Dockers come full circle for 30th anniversary.
Doug Conklyn makes the khaki brand slim, sexy and way cool
When Doug Conklyn, a veteran fashion industry exec who’d worked at Ralph Lauren, Lily Pultizer and Martin + Osa, was asked to join Dockers as chief creative officer in 2010, his reaction was tepid, to say the least.
The chino pantsmaker, he said, struck him as “a vanillaish” commodity that had no sex appeal. “It wasn’t that I thought badly of them,” Conklyn said. “I just didn’t think about them.”
That sums up what a lot of people think about Dockers — at least those who haven’t paid attention in years. Dockers hit the market in 1986 and became the business casual pant for cubicle-dwellers the world over on casual Fridays and beyond, as dress codes relaxed. Sales skyrocketed, and then began to sink. As menswear became more daring in recent decades, Dockers were perceived as dull, safe and bland.
But during the past five years, Dockers has been undergoing a transformation. The stodgy pant in uncomfortably warm fabric is gone, replaced with new styles in trimmer cuts, a rainbow of colors and materials with stretch. And, thanks to Conklyn, it has a new audience. Alpha Khakis, launched in 2011, saw their popularity soar with a version in camouflage print that he introduced. The pant became the biggest seller in company history.
Such radical moves have been part of a push, as Dockers celebrates its 30th anniversary this spring, to achieve two goals: bringing Dockers both back to its roots and into relevancy.
There’s a certain irony in the fact that it’s a 50-year-old skateboarder from rural Pennsylvania who’s helping Dockers with its midlife identity crisis. Only three years ago, Conklyn broke his left humerus in half while doing tricks in an empty swimming pool in San Jose, and has 12 pins and a rod in his arm to prove it.
But he likes taking risks, which is why he may have been particularly suited for the job, along with those industry chops and a lifelong obsession with California cool, too.
“Growing up in a small town, and idolizing skateboards and surfers my whole life, California was about the coolest place in the world,” he recalled. “What I couldn’t figure out was: Khakis are about the coolest apparel product in the world, California is like the coolest place in the world; Dockers are in California, and Dockers makes khakis, but how do we make Dockers cool?”
The first step was to create a point of view. Dockers was making hundreds of styles, in hundreds of fabrics, at different prices for merchants around the globe.
“What you need to qualify to be a Dockers pant,” he used to joke, “is that you need to be a pant. But if you start designing stuff for every different person, then you have no brand.”
Conklyn, who grew up outside Philadelphia, had been an Eagle Scout in high school. He found his dad’s old military khakis in the basement, washed the starch out and wore them until they were threadbare. He had a reverence for heritage, honor, duty and courage and considered attending West Point. “I l loved the uniform,” he said with a laugh. “I’m not going to lie.”
Instead, he majored in En-
glish in college, and found that the world of men’s fashion spoke to his sensibilities — in a different way.
After brief stints at the Eagle’s Eye and Pincus Brothers in Philadelphia, Conklyn joined Ralph Lauren, where he worked as director of neck wear, and learned about heritage, authenticity, color and fabrics from Lauren and his brother, Jerry Lauren. They shopped on weekends in London and visited fabric mills near Italy’s Lake Como.
He also learned about branding from the masters. As boys, the Laurens spent weekends at movie houses in the Bronx, which inspired their cinematic lifestyle campaigns in fashion magazines.
“I remember I was opening a Bloomingdale’s ad and it blew my mind — the car, the dog, the girl, the house,” Conklyn said. “It painted this picture. It wasn’t even the clothes. It was this whole cinematic experience and I was like, ‘I want it.’ ”
Fast forward to Dockers. Conklyn found that its designers in San Francisco were churning out hundreds of styles for the sake of making something different just to sell more pants. And it wasn’t working. Sales were declining.
“At Ralph Lauren, the khaki and the jean were the most rugged, masculine pant of all time,” Conklyn said. “This company owns one of those icons of fashion, and here it
felt like it was just something that we made — we didn’t bleed in khaki blood.”
And so, two months into the job at Dockers, he held a town hall meeting for employees.
“Whether or not I stay here for 10 years, or leave in 10 months or 10 days,” he remembered telling them, “these will still be true: Dockers is American; it’s classic, not contemporary; it’s authentic — influenced by the military, but not a military uniform; and most important, it’s Californian.”
Today, the design team creates about half as many products as it used to, but Dockers’ aesthetic is consistent and its appeal has grown with the introduction of the Alpha khaki style, a trimmer fit, in khaki, camo and blackwatch tartan, pinstripes and paisley.
So far, Conklyn seems to have found the right balance for customers: teenagers in Vans sneakers who wear Dockers the way Baby Boomers wear jeans; guys in red chinos on date nights; fellows who pair khakis with a navy blazer and penny loafers; and those millions of office workers, too.
Conklyn’s monochromatic 30th anniversary collection is an ode to military khaki, with cargo pants, sweaters, jackets, shoes, belts and hats all in the same sandy hue.
His lifelong love affair with khakis continues, even if he’s still in the honeymoon stage at Dockers. Conklyn owes it all to skateboarding, and California dreaming, in his youth.
“It’s sort of come full circle,” he said.
Carolyne Zinko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: czinko@sfchronicle.com