Keeping IT in fashion

It is hard to keep up with John Bovill on his rapid tour of Mosaic Fashions’ headquarters in London’s achingly hip Shoreditch, where he is the group’s IT director.

He walks quickly through open-plan offices greeting numerous members of staff and, with a delivery as brisk as a racing commentator, explains how the company’s myriad IT systems work.

Standing with his arms folded, he loiters in the middle of Karen Millen’s design hub. A brightly lit pod of eight sewing machines take centre stage, while a blonde-haired woman sits pinning a red silk dress to a mannequin.

The sewing machines hum intermittently in the background as Bovill points to a man who seems to be playing fashion’s version of Tetris. As we watch, he moves different coloured blocks around within a larger rectangle.

“Those different coloured blocks are all different panels in a clothing pattern. He is trying to find the best way to fit the panels into a length of cloth with as little wastage as possible. It’s a very important job. It can save us a fortune,” he says.
Bovill bears a resemblance to the EastEnders’ character Callum Monks whose cheeky wide-boy act makes him an ace market stall salesman. Like Monks, Bovill spent his formative years working on a stall, in his case on Wembley market.

It was those days spent selling women’s clothes in all weathers that sparked Bovill’s love affair with the retail industry.

“The guy I worked for had five shops and seven market stalls. I learned so much from him. He taught me to sell what people want, rather than persuading them to buy what I wanted to sell,” he says.

His boss was successful but eccentric. “He had a special trick to test the honesty of his employees. He would leave a £50 note lying on the floor of the van. If you picked it up and gave it to him, you got to come back to work again.”

Bovill left his home town of London to study history and politics at the University of Nottingham, but returned to the capital when he graduated in 1992, at the tail end of the last recession.

“Graduate jobs were few and far between. I managed to get a job on the Harrods graduate training scheme; it was one of the few schemes that was still open,” he says.

From that point on, Bovill has continued to work in retail across a range of roles and for a number of different companies. But over time, he has become increasingly involved in implementing those all-important IT systems that can make the difference between profit or loss in this cut-throat industry.

Bovill took on his new role as group IT director almost two years ago. “IT management touches every point of the business. It is becoming more integral, so it is vital to have someone that understands the pulse of your business,” he says.

After his stint at Warehouse, Bovill joined the clothing retailer Oasis in 1999, which at the time also owned Coast. In 2005, the Icelandic group Baugur acquired the chain which, by then, also owned Karen Millen and Whistles.

The collapse of the Icelandic banking system and the amount owed by Baugur to those now ailing institutions has pushed the fate of Mosaic Fashions to the top of the news agenda. Rumour and counter-rumour swirls about the future of the business.

But Bovill remains unperturbed. “We have a good, profitable business with strong brands. I’m not worried,” he says.

Bovill says he is far more concerned about the impact of the global financial crisis on the economy. “You would be an idiot to be working in fashion retail and not be concerned about the impact on your business. It is a tough market and only the fit will survive. We need to keep lean and trading well,” he says.

The logic behind one holding company owning a number of fashion brands was fairly straightforward; it would give sufficient economies of scale to allow those brands to invest in an infrastructure, including IT, that would otherwise be too expensive for the individual brand.

A good IT infrastructure helps fashion retailers to manage the risks in this notoriously tricky business.

“The stock is one of our biggest costs. Collections are planned well in advance and involve sinking considerable sums of money into buying and making the clothes. But it is almost impossible to gauge whether those clothes will sell,” says Bovill.
Retailers have other high fixed costs, such as rental and maintenance costs of a network of shops, along with employing staff. It is vital to have stock that it can sell quickly through each shop.

An effective IT system is essential to Mosaic Fashions, ensuring stock keeps moving efficiently through the supply chain and allows the company to monitor every step of the process.

“Fashion retailing is more involved than it used to be,” says Bovill. “We are not just selling through the stores but also over the web and through concessions in department stores, so the IT systems have to be able to cope with all this complexity.

“We use Mercatus as our core system to manage stock and our financial reporting. This effectively follows all our known stock. We have just begun to use a new planning system called JDA. This system sits in parallel to the Mercatus system.”

The advantage of the JDA system is that the Mosaic Fashions management team can allocate a sum of money to a buyer or a designer for a product range that is currently being developed and monitor how that development money is being spent.
Fashion retailing’s narrow margins and tight cashflow mean there are definite limits to the amount of capital expenditure that a fashion retailer can sink into an IT system.

“We make sure we get as big a bang for our buck as possible. We use simple, packaged solutions that are easy to understand and use,” says Bovill.
In the last 18 months, Bovill has invested in IT trainers to ensure everyone is up to speed with the new IT system.

Bovill is confident that these new improvements to the IT systems will play a crucial role in helping the company to survive the coming economic storm.

But for all his enthusiasm about the benefits of IT, designing a network plays second fiddle to his passion for being up to his neck in the risky business of fashion retail. “I still get a kick out of making a decision and then either living or dying by it,” he says with a smile.

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