The Company 'AllSaints' Revived in One Year by William Kim Recruited by Samsung

[Hidden Business Story] UK Contemporary Brand 'AllSaints' Near Bankruptcy After Financial Crisis
Recruited CEO 'William Kim', Former Gucci and Burberry VP... AllSaints Declares 'Digitalization'
Successful Digitalization of Marketing, Logistics, Distribution, and Sales... Grows into a 550 Billion KRW Global Company

AllSaints logo [Photo by AllSaints]

[Asia Economy Reporter Shinwon Yoon] Just making good clothes is not enough to survive in the jungle of the fashion market. Even if you boast unique design and quality, without proper marketing or sales strategies, failure can come in an instant. The rise and fall of the UK's representative contemporary brand 'AllSaints' was determined not by design but by strategy.

There was a time when 'AllSaints' was the first name that came to mind in the West, including the UK and the US, when thinking of 'leather jackets.' Loved by celebrities such as Madonna, Rihanna, and David Beckham, AllSaints grew rapidly but saw its performance deteriorate after the 2008 financial crisis. Unable to find a way out, it eventually came close to bankruptcy in 2011. At that time, William Kim, a Korean-American who had served as vice president at Gucci and Burberry, appeared as CEO. Within a year, he turned AllSaints from a deficit to a profit, and within five years, achieved annual sales of ?252.5 million (approximately 390 billion KRW), growing it into a global brand.

AllSaints store
[Photo by AllSaints]

AllSaints is a fashion brand founded in London in 1994. Starting with menswear, it successively launched womenswear and childrenswear, growing into a brand that creates trends by releasing clothes with AllSaints' unique color every season under the brand motto of 'Creativity.' Especially, leather jackets are considered AllSaints' signature product and the item that best expresses the brand identity of 'contemporary.'

However, after the 2008 global financial crisis, AllSaints also faced a crisis. Kevin Stanford, co-founder of AllSaints, aggressively expanded stores, and the Icelandic financial company Baugur, which held 35% of AllSaints' shares, was affected when Kaupthing Bank, from which it borrowed, went bankrupt. As a result, AllSaints incurred debts of ?53 million (approximately 82 billion KRW), more than twice its annual sales at the time. It was practically on the verge of collapse.

William Kim, former CEO of AllSaints [Photo by AllSaints]

Then, Lion Capital, a British private equity firm that recognized AllSaints' value, acquired 76% of its shares for ?105 million (approximately 162 billion KRW), changing the situation. In 2012, Lion Capital recruited William Kim, then senior vice president at Burberry and a giant in the fashion industry, as CEO. Leading Burberry's digital transformation, he declined a large stock option and chose to take on AllSaints, which was on the brink of bankruptcy. In an interview with a media outlet, he mentioned that the stock option's value was equivalent to about four apartments in Gangnam.

He recognized AllSaints' latent potential. Having experience overseeing luxury brands such as Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen under the Gucci Group, as well as Burberry, he was convinced that the brands future generations would focus on were not luxury brands but contemporary brands like AllSaints. Since the average age of employees was only 27, he judged the growth potential to be high. Therefore, as soon as William Kim started at AllSaints, he envisioned 'AllSaints of 2020.' Predicting that the millennial generation born in the digital age would emerge as the main customer base by 2020, he proposed 'digitalization' as the future of AllSaints. He needed to supplement AllSaints' inefficient marketing, logistics, distribution, and sales methods, which had remained analog.

The companies William Kim benchmarked were not fashion companies but IT companies like Amazon and Google. Immediately after his appointment as CEO, he developed websites and apps optimized for mobile and PC. For the first time in a fashion company, he collaborated with Google to enable over 3,000 AllSaints employees worldwide to use Google Cloud (document storage) and Google Hangouts (video calls and messaging).

[Photo by AllSaints]

The display methods and inventory management of offline stores were all managed in real-time through a system connected to headquarters. If a customer inquired about product inventory, typically staff would run to the warehouse to check, but AllSaints enabled staff to check warehouse inventory status and even inventory availability at other stores in real-time via tablet PCs. Payments were also improved to be completed within 30 seconds through Amazon's system. This is why 20% of AllSaints' sales (industry average less than 2%) occur online.

As a result, within one year of William Kim joining, AllSaints succeeded in turning a profit. Within just five years, it achieved annual sales of 390 billion KRW, and the number of stores worldwide increased from about 60 to 232. Thanks to the solid online system, although the number of countries with offline stores is limited to 16, delivery services are provided to 200 countries. Sales continue to rise. As of 2018, annual sales reached 550 billion KRW. This represents growth dozens of times greater than before AllSaints faced its crisis.

The timing of 2020 that he predicted also proved accurate. William Kim's achievements are being reevaluated recently. Even in the recently sluggish fashion industry, AllSaints is showing a growth curve, and last year Samsung Electronics recruited William Kim as a 'global digital marketing expert.' Currently, William Kim serves as Vice President in charge of Retail and E-commerce at Samsung Electronics' Wireless Business Division.