Rocha plans restructure of fashion design business

Fashion designer John Rocha has announced plans to restructure his Dublin-based business. According to Mr Rocha, he will no longer be responsible for the manufacture, marketing or distribution of his work, allowing him more time to concentrate on further development of design projects.

In relation to his clothing, he intends to sign a contract before the end of the month with a Portuguese company which will assume responsibility for all production and distribution in this area.

In many respects, these changes are a formalisation of what has already happened within Rocha's business. His company, Glibro Design, was set up in 1994; before that date, the designer had been working with A Wear, part of the Brown Thomas group.

Glibro's finance director, Mr Donal Bolger, said the business had an annual turnover of about £5 million (€6.4 million), but while the company was based in Ireland, more than 90 per cent of Rocha's clothing was manufactured overseas, predominantly in Portugal and Italy.

The new licensing arrangement means that all the company's manufacturing will be carried out overseas, resulting in up to 11 redundancies in the firm's warehousing and administration departments. Plans to hire new design staff should offset some of these job losses, Mr Bolger added.

"Design has always been at the heart of our business," Rocha said. "We have achieved tremendous success in Ireland and internationally on the strength of our creativity and design skills."

Licences only become attractive to manufacturers once the core brand name has become sufficiently strong on the international market.

This is now the case with John Rocha, thanks to the widespread success of his fashion label and the work he has already done with Waterford Crystal. In May 1997, the designer produced a range of glassware for the latter company, sales of which immediately surpassed all expectations; it has an expected turnover of more than £5 million this year.

The Waterford Crystal connection did much to raise Rocha's profile overseas, as have other projects such as his staff uniform designs for the Virgin Atlantic airline and his interior decoration of the recently opened Morrison Hotel in Dublin.

Mr Bolger sees Rocha's business taking on a new structure with separate divisions in fashion, accessories, homeware, interior design and miscellaneous consultancy services.

"Our strategy is to have a whole series of licences," he said. "We will have a team that manages the design side of each project and then there will be licence partners who will look after the manufacturing, distribution and effectively the financing of the product." While Mr Bolger declined to give specific details, he said the firm was at an advanced stage in three major licensing arrangements in clothing and accessories.