Why a career in advertising couldn’t prepare Chris Gove when it came to founding Percival

A former freelancer for the likes of Mother, TBWA, and Weiden + Kennedy, Gove designed campaigns and packaging for the likes of Ski Yogurt and Colgate. He confesses his time as a freelance was tough and disorganized often being left with very little to do. “[Working in] Advertising was so much money but because I was a freelancer and so much of it came to me, I didn’t have enough work, and it was so rubbish,” Gove admits.

While working a “dry” Samsung brief at Wieden + Kennedy, Gove got hit in the face by the office shutter on his way out of the agency’s Soho office and was rushed to hospital. A week before the accident Gove’s mum had shown him a childhood picture wearing a yellow raincoat and the idea had popped into his head to recreate the jacket. He went to buy enough waxed yellow fabric to make a coat, but he had to buy 50 meters committing himself to make 25 coats worth.

“I was in Whitechapel Hospital, and they were gluing my face back together. I was a bit concussed, but my one memory was ‘Fuck it, I’m just going to make these clothes and see what happens’,” he recalls.

Despite the benefit of having worked in agencies and on client briefs for exactly this kind of launch, Gove admits all that insider info went out the door on his first attempts at getting Percival off the ground. The designs “weren’t good, and I had no idea how to sell them”. He tried giving wholesale a go first, pitching to Asos and Topman concession. “I didn’t have a fucking clue what I was doing and whether that was good for the brand, what the brand values were what else I was going to make,” Gove says. “Wholesale is a very hard business model I don't think any brand can exist without a lot of money upfront doing wholesale.”

His next misstep was locking the business into a 10-year lease in a Soho retail space. It was selling just about enough to keep the lights on and produce enough stock, but the store kept getting broken into and eventually, it lost its staff. Gove then ran out of cash. "This was not what it's meant to be like. The fun was completely drained from it,” Gove says. “I knew and liked what we were doing but I knew it wasn’t working.”

Gove took the decision to liquidate the business and sold the existing stock making £30,000. He used that money to relaunch the brand as a direct-to-consumer online-only business. “I learned so much at that point, starting a business account, money, financial advice, business mentors and people who could teach me how to run a business went full time.”

How Percival found its brand

Whilst Gove was trying to find his footing with his first attempt at Percival, he was doing freelance and in-house fashion marketing on the side, namely for GQ. It was here he learned the difference between making conceptual clothes and making garments that could be marketed. “I always feel like the hardest thing to do is to make stuff [clothes] that are interesting, but still sell,” he says.

When launching Percival 2.0 he knew he needed a stronger positioning and so he anchored it around his two loves, football and comedy. The thinking behind adding football to the brand was to find ways to make “football not tribal and how to take it from being a gross 90s version of football,” Gove says.

Gove admits men are still reluctant to talk about what they like to wear and how they’d like to wear it, so Percival uses football comedy to talk about looking great without having to say it. “I knew the position should be to allow people just come and feel very comfortable asking questions and teaching them to dress well without judging,” he adds.

Despite the drama of his first bricks and mortar store, Gove has given a physical store a second shot – this time with a short-term lease. The store has recently been gaining momentum taking £107k in April, a 63% increase from last year. As well as selling clothes the store has a free bar and free coffee. Gove says this adds to making the customer feel comfortable, as opposed to the “cool threshold that is tough to cross”.

He admits customers find D2C retailers hard to gain trust. Two moves have helped validate the brand, Gove explained, the first was to go back to wholesale but selecting just one department store, Liberty’s in London. The second was to use celebrities to market the clothes through a calculated plan to get in front of celebrity stylists.

Percival’s growth strategy

To take the brand to the next level Percival has sought the help of venture capitalists VGC who signed a £5m investment. Last month Cheryl Calegari of VGC and an ex-brand marketer at Beats, Converse and Tommy Hilfiger was appointed non-executive chair at Percival. Along with VGC's head of brand Dan Rookwood as a board director.

Part of VGC’s plans with Percvial is to help it grow and mature through international expansions and collaborations. New York, LA and Northern Europe are the first stages of their plans.

Its first step in the US is focused on New York where Percival plans to leverage football by putting on matches with locals and opening a pop-up store that doubles up as a bar. “I don’t want to go there and assume people [Americans] give a shit about what Britishness I don't think they do,” Gove says. Collaboration with local artists, musicians, and podcasters is crucial to the plan. “I just want to get under the skin of the local culture in order to not assume we know everything,” he adds. Paid media and lead generation marketing will then follow from the organic activations.

On the collaborations side, Gove admits the company is still relatively small so it can’t get in the door with brands like Carhartt or Doc Martins. The strategy instead is to team up with affinity brands Percival’s staff have an interest in. “In the absence of loads of cash was to acquire an audience from the similar thing to you in every other affinity category,” Gove says. That has led to partnerships with the likes of the Off Menu Podcast, Campari, and Sriracha. Next year Gove plans to take this collaboration to the next level by partnering with slightly more mainstream brands.

For Gove, it’s paramount that Percival “feels aspirational, you need to feel like it’s good quality, expensive stuff. And so, while we don’t take the communication of the clothes seriously, we take the clothes seriously, they have to be made well.”