vote on our designs today. And we get some of our dedicated customers and followers, you know, will interact with us quite regularly. We've had people contributing, we had one person contribute a I would almost call it a manifesto of 20 pages of text, just talking about the different designs and inspirations that they have. And it's just fabulous to get this feedback. And we you know, some of it is incredibly useful. Some of it we can't use, but that's the sort of collaboration we already have. It's it's not a terribly sophisticated platform. It's simply email going back and forth. And that's what we're aiming to really ramp up.

PB: 9:58

Right. And that's it Yeah, it's great to have, like onboard, and responsive feedback instantly. So it's something that you might want to think about making. And if you do ever design, and it's kind of voted on by the community, do you have to have a certain amount of numbers and pre sales in order for you to produce these? And are they limited editions as well? Unlimited prints?

Unknown: 10:19

Okay, so a couple of questions. The first one in terms of the voting numbers, we have had a few experiences where the absolute top contender when it came to votes, did not sell at all, it just was absolutely horrible commercially. But everybody thought it was going to be great. So they voted for it. So now we do a little bit more of an acid test. And we tend to do a pre order, once we've confirmed that people actually want to buy the product. And we have quite a quick turnaround with our manufacturing base. So that's all very feasible. So that's sort of the the way we make sure that what our community is asking for is indeed what the market is willing to pay for, which is important. You know, that's important from everything to from efficiency and inventory control through to sustainability, because you don't want to have a whole lot of inventory, sitting around and not getting sold. It's not good for for business, nor is it good for the environment, if you can't sell all your product.

PB: 11:21

Yeah. And do you have like one eye on sustainability with what other brands might do? Or do you? How else do you implement some sustainability pledges within the brand.

Unknown: 11:34

Sustainability is becoming a bigger and bigger criteria for people when they are looking at what to buy when it comes to fashion in particular, which has not got a great history when it comes to the environmental sustainability. We've started that process in a fairly simplistic way by ensuring our packaging is recycled and recyclable. We keep our garments plastic free, so you won't see a plastic sleeve on the shirt when it comes in. Its in its box or in its tube. We're now in the process. We have a new lead buyer joining us next week actually. And one of her charters is going to be to expand our product range in conjunction with our supplier base and the suppliers that we will expand to we'll all have an obligation to stick with the appropriate levels of sustainability criteria that apply to that particular garment. And of course, if you're doing a 100% cotton shirt that has one one level of sustainability criteria versus something that may be a poly blend, which starts to involve other aspects of sustainability. And then they're the dyes that go into the shirts. So we need to make sure those are done and created in an environmentally responsible way. And then right down to the reuse. And you know what happens to a shirt when it no longer has a place on your on your rack. Some of our customers buy our products for an occasion and they may only wear it once or twice. So because these are unique designs and they all get retired after a certain point, they start to take on a value of their own because there is a level of uniqueness. And with that in mind, we're looking at now putting together a secondary market or at least uniquely identifying every shirt so that they can be valued more appropriately on a secondary market so that they're not going in the bin or not getting not getting used. There's got

PB: 13:33

to be a Blake mill exhibition somewhere like I imagine some of these prints, especially the ones that everybody said, Yeah, let's have that and then didn't buy it. I mean that that must be like the main centrepiece in the Blake mill Museum.

Unknown: 13:47

You know, we there is a level of art and we actually do licence, some works of art that go on to our prints. So we work with Museum in Italy. We're licencing Botticelli painting that goes on to our Renaissance shirts. We work closely with the Lowry here in Manchester, and have one of his works on one of our shirts. And those are quite good sellers, actually. So not everything is dead original, in terms of being created by Blake mill, or our design partners, but we're about expressiveness as well. So sometimes it's a matter of taking what's already a brilliant piece of art and brilliant image and making it available is something you can wear.

PB: 14:33

Do you ever come across any slight sensitivities when it comes to licencing? For example, I'm very well versed in the world of James Bond, when it comes to logos and not putting James Bond stuff on us, shall I say, and I'll just leave that there. But do you have where it's happened to you where you thought this is innocent enough? I can put this on the shirt. It's either an astronomer or a mathematician or a famous scientist, and then perhaps out of nowhere, got one of them. They're more for Red Letter days.

Unknown: 15:09

We had one very recently and I just referenced the Bata Celli painting, which we were looking to do a press release on. And I was just in a workshop with my colleagues, I did a quick internet search and found that a big French fashion house was being sued by the Italian art museum for use of that exact same painting in some of their garments. And we had only produced this garment about a month before and I was going oh my gosh, do so. For some reason, this particular fashion label wasn't responding to the museum's requests. And as a result, legal action was being taken. So we reached right out to the museum. And within a couple of days, we had a royalty arrangement in place with them and everything is fine. So we were told by our legal counsel, that if the artists had been deceased for over 70 years, then you're generally free and clear to us that work. That is not always the case. And we learned that quite quickly. And fortunately, we were able to get everything sorted quickly and no harm no foul.

