Douglas Young, designer and entrepreneur

The name G.O.D. is the acronym for Goods Of Desire, explains Douglas Young, the company’s founder and CEO. It is also one of the many puns for which Young is famous: in Cantonese it sounds like “to live better”, a universal aspiration. G.O.D. embodies a lifestyle philosophy that can apply to almost anything, he says. A quick walk around the company’s 20,000 square foot Causeway Bay flagship reinforces the truth of his claim.

A youthful looking 44, Young is a natural charmer with irresistible energy and enthusiasm, someone who clearly enjoys every minute of his work, despite the long hours that he happily imposes on himself as founder and chief designer. He’s very cooperative and unselfconscious in front of the camera. “If you don’t enjoy the attention, you shouldn’t be in this sort of business,” he says.

Over his checked lumberjack-type shirt and seriously distressed jeans Young is wearing a PLA type jacket of olive green cotton with red collar flashes. “They kept falling off,“ he complains of the flashes, “so I sewed them on”. cIt’s a decidedly unconventional work-day outfit for someone who was named one of Hong Kong’s best-dressed men only a few years ago. He looks surprised, “Was I? They must have been desperate!” he responds in characteristic self-deprecatory style.

Raised in Kowloon Tong and educated in Britain from the age of 14, Young showed exceptional artistic talent at a very young age and his parents sent him abroad to further his abilities. He studied architecture at Sheffield University and the Architectural Association in London. “Boarding school was wonderful,” he says. “I really indulged myself in what I liked to do. Being Hong Kong minded, I studied architecture rather than fine arts. But architecture is the mother of all arts and the training makes you very versatile, whereas if you train as a graphic artist or a fashion designer, your options are more limited. Had I stayed in the UK, where projects are small and manageable, I’d probably still be practising architecture. But Hong Kong projects tend to be huge. So when I returned to Hong Kong in 1991 I started a design practice. Then I met Benjamin Lau, who has extensive retailing and management experience and together we started G.O.D.”

The time abroad enabled him to view familiar Hong Kong icons with new eyes when he returned to Hong Kong, says Young. “It didn’t have to be Britain, it could have been any environment that was different. But I do love the British sense of humour, the tongue-in-cheek approach that you see in my products. During the first 14 years of my life I didn’t realise that my home town is so special and interesting,” Young says.

About 95 percent of G.O.D.’s ideas are initiated by Young, who then he passes them to his design team of about a dozen. The G.O.D. team only designs its merchandise as the company does not have its own manufacturing facilities. Like everyone else, they make a great many of their products in China. But many manufacturers are not too keen to work with G.O.D. as the quantities are small and they are very particular about details, says Young. Expansion would create a larger critical mass and make it possible to order in greater quantities, but Young is cautious about growing too big and losing the essence of the brand. So far, the company has only about 100 employees all-told, including shop staff and back-office administratorsAs with everything else, Young has his own approach to recycling. Photographs accumulated over the past two decades have been distilled into books of images and into the three “signature” lines of G.O.D. merchandise featuring old Yaumatei tenement buildings, classified advertisements in Chinese newspapers and mailboxes. “I’m one of those people who find it hard to throw things away. Luckily I have a shop!” The hardest challenge in the store is to keep things reasonably tidy, says Young. “We don’t have a formula. I’m very hands-on, so I’m the one who does everything, even arranging the flowers and choosing the music. I find it hard to delegate!”

Sometimes Young’s visual or verbal jokes attract a little too much attention and this can backfire, like the 14K T-shirts and postcards that were confiscated and resulted in the arrest of Young and 17 of his staff for infringing anti-triad legislation.

No formulas
G.O.D. is still privately owned and for the moment at least Young has no ambition to see the company listed on the stock exchange. He’s in no hurry to grow the company unless he can find the right people to work with him. “Perhaps we could expand by joining up with a strategic partner like a landlord or someone with retail experience. We would have to be more accountable, but hopefully to someone with compatible ideas.”

G.O.D. products sell well in Singapore and in London, and the stationery is popular in France. Twenty-something mainlanders buy the tee-shirts and other goods that hark back to the Cultural Revolution. The challenge is to transplant the brand to places that do not have knowledge of Hong Kong, where they still see Hong Kong as exotic, not part of the mainstream, as Young puts it. “We’ve missed a few chances to open shops in China. We didn’t pursue opportunities that arose and they went to other people. But we need to find the right partners.

