We want to help U.S. entrepreneurs, small business owners, and brands and companies of all sizes sell their goods to the growing Chinese consumer class. Chinese consumers will get to buy the American products they want. This, in turn, will help create American jobs and increase U.S. exports.
Chinese brands will face many obstacles when marketing to Western consumers. Beyond the associations with poor quality and unsound environmental practices, they generally do not have the marketing capabilities or budgets to build powerful global brands.
There was a shop in Birmingham called Autographs, where I'm from in Birmingham. My uncles and dad used to shop there. They played professionally, too. When I started, I went to Autograph, and they had brands like Rick Owens. There are loads of brands, like my go-to brands that I will go to if I want to buy jeans, like DSquared or Balmain.
Haier, a Chinese brand, exemplifies the trend of emerging market companies building brands that are being accepted, if not recognized, by the Western consumer.
If the Chinese economy can be opened so that currencies are convertible, Chinese tourists can take money and go see the world. Chinese businessmen can go and buy property in the U.S. and France and every place. All of a sudden, it's just going to be a blossoming global economy. I think it's going to be good for everybody.
Let's hope brands recognize that the true power of this technology is not its reach but its ability to communicate substance that adds meaning to our lives. Otherwise, brands will be investing in technology that consumers simply won't buy.
At the end of the day, people (customers) don't necessarily buy into what you do; they buy into why you do it. People buy Apple because they love the Apple brand - what it stands for - they feel proud to be associated with that brand. What makes Google or Virgin or any of these 'superior' brands what they are is that they have a mission to change the world. Those are the kinds of companies that will endure the test of time.
I'm fed up with Britain being condemned to this future where we borrow the Chinese in order to buy from the Chinese the things that they make for us.
I want young people to be able to buy into what I design. When I was young, I wanted to buy designer brands even if all I could afford was the cheapest wallet, the cheapest pen, the cheapest T-shirt because I wanted to be a part of it.
Buy products of genuine lasting value from brands that take their manufacturing seriously. I have things that are 75 years old, like the dinner suit of my grandfather's that was made in 1933 by a tailor in Edinburgh. Clothes develop stories. You can remember where you've been through clothing that you've worn. I want products that are going to endure. I hate that we buy things that are disposable. We need to buy products with integrity.
A lot of Americans desperately want to believe that China is full of poor people who can't innovate, and the only goods they make are cheap, toxic rip-offs our Western brands. They want to believe the only reason the Chinese economy is surging is because the West wants cheap goods and China knows how to make them that way.
The Chinese concept of rights arose, then, in a context of power. Western nations had become powerful enough, and imposed their will in nakedly aggressive fashion, so that they had to be addressed in their terms. Eventually rights in Chinese thought are attributed not just to nation states but also to individual people.
Too many companies want their brands to reflect some idealised, perfected image of themselves. As a consequence, their brands acquire no texture, no character and no public trust.
Brands are in your face 24/7; I'm sure you've consumed a couple brands today. So it's fun working with them. People recognize brands, and people are starting to recognize my brand.
They [Chinese] have very smart, experienced people. I don't want to paint them all with the same brush. There was a little bit of a feeling that the stock market, which went from something like $4 trillion in valuation to $10 trillion, that the Chinese wanted that.
When I was a little girl, if I didn't eat my soup, my mother would say, 'You have to think of all the Chinese children who have nothing to eat.' But now, for my children, Chinese people make everything, and for my grandchildren, they buy everything.