On his feet are Camper shoes
On his feet are Camper shoes.Flux?old 3.5 million pairs of these in 46 countries last year. When Nicole Kidman famously thrust her arms in the air to celebrate her divorce, her feet were Camper-clad. Liam and Noel Gallagher wore Campers on an Oasis album cover Peter Mandelson was pictured walking a dog in his. And when 12 million viewers watched James Nesbitt in Cold Feet six weeks ago, they might have noticed he was wearing three different pairs of Campers.The company that Flux?ounded 28 years ago is private and low-profile; he has never before given a full interview about its business to a foreign newspaper. Yet it is becoming dramatically more visible by the month, because of the rate at which it slots its shops into the swankiest retail locations worldwide.A couple of years ago it opened in New York and San Francisco, adding Boston and Chicago in December.
It will be in Los Angeles in June and Silicon Valley’s Santana Row a month later. Germany had Frankfurt and Munich added to Berlin last year, with Dusseldorf’s opening imminent. Johannesburg and Tokyo are among the other scheduled locations in the coming months.Camper, which never ventured outside Spain until 1992, can be fleet of foot because it stays small, says Flux?Most of its 55 directly owned international shops occupy just 50 square metres. (Its shoes are also sold through another 49 non-franchised “shop-in-shops” and other retailers, such as Jones in the UK.) Tokyo’s store will be the largest, but at 400 sq m it is hardly a fashion supermarket.The stores are also iconoclastic. When Camper opened in Via Montenapoleone in Milan, the local retailers’ association officially complained that it had not followed the convention of its brand neighbours, such as Gucci and Armani.
By tradition, they cover their windows with hoardings for six months before a grand opening.Camper marched into Milan as it always does: whitewashing the walls of its shop while still refurbishing, and encouraging shoppers to come in and scrawl messages, about anything and everything, on them.”We call it Walk in Progress,” says commercial director Dalia Saliamonas. “The retailers’ association wanted to know ‘How could you do this?’ A month later, it apologised.”In Old Bond Street in March – its fifth shop in the UK, to be joined next month by its ninth factory outlet worldwide in Bicester Village, Oxfordshire – Camper not only whitewashed the inside of a Grade II listed building, it velcroed it.Camper also staged an exhibition about 137 endangered Somera donkeys on the island of Majorca. “What a delightful irony,” jokes Flux?”In our shop, we have donkeys. Across the road in Prada, they’re selling furs.”As Camper’s president, Flux?oes not possess a business card with a title on it. His contacts with everyday business are so informal that he only ever wears a tie – and, as a joke, always the same tie, which he bought in Japan 15 years ago – when going to dinner parties with friends.Camper employs what Flux?escribes as “very special” professional managers But, as a family business, he openly embraces nepotism.