Larry Rosen is chairman and CEO of Harry Rosen Inc.
Larry Rosen
What are the most popular trends in menswear this year?
Rosen: There’s a lot of interesting things happening. I guess what I would define as the most interesting continuing trend is with the casualization of the workplace with many offices going casual for larger portions of the week.
There’s been tremendous interest in soft sport jackets with some colour, with some pattern. But we’ve seen a really strong trend. A lot more almost like sweaters for jackets – soft – that you can wear with a pair of khakis or whatever. Even we call them ‘swackets.’ They’re like sweater jackets.
A way of sort of casualizing business wear, and still looking like a distinguished leader if you’re management, is to have the right jacket. So we’ve seen a lot of that. That’s been pretty interesting.
There’s lots of other things that are happening. People are wearing that sport jacket with a pair of cool chinos and they’re wearing pair of sneakers … a fun look.
How did the company fare through the tough economic times and in particular in Alberta, with the province in a recession in 2015 and 2016?
Rosen: We’ve been in Calgary since 1983. So this isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve been through a few ups and downs. Obviously, the last couple of years in Calgary have been tougher. The mall store sort of held its own in Chinook but downtown there’s been some attrition of white collar jobs. We felt it.
We’re certainly off our high. I think we’re off about 10 per cent from our high but there is still a business to be done in Calgary. One thing you learn if you’ve been operating in Calgary as long as we have is that there’s going to be booms and there’s going to be tougher times. We have confidence in Calgary long term. The oil markets are turning around and the economy there is getting more sophisticated and diversified every year, so it will come back. It will come back strong. It always does.
Calgary is a youthful city. It’s a progressive city. It’s a place we’ve been on for long term, not for the short term.
That’s the beauty of being a private company and it’s also the beauty of being diversified across the country. Some markets aren’t as strong as others but you ride it out and in fact you invest in the market when it’s a little tougher. We’ve made some investments there to keep it strong and make sure when it does come back we’re positioned well to take our chunk of it.
What are your plans for the company’s future? More stores? More renovations of existing stores?
Rosen: Right now we have a bunch of work being done. We’re building two free-standing Zegna stores right now. One in Vancouver and one in Toronto. We’re doing a bunch of upgrades to our Bloor Street store. We have a couple of stores planned to open but I can’t really disclose them. They’re not signed deals. We have stuff happening.
The big investments in our business going forward is to up our digital game. My son Ian Rosen has joined us recently as a vice-president of digital and strategy. We just think that the conventional model of retail where most of your investment is sucked up in stores, we think going forward there will be investment in stores but there will also be much more investment in enhancing our digital capabilities. There’s a huge synergy these days between stores and online.
We’re famous as a company for our customer service, our relationship-based selling approach and making sure we extend that and complement it in the digital sphere is very much our priority. We’ve been working hard at it.
We’ve got a strong online business. But there’s more even that we can do. The world is just starting to touch on what the synergies are between a strong in-store experience and a strong online experience and using some of the in-store expertise that we have to support the online experience.
How different is the marketplace today than when Harry Rosen first started?
Rosen: It’s hugely different. When we opened our store in Calgary in the early 1980s, we were a suit store. Probably 75 per cent of our business was suits. Today, maybe 20 per cent of our business is suits. We’re much more rounded. We’ve got shoes and sport jackets and sportswear. There’s just so much more to our business.
And Calgary is just a more eclectic place. We reflect that.
The big difference is that in those days business wear for men was very much a uniform. A guy had his suits, his shirts, his ties and that was it. In today’s business environment, a man’s got to have his suit for the right meetings for the right client appointments. But they also have their jacket wardrobe and their more eclectic wardrobe for other types of business.
It’s actually harder for a man today to dress for business appropriately because of how eclectic men’s dressing has become. And that really caters to us because our brand since it’s very inception has really been about expertise in menswear. We’re busy educating men as to how to dress appropriately for work but still observe the more casual way of the office.
Why has Harry Rosen not expanded into the U.S.? Is that ever a possibility for the future?
Rosen: International expansion is certainly something we would consider. Our comfort zone right now is we know the Canadian market so well.
We just made an acquisition last year where we bought Davids Shoes in Toronto, a women’s shoe, and we’re really working hard to expand that. We just opened our first out-of-Toronto store in Ottawa and that will be something we bring to Calgary some day and to Vancouver and Edmonton. It’s something we hope to expand across the country.
The U.S. is a very different retail market. Most American stores haven’t done so great here – Canada is very different from the U.S. and right now as long as we have low-hanging fruit for growth and expansion in Canada, our preference is to leverage that because it’s our comfort zone.
But I’m not saying never to U.S. expansion or international expansion. I’m just saying it’s not on our immediate horizon.
– Mario Toneguzzi
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