The Great Build - S1, Episode 2

The Great Build is a podcast by Bhartiya Converge, bringing senior leaders together for candid, unscripted conversations about the ideas shaping how organisations think, build, and grow.

In the second episode of The Great Build, host Bill Jordan, Board Member of Bhartiya Converge and former President of Designer Brands, sits down with Peter Wood, CEO of AllSaints and John Varvatos, to explore why a brand-led business chose to build capabilities it owns rather than contract them out.

Peter shares how culture shapes the way companies are built and, ultimately, how they perform. He also reveals the unique metric he uses as a CEO to measure success.

The conversation explores the build versus buy decision, how brand DNA travels beyond the city where it was born, and where the capabilities of the next decade in AI, data and digital product will actually be built.

For CxOs and senior leaders thinking about how to build and scale capability, this is a conversation worth your time.

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Bill Jordan: Welcome to The Great Build podcast, where vision becomes reality.

I'm your host, Bill Jordan, retired retail executive and Board Member of Bhartiya Converge.

In this podcast, I sit down with leaders who are shaping how organisations think, build and transform. Ambitious leaders share how they lead and, in each episode, I bring you one conversation, one leader, one perspective and one set of ideas that can change how you think about the challenges your organisation is facing right now.

This is where ambitious leaders share how they build.

Today's guest is a leader who took one of Britain's most distinctive fashion brands from turnaround to record results, and who is now making one of the most interesting capability decisions in mid-market retail.

Peter Wood joined AllSaints as Chief Financial Officer in 2010 and has led the company as Chief Executive Officer since 2018. He has served as Chief Executive Officer of John Varvatos since 2020, sits on the board of the British Retail Consortium and was named Leader of the Year at the 2025 Drapers Awards. That same year, AllSaints was named Fashion Retailer of the Year.

Peter, welcome to The Great Build podcast.

Peter Wood: Thank you, Bill. It's great to be here.

Bill Jordan: Peter, would you mind starting off by sharing a little thumbnail sketch of AllSaints and John Varvatos? Who's your customer, where are your brands distributed, and what sets your brands apart in the marketplace?

Peter Wood: Sure.

AllSaints, as you mentioned, is a British fashion brand. It's been around since 1994, so it's been around for 32 years now.

I happen to be the longest-serving board member at AllSaints. I've been there half that time, 16 years, and for a quarter of that time I've been CEO. So I've got a good sense of what the brand is all about.

The thing that attracted me to AllSaints in the first place is still what gets me out of bed in the morning to lead AllSaints today.

It's a fashion brand where sales are roughly 50/50 between menswear and womenswear. We have all ages in our customer base, all lifestyles, and we're shipping to many different countries all around the world. We're truly international.

But so what? Many fashion brands could say that they have those dynamics within their customer database.

The thing that I think makes AllSaints really special is that we also transcend income with our customer base.

We have very, very affluent customers and much less affluent, aspirational customers. Both ends of that spectrum are very happy to coexist within our customer base as part of the brand, which is pretty special.

Normally, more affluent people like to be seen to be wearing something different from less affluent people. We don't have that at AllSaints.

The example I always give is the iPhone with Apple. Everyone's allowed to own an iPhone. It doesn't matter what your income is. I think we have that with AllSaints.

I didn't invent that. I didn't create that. But it's very much part of the DNA of the brand and has been for a long time.

Our purpose is to help our customers feel good.

I still believe it's possible to get up in the morning, put on a piece from our brand, look in the mirror and feel just a little bit better about yourself and about life in general than you did before you put it on.

I think that's pretty powerful, and it's a privilege to be able to help so many people feel good.

Our customer base isn't everyone. You have to be interested in fashion. You have to believe that what you wear can help you be who you are and help you express yourself.

There are a lot of people who don't think about what they wear in those terms. They're never going to be customers of AllSaints.

But if you're lying in bed thinking, "What am I going to wear tomorrow?", then we want you to feel very welcome at our brand.

So that's AllSaints.

We're about £400 million in revenues. More than half our business is outside our home country of the UK, and we have 2,000 employees across 16 countries.

John Varvatos is much smaller, at about US$100 million in revenue.

Whereas AllSaints has a very inclusive customer base, John Varvatos is exclusive in the sense that it's a much higher price-point proposition. You do have to have high disposable income to be able to enjoy John Varvatos.

It's a luxury-price-point proposition. It's a menswear luxury brand.

Unlike AllSaints, it's not British. AllSaints is British and John Varvatos is American, based out of New York.

My main office is in London, but I have an office in New York as well, which is where the John Varvatos design team and the relevant parts of that business are based.

I always think of the John Varvatos customer as not only rock stars, because there are real-life rock stars who enjoy wearing John Varvatos, which is amazing. Billy Joel, Jon Bon Jovi, Ringo Starr and Iggy Pop, over the years, have all been customers of John Varvatos.

