Sophie Mirman is among retail royalty. As the daughter of milliner Simone Mirman, who made hats for Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana, and with her father behind the introduction of Christian Dior to the UK in the 1950s, it’s almost inevitable that Mirman would blaze a trail in fashion for herself. Since being named Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year in 1988, as the brains behind SockShop, she has co-partnered and grown her retail brand Trotters into a thriving, upmarket childrenswear chain.
What led you to open Trotters?
“The idea came from taking my then one-year-old son to get his hair cut in a large department store. We spend the first couple of years of a child’s life saying, ‘Don’t touch anything sharp’, ‘Don’t go near a pair of scissors’, and then, all of a sudden, this perfect stranger comes up to your child with a pair of scissors at very close quarters. It was just a really unpleasant experience for him.
“Alongside that, I took my three-year-old daughter (who’s now my CRO) to buy a pair of shoes, and she spent a long time choosing and wanted a pair of bright pink shoes with green dots. The sales assistant came up, measured her, disappeared off into the stockroom and reappeared five minutes later with a huge pile of boxes saying, ‘Well I haven’t got the shoes that you want, but we’ve got all these other options.’ My poor daughter was crestfallen because she’d really set her heart on these bright pink shoes.
“The two experiences just struck me as being just a very unfriendly way of dealing with children, so I wanted to create an environment that brought everything together under one roof and made it fun for them.”
How have the priorities of the business changed since you first opened?
“It’s always been a family business, started by my partner [Richard Ross] and I. Before Trotters we had a public company called SockShop, which was much bigger. So we just wanted to test something that was small, that was not going to be a public company, that was very much in our control.
“When we first started, we didn’t do any of our own designing, so we had to buy what was available on the high street. The clothing that we initially sold was all branded merchandise and there was no reason for people to come to us rather than go to another store.
“Little by little, we began to understand who our customer was. We opened up a second shop and that’s when we were able to start designing our own range and do it for our customers, rather than just trying to do a little bit of everything. Now, 35 years later (which is a bit of a scary), our clothing is designed by us and made for us by small family businesses that we’ve worked with for many, many years, mainly in Portugal and some in Spain.
“We are still multi-brand, but everything sits under the Trotters umbrella. We’ve got 14 different brands and each has got a specific DNA, so the consumer coming in feels that they found a whole load of little exclusive brands that are only available at Trotters.”
With generalists expanding all the time, how do you keep your edge as a specialist retailer?
“For us, it’s very much the experiential side of it. You can’t just open a shop and assume people are going to come in, those days are gone.
“Trotter is an experience; there are the fish tanks, some stores have got trains, other ones have got ships. The children enjoy coming in because there’s something for them and they consider it as their store and they consider the hairdressers in each as their own.”
How many stores do you have now?
“We’ve got five of our own stores, and we run the childrenswear department in Liberty. We have a concession in Harrods, in Selfridges in the Trafford Centre [Manchester], and on Monday (March 25), we opened our latest concession which is in Selfridges on Oxford Street.”
You’ve been expanding in department stores with concessions, what has that process been like?
“It’s been fantastic. The first concession was Liberty, then Harrods and then Selfridges.
“In 2018, Richard and I decided that we needed to recruit an external CEO. We recruited a fantastic CEO, Ed Goodman, who joined us from Selfridges, and very sadly, he passed away a year ago after just three years with the business. He’s the one who initially brought the concessions to us, but one day to the next he got very ill and wasn’t able to come back, which was absolutely tragic.
“Ed recommended a colleague of his whom he had worked with – Bruce Langlands. Bruce joined us a year ago with Ed’s blessing and is doing a great job of steering the ship.
“We put the concessions in Harrods about a year and a half ago. Harrods came to us and said, ‘We’d really like to put you into a hairdressing salon’, which was quite funny because Harrods is where my son had his first haircut, so it’s a complete circle. I’m really pleased with what we’ve done there, we’ve got two digital fish tanks behind portholes and they look fantastic. The kids absolutely love it.”
Where do you see the next opportunity?
“Certainly it’s developing our own website. I’ve got a new head of digital who has been with us for six months now. We really want to strengthen our digital side because obviously, that gives us access internationally.
“But, irritatingly, we’re all perfectionists, and we’re all passionate about what we do, so we’ll look at any opportunity that may come along.”
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