COVETED MAGAZINE PAGE 55.
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW //
“even when he was outselling me ten to
one I was still not wanting to go back
classic furnishings”
CM: Who or what inspired you to grow personally and professionally?
CG: I think what inspired initially was how to put a roof over your
head and how to feed yourself (laughs), that’s a good start. And
from everything else, you want to do something which gives you
passion, I can never do anything without passion, if I don’t have
passion I can’t do. So, when I originally started, I’ve had discovered
about English classic furniture, like Chippendale’s furniture, how
they were made. I remember, I tell my brother, I said: “Richard,
you’re looking for something to do, here is a business for you, to
do that.” He was doing all the classic furniture from Chippendale
and I said, well I’m gonna start my own mirror collection, and I
remember we did a show at the same time in Madrid, our first
show. He outsold me ten to one (laughs). Everyone has wanting to
buy classic furniture no one wanted to buy my mirrors, so I knew
that I had to work a little bit harder on what I was doing, but still,
even when he was outselling me ten to one I was still not wanting
to go back classic furnishings.
CM: What happened next? What was your move?
CG: (...) If you believe in something you try, you have to put a
lot of hours into it and you really have to believe. You need to be
unique in the industry, but unique in a sense that it has to be still
marketable. Sometimes you go to a design school and someone has
won an award for some fancy chair and from one side you could
say the chair looks great, it’s like a sculpture, but is it marketable
as a product? So you have to draw the line, how do you make that
difference? When is it marketable? When is it a unique piece? So
when I started creating one of the lifetime lessons, it is about how
multiple pieces fit together. That’s actually a lot more difficult
than doing mirror frames, cause when I was doing mirror frames
it is one piece of design, no one fills a room with mirrors, but if you
fill in with furnishings, then they do. So then how do they’ll work
together without looking the same? And that’s when you need the
different materials and different processes to do that. In my case,
we’re manufacturing everything a 100% in the house, so you have
to learn a lot of techniques and they cannot look the same as the
technique in the other room.
“the design is not the challenge,
manufacturing is not the challenge, the
challenge is distribution”
CM: How do you see the brand Christopher Guy in the future, 10
years from now?
CG: Hell, actually we just celebrated our 10th anniversary this
year. The design is not the challenge, manufacturing is not the
challenge, the challenge is distribution, and that is why we’ve
been working in technology. Cause, last 10 years everything
has changed. 20 years ago China brought new challenges and
new possibilities to the market and then industry has changed,
anyone who is now in the traditional business, I mean, many
companies have closed down because frankly the younger market
is not interested in traditional. Even the fashion houses had to
change. If you’re Channel... I see that sometimes... they sell the
purses in sandwich boxes, in plastic sandwich boxes, which Coco
Channel would have died if she ever saw that, but they are trying
to cater for the new market. So everyone is saying: “Here’s a new
market, how do you cater for that market?” Well technology and
conveniences are certainly central to that, how do you make sure
that your costume, your pricing is in the right range, so there’s a
lot of little things that are needed to be able to success moving
ahead. But design uniqueness, service and convenience. If you
maintain those, then you’ll have a business in 10, 20 and beyond.
