Change suits Topman's main man

Topman is pioneering a sea change in menswear, its design director Gordon Richardson told an audience in Dublin yesterday. "Men today are less shy in talking about fashion," he said.

In the last of a number of public talks for Dublin Fashion Week, the man who turned Topman, a British menswear label losing £40 million a year into a hip brand that now generates a weekly turnover of £3.5 million, which more than doubles at Christmas, said there were "huge opportunities today for menswear designers that didn't exist 20 years ago".

With a creative team of 10 designers, "we try to be the first and we try to take risks. It's a big business and a big team effort."

He described initiatives such as showing during London Fashion Week and giving young designers a foothold in the industry, or encouraging them to reinvent classics such as white shirts, as ways of bringing fresh ideas into the marketplace. Resurrecting an ailing brand was a huge challenge, "but you have to understand your market - in our case it was always a student-based 18-25 age group - then make it interesting.

"Menswear is now working as fast as womenswear and we can react as quickly, too. Our role is to find out what is going on in Europe, in Tokyo, and Los Angeles and building a brand is taking it to places you never thought would react to it. We now have a shop in Japan and one in China."

Links with the music industry and selling online are other factors in reaching a wider audience, he said.

"Young designer projects are making us more aware of what we could have and having such design influence is pretty unusual in the industry, but we are doing it modestly and slowly and really believing in it.

"I have always tried to do things with integrity. But I like being in the hurly-burly and working with and motivating people. In the end it's all about ideas," Richardson said.