The lyrically named Mary-Adair Macaire – part Irish, part Scottish, all
American – is having a crisis. I have asked for her date of birth, having
already promised I wouldn’t. We journalists can be mean like that. “Andrew,”
she squeals in her Philadelphia accent, “I am a single girl in town, don’t
ruin my chances.” Then she gives a deep, rather sexy, laugh. “Oh God, now I
can see the banner headline, and the . . .”
We’ll try to keep it low key for sensitive readers. Macaire, new boss of the
knitwear firm Pringle of Scotland, just giggles. You want to be severe on
her and her indeterminate age – some think she is 43 – but it’s hard not to
be impressed by her chutzpah.
For starters, Macaire, previously global marketing boss at French fashion
house Chanel and five years divorced, is not your usual haute couture ice
maiden. Warm and funny, she has a nice line in sardonic humour and is adept
at the tricky art of gentle flirting. She is also deadly serious about what
she does, and has a difficult job on her hands.
Pringle, bought by Hong Kong’s Fang family in 2000, has been repositioning
itself for the best part of a decade, sloughing off its golf-sweater past
and trying to recast itself as a fashion-led, luxury brand.
Kim Winser, once at Marks & Spencer, now at Aquascutum, started Pringle’s
transformation nine years ago, opening its first shops and turning it
trendy. Douglas Fang, son of the owning family, part of a dynasty that made
its fortune manufacturing clothes in the Far East, ran the business from
2006 to 2008, closing its knitwear mill at Hawick, the base that spawned the
firm back in 1815.
But neither Winser nor Fang could push the loss-making company into the black.
So now here is Macaire, a lawyer by training, tough but glamorous, trying to
work her magic, as the global economy crashes all around her.
No worries, she says, suddenly steely.
Recession brings opportunity, as customers seek lasting value from an
investment in quality. She is also the first of Pringle’s bosses with a real
luxury-brand pedigree. “I’m a luxury girl,” she grins.
She certainly wears the brand well. Pixie-faced and bare-armed, wrapped in a
tight, black Pringle dress and teetering in Pierre Hardy high heels, she
looks effortlessly chic. Her eyes are almost too pale for colour and her
auburn hair sweeps her shoulders. She spends a lot of the interview picking
off stray strands as she speaks. She can’t bear to present an unkempt image.
Her whitewalled office in London’s Sloane Street is similarly well-composed,
dominated by a beautiful, antique table.
“I bought it in Antwerp. It’s made in the same year Pringle started. I
couldn’t resist,” she purrs.
But you need more than heritage and image skills to establish a luxury brand.
Further up Sloane Street the competition jostles shoulder to shoulder:
Gucci, Hermès, Bulgari, Dolce & Gabbana, Valentino, Yves St
Laurent, Pucci.
No wonder Pringle has found it hard to get noticed. And after Gucci and
Burberry led the way in the 1990s, it was always going to be a late starter.
Macaire cuts me short. “There’s no such thing as a late starter.” Customers’
curiosity just has to be piqued. She has a vision of her brand as a seamless
connection between old and new, where heritage items like classic Argyle
sweaters and twin-sets sell side by side with cutting-edge fashion. The
implication – though she is careful not to criticise what has gone before –
is that the link between old and new has yet to be properly forged.
“Did you know that Pringle invented the twin-set?” she asks, incredulous.
“Chanel has made a fortune from twin-sets, and I had no idea. Grace Kelly
wore Pringle. I think maybe we have been ignoring the old for the new, but
these are things that people always liked about Pringle. We just have to
make it relevant.”
That play on old and new is what she has been hired for. It has been the
bedrock of success at privately-owned Chanel, where designer Karl Lagerfeld
has produced variants of clothing classics, like the Chanel jacket, for two
decades. Perfumes, watches, jewellery, shoes and cosmetics have been
successfully spun off that couture base.
But Chanel is a business with estimated $3 billion (£2 billion) revenues and a
global profile. Pringle has a worldwide turnover of about £60m, and is still
low key in markets like America. What tempted Macaire, who was at Chanel for
more than 20 years, to make the leap?
She smiles. “I just thought some time you need to leave a place of safety and
take a dive from a high board.”
No coincidence, then, that Chanel had recently appointed another American,
Maureen Chiquet, 45, as chief executive?
Not at all, says Macaire, they got on well. The key factor was the job on
offer.
She was already a big fan of Pringle’s creative director Clare Waight Keller,
whose work plays on classic 1960s iconography and the company’s rich
Scottish heritage. She also received assurances from the Fangs about
funding. Contacts within the industry say that the timing was crucial.
“Mary-Adair needed to get to the next level,” says Ginny Hershey-Lambert,
senior vice-president at the New York retailer Bergdorf Goodman. “She’s got
all the skill sets and she’s very good at understanding what the customer
wants. And Pringle has a lot of potential.”