But the interesting opportunity for me is to target the person who's not an actual rock star, but the gentleman who thinks he's the rock star of his chosen profession.

If you line up 20 dentists in the US, 19 of them will probably be dressed quite conservatively, quite classically. They'll be affluent and well dressed, wearing classic luxury items from classic luxury brands.

But one of them, when he looks in the mirror in the morning, thinks he's the rock star dentist.

He's the guy we think we've got something for at John Varvatos.

Bill Jordan: That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that.

I'm a big fan of both the brands. I have many pieces from both brands. I should have worn my rock star podcasting outfit today, but I didn't.

Peter Wood: I can tell you're a rock star, Bill. It's all good.

Bill Jordan: It's all good.

Well, why don't we jump into the conversation?

Peter, you're a transformational leader, and today I'd like to talk about a transformation that you and your team have been making relating to India.

As a former retail executive myself, and still very much in touch with retail trends, I know many retailers across the globe are looking at India right now for many reasons.

There's access to a humongous talent pool, the cost leverage you can get through salary arbitrage and, importantly, the transformational capabilities available through Indian talent, especially in AI today.

Historically, when retailers have thought about India, they think about outsourcing. But the trend is clearly moving towards GCCs, or Global Capability Centres, where retailers own and control their own teams in India.

That's a big difference.

I want to start by asking you if you could tell us a little bit about your journey around India and GCCs. How did you come to know about these capabilities, and how have your views on Indian GCCs evolved?

Peter Wood: Sure.

I'm thinking about where best to start because there's a lot of things going on that brought us to where we are.

Working with Bhartiya Converge is connected to something I'm a big believer in.

When people ask me what my number one KPI is — how big do you want to be, or how much profit do you want to make as CEO? — I say, actually, genuinely, that's not my primary focus.

That's not my number one KPI.

My number one KPI is: how many of our team love their jobs?

I'm a big believer that, even though I'm financially trained and even though I was a CFO, the numbers are the outputs.

If you want to succeed, it's the inputs that you have to get right.

One of the biggest inputs that I can influence as CEO is the culture of our organisation.

I say that with reference to the outsource-versus-in-house point.

Every organisation has its own culture.

Many organisations have very different cultures from ours. They're more successful than us or whatever. Good luck to them all.

But our culture is what I happen to think is driving the modest but solid, promising and encouraging success we've had at AllSaints in recent years.

That's the first step in my mind towards trying to have something that joins people together and brings people together to deliver the success that I think this brand is capable of.

As regards India specifically, I studied maths and physics at university. At one point back then, I thought I was going to be some crazy scientist off trying to change the world that way.

But I always remember, when I was studying maths and leading mathematicians, how strong India was in terms of how many amazing mathematicians they had.

As a guy who was really passionate about that, I used to read and study and be inspired by that.

You referenced the cost-arbitrage piece in terms of looking at India, but actually for me that's okay, but really I'm looking for quality. I'm looking for capability.

I want our business to perform to the best of its capability.

At the beginning of 2025, I remember standing up in front of more than 2,000 people at our town hall.

We had just managed to eke out another record year, but it was a real fight. It was a lot of hard work to get it over the line.

I said to my team, "Look, moving forward, I'm not going to ask you to work any harder. I can't ask you to work any harder. I can see how hard everyone's working, but clearly the output isn't reflective of all that hard work going in."

We'd managed to deliver another record year, but only just.

I think, as your CEO, what we should be doing is standing back and saying, "If we were going to start AllSaints again today, how would we do it?"

I think it might be a bit different.

Let's let that question breathe.

I think we might do things differently from how we happen to be set up, having 30 years of history behind us.

I try to create space for us to take time out, which is not easy in a fashion retail business because it's 24/7. You're never closed.

But I knew that, as leadership, we owed it to the business and to our teams to stand back and say, "Listen, is there a better way? Can we be faster? Can we be bolder? Can we be smarter?"

Those were the three words that I used: faster, bolder, smarter.

That's the big-picture backdrop to what I was facing as CEO as we headed into the beginning of 2025.

Bhartiya is an apparel producer as part of the Bhartiya Group. It's their origin, although they're doing many other things now as well.

Bhartiya has been a supplier to AllSaints, producing amazing clothing for us, since before I joined.

When I joined in 2010, one of my first trips was to India to meet the Bhartiya team and the Bhartiya chairman.

We've worked with Bhartiya for a long time. They make amazing leather jackets for us and our customers.

I was first made aware of Bhartiya Converge through my existing connections with Bhartiya and Arjun. We met in London and he talked me through what they were developing.

He said, "Just have it in your head as you're sitting thinking about everything you need to do."

I would catch up with Bob Mer and other members of the Bhartiya team in the months that followed.

So the seed was planted.

When I was working with my team in London, figuring things out, there came a moment. I remember it. I think it was about 5:00 one morning when I messaged Bob Mer and said, "Listen, I think it's time."

