Global Brands group focuses on affordable luxury US marques and globalizing them
When he first came to Hong Kong to play tennis as a teenager in the late 1970s, Bruce Rockowitz didn’t become a professional tennis player as he originally planned. Instead, he met Allen Zeman, known as the Godfather of the city’s renowned Lan Kwai Fong restaurant and nightlife area. He started working with Zeman and eventually made his name in the business world.
After serving as president of Li & Fung Group for seven years, Rockowitz is now running Li & Fung spinoff branded fashion firm Global Brands Group Holding Ltd. He said he likes fashion, likes the challenges presented by his work and wants to make the company a large multinational enterprise.
Rockowitz is not a big fan of so-called “work-life balance”. He said he is a businessman who works very hard and adds that he and his wife — the famous Hong Kong-born American singer Coco Lee — are both very hardworking people.
He said the couple are used to it and their lives revolve around their work.
Recently, Rockowitz spoke with China Daily about the company’s strategy and its business opportunities in the Chinese market. The following are edited excerpts from the interview.
What does Global Brands do? What is the company’s focus?
Global Brands is one of the largest brand companies in the world. We focus on affordable luxury US brands and we are globalizing them — brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Kate Spade, Juicy Couture — those are the kind of brands we have license for.
We spun off from Li & Fung in July 2014. The past two and half years have been good for the company. We have been very focused on our model, changing our portfolio of brands, improving it and improving our margins.
Over the past two years, we’ve restructured our compa- ny, restructured our brand portfolio, built our management team, built out our offices around the world, and we divided ourselves into four vertical operations: Kids, Footwear and Accessories, Men’s and Women’s Fashion and Brand Management.
What is the company’s business model?
We license many brands, after that we control the brands, and we pay a royalty. But we design, we produce, we do the logistics, and we act like a brand company would do and we sell, depending on the type of the brand, to everyone or certain types of stores. The higher the brand is, the fewer retail stores we sell to and we may sell lower brands to WalMart.
The beauty of our company is that we have a very wide distribution network and 99 percent of business is to sell to other retailers. We don’t open retail stores ourselves, or sell through e-commerce platforms like Tmall and Amazon. We are a very large wholeseller.
What is your opinion about the global market?
The US is the largest market of our business, and the US market is strong, relatively speaking. The economy is good, generally, the US is in a great shape for consumption, and it is the largest per capita consuming country. The unemployment rate is down, the interest rate is low.
Europe is in the early stage of recovery and the recovery process will take many years. Our business there is relatively small, but we had a very good year in Europe, compared with the previous year.
Age: 58 Nationality: Career: 2014 onward: Chief executive officer, vicechairman and an executive director of Global Brands Group Holding Ltd
2004-11: President of Li & Fung Group
1981-2000: Chief executive officer of Colby International Ltd
Family: Married to Coco Lee since 2011
How about the Asian market, particularly China?
Asia is very new to us, ironically. We’ve been here 110 years, but we always produced here, we didn’t sell here, we didn’t design here. But in the past four years, we have been developing our Asian business and we have offices in different parts of China. Our China headquarters is in Shanghai. Currently in Asia we are focusing on China and South Korea.
In China, we are focused on children’s clothes and brands management.
What is Global Brands’
We are going step by step in China. It takes time to get the right people in China, and to build the right platform, what we don’t want to do is fail. It is easy to say that we can do it.
It is all about people in our business. We are hiring and we are developing people. As our platform is built out more, we will bring more and more US brands to China.
Ultimately, we also want to