Upon meeting Douglas Young, it is easy to forget that the founder of acclaimed Hong Kong retail brand G.O.D is no stranger to controversy. Young is well mannered to a fault, and begins proceedings by - rather helpfully - providing a detailed run-down of his company’s operations.
Given the critical success that G.O.D enjoys in Hong Kong, Young’s approach is a little disarming. It seems unlikely, for example, that many people in the media are unaware of what his company does.
Presumably, Young’s brushes with controversy are part of the same strategy. In December last year, the company achieved the rare distinction of having the advertising campaign for its new ‘Delay no more’ clothing line rejected by the South China Morning Post after thousands of complaints drew the newspaper’s attention to the similiarities between the English tagline and the ubiquitous foul-mouthed Cantonese phrase that it closely resembles.
Young professes a certain amount of innocence about the incident, but adds, rather more tellingly: “As long as everybody knows about it, then it’s fine.”
Public relations, it appears, is top of Young’s agenda when it comes to brand-building, an approach that has garnered his brand reams of positive press coverage, if not spectacular financial success.
Still, Young is fairly satisfied with the progress G.O.D has made since it launched in 1996, via an unconventional series of print ads that depicted ordinary scenes of city dwellers in Hong Kong. After growing up in the UK, where he trained as an architect, Young returned to the city of his birth to find a place that “didn’t seem to have a brand that represented it”.
Out of this insight G.O.D was born, meeting a thirst for mid-range furniture and - at the same time - tapping into a sense of nostalgia for Hong Kong’s past. “My inspiration is really the streets of Hong Kong,” says Young, an avid photographer who remains in charge of G.O.D’s 12-person creative team.
Young’s affinity for brand-building was evident early on, when he launched the kind of retail space that marked a significant departure from the bland, brightly-lit facades of luxury retailers and bargain-basement mass-market shops alike. “Shopping should be like theatre,” he explains.
G.O.D now has three outlets in Hong Kong, each of which inhabits a quirky space dotted with remnants of Hong Kong from the ’70s and ’80s. Old Chinese mailboxes and graffiti mingle freely with handbags printed with pictures of housing tenements and Communist motifs to create an overall effect that has proved resoundingly popular with certain sectors of both local and expatriate communities in Hong Kong.
Unsurprisingly, the G.O.D approach does not always sit well with a local population that often appears enamoured with a more upmarket, Western approach. “We have a very polemic customer base - they either like it or they don’t,” admits Young. “There are some locals that would like a Western look, and to them, upmarket often equals Western.”
What, then, does Young make of the recent trend to brand Hong Kong properties as fantastic creations out of the French Riviera? “It’s crass and horrible,” he states. “It’s just a joke.”
Young does not see much point, it seems, in employing any agencies, although his initial defence — “to keep costs down” - is a little diversionary.
“It doesn’t take me long to come up with what I want and I know how to get it,” he says, pointing to G.O.D’s outdoor billboard as an example. “It’s blurred, but the technique is not important. It’s the message that matters.”
More recently, Young has been enlisting a range of partners to get his message across, co-branding creations with the likes of Alfa Romeo, Xbox and - for the Delay No More line - Greenpeace.
“We like to work with brands that are very different from us,” he points out. “That’s when you get cross-fertisilation.
The approach has resulted in the rather unlikely scenario of the Delay No More ‘Reality T-shirt’ range being appropriated by Hong Kong’s democracy movement.
“We ended up having to come up with a democracy design for them,” he explains. “I’m not a political person, but if they’re going to do it, I’d rather do it - or it could turn out ugly and ruin our brand.”
Douglas Young’s CV
1996 Founder and CEO, G.O.D
1990 Managing director, Young Associates