They started with €750 and little to lose in the post-9/11 downturn. Now the pair behind the Counter Propaganda label have set their sights on international success, writes Gillian Hamill
Counter Propaganda, a funky Irish menswear label, is the brainchild of two 28-year-old Dubliners, Fergal Swan and Richard Doody. The pair has a flair not just for design but also for entrepreneurship. They launched the label less than four years ago, but already it is sold by 25 stores around the country, including BT2 and Arnotts.
Swan, who graduated from the National College of Art & Design in 2002 with a degree in fashion, provides the creative vision behind each season's collection. Doody, who has been learning about business since his mother co-founded Lir Chocolates, deals principally with sales, marketing and finance.
They seem a perfect team to make a mark in fashion. It wasn't immediately apparent, however. As with many home-grown success stories, it all started with "a conversation in the pub". It was also a question of making the best of a bad situation. Doody, who has a degree in engineering from NUI Galway, found that after 9/11 many US multinationals put a freeze on international contracts, making it harder to get top jobs. Taking a gamble on the fashion industry seemed like a reasonable, if unlikely, alternative.
The duo started with just €750 in the summer of 2003, selling T-shirts from a stall at Cow's Lane market in Temple Bar. By February 2004 Counter Propaganda had become their full-time occupation. Growing sales made production ever more difficult, however. Swan remembers an order worth €10,000 in September 2004. "I spent three weeks sitting at a sewing machine, with Richard in front of me ironing, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. It was horrible," he says. They were saved from cabin fever when they met a customer with a supply contact in Portugal. They outsourced production for spring 2005 and have been doing so ever since.
With supply sorted, the team could concentrate on trying to make Counter Propaganda - or Propag&a, as they like to style it - Ireland's top streetwear brand. Now they are keen to get into overseas trade. As Doody points out, "the Irish fashion industry is worth €13 million, whereas the European market generates €450 million, so we'd be crazy to stay just in Ireland".
The duo secured six UK accounts at London Fashion Week, and next week they'll be exhibiting their designs at Bread & Butter Barcelona. The prestigious trade show attracts 80,000 international buyers from stores such as Selfridges, House of Fraser and Macy's. Over three manic days many of next season's key trends will be decided on and bought.
Swan and Doody have been painstaking in their preparations, making sure every detail of their brochures, photo shoots, samples and stand will help them pack a serious punch.
"It's the nature of the business that there will always be a certain amount of craziness in the run-up to a show," says Doody. "If you prepare the collection too far in advance it's going to be off-trend . . . People won't know why they don't like it - they just won't - because it won't be as close to cutting-edge fashion. This show will be more about networking, and picking up agents to sell our stock, rather than writing orders. We want to be seen against the best and make an impression, letting everyone see we're new and fresh."
Then they'll be flying straight back to Ireland to pitch the Counter Propaganda tent, for the fourth time, at the Oxegen music festival, in Co Kildare next weekend. Later in the summer they will also set up a stall, for the third time, at the Electric Picnic festival, in Co Laois. Swan and Doody are by now dab hands at selling at festivals - knowing, for example, to bring four types of mobile-phone charger, to save the day for festival-goers frantically searching for friends equipped only with dead phones - but they also know festivals can involve 18-hour days. They liken them to giant versions of nights out when they're the only sober ones in a group of drunk people, because the task of running the stall means sometimes "you're the only sane person for miles around".
But they thrive on the buzz at festivals, which they reckon provide excellent opportunities to hear what customers think of their designs. "At festivals people are drunk enough not to be inhibited about giving their opinion. Normally when we show our collection to people they will be really polite and say everything's great, or else they'll start slagging it for a joke. But at festivals people will say it's either deadly or useless - there's no deception."
The pair are hoping their latest collection will also get a good response. Each collection has a theme; this one's is illusion. One T-shirt has an arc of either bunnies or ducks, depending on which way it catches your eye. Others have Rubik's cubes and a design based on the dots used in psychological assessment.
Then there's one showing George Bush in a rap pose at the White House under the caption "Just say yo", inspired by the time the US president apparently greeted the British prime minister with the words "Yo, Blair" at a G8 summit. Our advice? There's no need to look for a subversive message. Just say yo.
See www.counterpropaganda.ie