PB: 16:16

Oh, my god, yeah, I love these sort of lessons in life where you're learning the legal stuff along the way. And then by the end of it, you could, you could almost become like a I don't know, a licenced lawyer yourself with all the homework that you put into it. Right?

Unknown: 16:29

When when you're a small company, you don't have a legal department or you know, all the various experts to hand to manage these things you sometimes have to learn along the way. But fortunately, Steve and I are relatively experienced in a number of these these things from a different industry. But excuse me, so that's not my dog.

PB: 16:50

That's Roger. He's talking his own shadow. Sorry about that.

Unknown: 16:55

So in Cata. So in any case, we were able to get that button down. And it's all good.

PB: 17:03

Give relief. Well, I mean, so are we outside of the campaign? Are we looking any further beyond the campaign at the moment plans for 2020? Free? Any exhibitions? I know that I've seen you guys down at the one of the centres down at Wembley centre a couple of times back in,

Unknown: 17:22

probably pure down. That's right. Thank you. Yeah, Earls Court area, actually. So we haven't been doing exhibitions, obviously, the COVID outbreak kept everything quiet. In 2023. We're looking at all kinds of different options we brought on earlier this year Head of Marketing, who's really been helping a shake up our branding and getting our message out there to a much wider audience. So in fact, we were just having a conversation this afternoon about sort of looking at how we're going to budget for 2023. And what are the different ways we can start to make a larger audience aware of the Blake meal brand, what we do, etcetera. And that will dovetail with the design, collaboration, outreach that we're planning for 2023 as well. So exhibitions may well be part of that we haven't made any final decisions. But you know, some of these things are going to be sort of a little bit of guerrilla warfare, we're just starting to do a lot more PR. And we have quite a strong emphasis on our influencer programme, which has been very successful, some design, collaborations, etc. So the world is a lot different now than it was 1520 years ago. So you've got to keep no changes literally every month. So you have to keep on top of the different channels to market. So yeah, keep your eye on the space and will be, you will show up probably in some places you wouldn't expect.

PB: 18:50

Yeah, hope so well, this space would be Blake mil.co.uk. And I encourage everyone to have a look at the site and enjoy the designs because I think there's something for everyone. And in all occasions as well. It's not just the party shirt or the holiday shirt. There's also the business shirts and things in between that your your enjoy over there.

Unknown: 19:10

Can you relate to say, from the bar to the boardroom,

PB: 19:13

the bar to the boardroom has much better you see, that's where you get the big bucks over

Unknown: 19:17

the border into the bar. You don't actually want to go from the bar to the board. Well, the other way around

PB: 19:23

depends. Depends what office you're in. But yeah, we can you were going to tell me how you got from chyzyk to Manchester off air. We were talking about how you're you were choosing height and then before moving and migrating up to Manchester. So what's the story there?

Unknown: 19:42

Well, I actually moved back to Canada where I'm originally from after living in chyzyk. Back in 2002, and then I started my my business partner from that previous life when I lived in London, reached out To me back in I guess it was 2017 when he had started to put together this business and I invested and started working with him in 2017 from Canada and then after a couple of years decided it was time to double down. We saw the business starting to grow and move to Manchester in mid 2019. And yeah, we've just really pushed hard on the business and built we've moved our office we were actually in town called Bollington, south of Manchester. But we started out by actually manufacturing our own product. So everything was done in house we had our own equipment or on seamstresses are on warehousing, we were doing our own picking and packing. So we decided if we really wanted to scale this business and focus on the design side of the business, then we should start outsourcing to specialists, specialists who actually do the manufacturing at scale and do the warehousing and picking and packing at scale. We did that. And we moved our head office into Manchester, where it's turning out to just be a fantastic Centre for expertise in marketing and finance, advertising, design fashion. So we're just flooded with expertise here. And it's been a fantastic move. So we're really happy to be based here in Manchester.

PB: 21:14

Wonderful. Well, the old cotton Nepalis the foundation for British fashion and in fact,

Unknown: 21:21

our offices in M coats right in the middle of the cotton field, cotton train,

PB: 21:26

you go so you're in you're in good hands over there. Ken, great, great to finally talk to you after I've known known you a while we've we've been back and forth back in the day. As we discussed offline, that will mean nothing to people listening to this, but it was good to finally catch up with you and best of luck. And again, Blake mill Dakota, UK is the place people go. Until next time, brilliant.

Unknown: 21:54

All right, Peter, thanks very much.

PB: 22:04

You've been listening to the menswear style podcast be sure to head over to menswear style.co.uk For more menswear content and email info at menswear startup code at UK if you'd like to be a future guest on the show. Finally, please help support the show by leaving a review on iTunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast. Until next time