Macaire’s career path could have been very different. She was born the eldest
of four siblings in a Philadelphia family with Irish-Scottish roots and
trained to be a maritime lawyer. Her father was an executive at an
electrical company, her mother an interior designer. But Macaire rebelled
when she started clerking for law firms in her student holidays. “I realised
it was just dotting the Is and crossing the Ts for someone else’s creative
work.”
Instead, she looked for a job in advertising and found one at the marketing
department of Tiffany’s, the jeweller. They started her on the sales floor,
where one customer was so impressed that she immediately offered her a job.
That customer was the head of distribution for Chanel in America. Macaire
left Tiffany’s and never looked back. She went on to run Chanel’s clothing
business in America before taking on global marketing, based in Paris.
That jump between continents, she admits, suddenly put her on headhunters’
lists. “There are a lot of companies looking for people with a global
perspective.”
Macaire now promises a raft of changes to give Pringle a sharper profile and
make customers search it out. Those changes include a refit of its clutch of
shops – “walk down any fashion street, you see one limestone mausoleum after
another” – and another cull of its third-party distribution outlets.
That echoes the changes that were first introduced by Winser. She also wants a
broader range of goods: Pringle is already selling dresses, coats, suits and
bags. And Macaire is bemused that many in Britain still associate the brand
with golfer Nick Faldo, sponsored by Pringle in the 1990s. Nothing since has
really stuck.
“The fundamental challenge for me is communication: who we are, what our
product is all about. So many people say, ‘we had no idea you do this
stuff’. It’s a little bit frustrating, as we’ve been so quiet.”
But continued investment requires nerves of steel in a global recession. Has
she got the money? She nods. Pringle will not cut advertising.
And the effect of the general economic downturn? “The customers who purchase
luxury are not now purchasing five-and-dime alternatives, they are just
buying less and asking more questions. That’s fine. It leaves a brand like
ours with an opportunity. It’s not just about cutting costs – you can’t hide
right now.”
Those are brave words if she is shrinking distribution – and hence sales – in
the short term. She shrugs.
“I have to think how I am going to cut the losses. I have to be creative;
there are things I could do that would be easy, like a moratorium on
advertising, but how stupid would that be? Communication is the key issue.”
And how will we know if she is succeeding? “If we’re still alive,” she says,
and then gives another gutsy laugh. Behind her, a computer screen saver
scrolls by: “All glory is fleeting”.
A bit premature? She blushes. “It’s from the scene in Patton, Lust For Glory,
about the slave whispering in the Roman general’s ear on a triumphal march.
But, um, not that I need to remember that, obviously, oh God . . .”
She dissolves again. She is clearly a woman of surprises. The next day she
rings with her serious voice on, keen to reiterate some points about
Pringle’s strategy.
What you have to realise, she says, is that knitwear is still a boom sector,
and Pringle has a longer heritage than most. Hence, in theory, it’s got a
better business base than luxury names based on raincoats or leather goods.
It just needs that special something. Has Macaire got it? We’ll see.
andrewdavidson.biz
The life of Mary-Adair Macaire
VITAL STATISTICS
Born: undisclosed. “I’m a single girl in town. Don’t ruin my chances.”
Marital status: divorced. “Can’t you just say single?”
School: Overbrook, Philadelphia
University: Hood College, Maryland, and Tulane University, New Orleans
First job: paralegal at a Washington law firm
Pay: undisclosed
Home: Belgravia. “And I’d like to buy somewhere on the beach. I want to find
my Nantucket here.”
Car: blue and black 1963 Bentley
Film: Un Homme et Une Femme
Music: “Anything from Tricky to Thomas Tallis”
Book: Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
Gadget: “My Apple iPod, the biggest one”
Last holiday: Rajasthan in India
WORKING DAY
THE Pringle chief executive wakes at 5.30am in her apartment in London’s
Belgravia. “It’s a kind of quiet area. I only see chauffeurs and nannies,
but it was the only apartment I could find with high ceilings and decent
floors. I miss my Paris neighbourhood.”
Mary-Adair Macaire walks to her office above Pringle’s flagship store on
Sloane Street by 9am, and often goes straight into meetings. “There is so
much that is new to me here, and it’s important that I am there for people.
But I am not a micro-manager.” She meets contacts at London’s fashionable
venues – Scott’s, the Wolseley, the Berkeley, Claridge’s – and works until
late. “This business is about using both sides of the brain. You have to be
creative as well as analytical.”
DOWNTIME
MARY-ADAIR MACAIRE rides to relax. “I love horseback riding. I did have a bad
fall and I got kicked in the face, but I went to Ireland recently and rode
to regain my nerve.”
She used to drive rally cars as a hobby with her former husband. “We did the
Carrera Panamericana in Mexico with vintage cars.” Now she is more likely to
be found walking her Welsh Terrier Rollo in one of London’s parks. Otherwise
she spends her money on travel and clothes. “Clothing is part of my
compensation package, but I also spend a lot.”