“G.O.D. is not a chain, it’s not a formula business. The appeal of G.O.D. is quite personal. If we want to expand, the trick is to keep the personal touch while we develop the brand. We’ve had a few offers to take the brand overseas, but we wouldn’t open something this size. It’s a challenge to condense it without losing the essence. There are lots of in-jokes that only Hong Kong people understand, so how can we transport it overseas?

“In general, the rest of the world does not have a very good understanding of Hong Kong other than the clichés. I often see the brand as a kind of cultural ambassador,” Young says. “Our books show the unique nature of Hong Kong. But we need more signature products with universal appeal.”

Hard to copycat
Shoppers in G.O.D.’s Hollywood Road store are mostly Westerners, while in the Tsimshatsui and Causeway Bay stores most patrons are Hong Kong locals, with some Japanese and Koreans in the latter, says Young. G.O.D. has received the doubtful accolade from Mongkok pirates of copycat versions of items like T-shirts, albeit using a different font. But the company introduces new designs so often that the pirates must move fast to catch up. It is tempting to compare G.O.D. and Shanghai Tang, but Young says he thinks Shanghai Tang has greater appeal overseas rather than in Hong Kong. “Shanghai Tang is perhaps more a souvenir shop for upmarket visitors whereas most of our clients are local (including foreigners). Our objects are functional and reasonably priced although they are not cheap.”

Spoken in Cantonese, the apparently innocent English exhortation, ‘Delay No More!’ sounds like one of Hong Kong’s most frequently heard curses and it is emblazoned on many of G.O.D.’s most popular T-shirts. The in-joke took on a new dimension with the opening of the Delay No Mall in late 2007. When the lease was coming up for renewal at the flagship store in Causeway Bay, a rent increase seemed inevitable. So Young and his team started looking elsewhere and in the process met the developer of a new shopping centre in Yee Wo Street.

In the end, the threatened increase never happened and G.O.D. stayed where it was. But in the meantime the Yee Wo Street developer had decided that he very much wanted the G.O.D. team to be involved in his project. “It wasn’t our intention to establish a mall. But the developer really wanted us,” says Young.

“He even came up with the name. It’s been disappointing that development of the mall has been quite slow. The F&B is still not sorted out. The new zebra crossing will help and the additional food outlets – mostly burger joints and Chinese takeaways – should bring people in. It will be like a food court: there isn’t one close by and even in the midst of an economic downturn, people working nearby still need to eat. But things take much longer with so many different tenants. Here (at G.O.D.) it’s my money and I call the shots so things happen fast.”

G.O.D. shall provide
Retailing everywhere has been badly hit since the economic crisis and G.O.D. has been affected like everyone else. “Until now we’ve seen approximately 10 percent growth in our sales year on year, but this year it’s pretty flat although it’s not actually down,” says Young.

“Nobody knows what’ll happen next. At least before Chinese New Year we’re resisting the idea of a big sale – that would affect our brand image. We’re hoping for good home ware sales in the lead up to Chinese New Year, as this is when Chinese customarily change their furniture. October was the worst for us, but in November things started picking up with the approach of Christmas. We turned up the music and increased our budget for decorating to cheer people up and make them feel more like spending. With hindsight I should have ordered more fairy lights – people want to buy them, but we’ve used them all ourselves!”

“We could apply the G.O.D. lifestyle philosophy to anything – a restaurant or a hotel. It all depends who we bump into next,” says Young. So the obvious question is, what about a hotel? A boutique hotel, naturally. Young takes up the suggestion with alacrity, it seems this is not the first time he has considered the idea. “If I were to do a boutique hotel it would be in a tenement building with wooden partitions, washing outside the windows and work going on outside.”

In his spare time, Young spends time with his beloved dogs. He goes skiing or revisits England whenever he can take a longer break. “When I lived in London I didn’t realise how important it was to me. In the UK people don’t want change, it’s very expensive and there’s a feeling of inertia. But Hong Kong is still a happening place. It’s a city of change. If you work hard, everything is possible.”