Because we had that existing relationship with Bhartiya, there was mutual trust to essentially get straight into making it happen versus dancing around the handbags a little bit.

Within less than three months, our merchandising function was crying out for some support.

Bob answered the call and mobilised, and Bhartiya Converge, with my Transformation Chief and my People and Culture Chief, got together and made it happen, obviously with our merchandising team involved as well.

So, a classic case of awareness.

There's a bit of philosophy, the cultural piece. There's a bit of awareness.

And fundamentally, there's also timing.

Timing is everything, and believing when to mobilise.

The other big-picture point, which I haven't mentioned yet, is that I am seeing, believing in and working with my team to deliver AllSaints to many more Indian customers than we have right now.

For many years we've had Bollywood actors and actresses wearing our AllSaints leather jackets and other items.

When India won the World Cup, I think it was two summers ago, I remember someone sent me a photo of the team and one of the young guys in the team was holding the trophy wearing an AllSaints T-shirt.

So I know there has been awareness of AllSaints in India, whether it's in the entertainment industry or in sport, for some time.

I'm betting on India.

I think five years from now, ten years from now, India is going to be at the table with those other countries who think they are the powerhouses in the world.

I think India is going to be there alongside them.

So I want to make sure I think I owe it to our brand to be engaging with India and building connections in India, because my instinct as the leader is that there's opportunity for our brand in India as well, on the customer side.

I think it's huge.

Bill Jordan: Sure.

You talked a lot at the beginning about culture, Peter, and how it's so important and that's what's going to drive your results.

I'd love to ask you about your team in India, because it's your team in India.

How do you feel about the culture there? And then how do you feel the folks in London or your other offices have embraced this change?

Does it feel like one team? Is it separate teams? How would you describe that?

Peter Wood: I'll get specific to our team in India, the Bhartiya Converge team that we have supporting us there, in a second.

But, as a preamble, as the CEO, one thing I've learned is you can never bang the drum enough on culture.

I spend a lot of my time reinforcing, supporting and hammering home, and trying to demonstrate through my own actions and behaviours, the consistency of our culture.

I say that because when any change happens in the business, that's when there can be hesitation and nervousness.

Doing something with Bhartiya Converge, or doing something else that's new and different as part of what I think we need to do to be faster, bolder and smarter, can make people nervous.

The existing team members get a little bit nervous because it's something different. It's something new.

With that backdrop, I'm really pleased with how quickly we got those working relationships established.

It's not easy.

We have a different time zone from our team in London, and the US is actually our biggest market. Our US executives are based in LA, which is about as far away as you can get in terms of time zone from India.

All those challenges were there, but that's where your culture has to see you through.

I often say that when we had the pandemic, our culture had delivered our best-ever results. The same culture got us through the challenges of the pandemic.

We didn't change our culture because something new and different and disruptive was happening. We leaned into our culture, and that culture saw us through.

The same thing has served us well with all the different things we're doing with transformation, including the Bhartiya Converge piece.

It's now not only helping us in merchandising, but also across our technology and a lot of development that we're doing.

We're launching a new website, a new look and feel for AllSaints.com. Bhartiya Converge has technology team members very much in the thick of that, working alongside our technology leadership and team members here in London as well.

One of the things I've recognised since the pandemic, and in retail in general, is that in retail you've got sourcing organisations across the world and offices around the world.

Retail, for many, many years, has been comfortable operating out of multiple places.

The pandemic obviously helped accelerate some of that with home offices. I was very comfortable doing calls.

I had a team in China and in Brazil. Yes, you went there on an occasional basis to make sure you checked in, but you're on the phone with them and they're just part of the team.

The culture that you mentioned, and the leadership you put in various parts of your organisation, really drive those results.

Bill Jordan: I really like that.

Peter Wood: Absolutely.

When I think about having offices around the world, I always did think that there are some things in my business that were very core to the DNA and really had to sit in that home office.

For you, that would be London. For me, that was New York or Columbus.

Can you talk about thinking about that decision? What is so core that you think you need to keep in London or New York? Or are there no sacred cows?

Peter Wood: No, it's a really interesting question.

I'm minded to tell the story of my old dad, my father, who's going to be 84 in a couple of months.

He's up in Scotland with my mother. Thankfully, they're both still with us.

My wife and I have got two relatively young kids, so each Sunday we have a FaceTime call with the grandparents, with my parents, so the kids can have some contact because we're not in Scotland very often.

Each Sunday my dad, who was a policeman, left school at 14 and grew up as the son of a shepherd, doesn't really understand what I do for a living.

So when we jump on FaceTime each Sunday, he says, "How did the shop do this week, son?"

He thinks I run a shop.

He knows it's a big shop because he knows I'm in Tokyo one week or San Francisco the next week or whatever.

But I think there's something useful in that perspective.

If we did have only one shop, if I only had one shop, I'd know every member of my team. I'd know their names. I'd know what they've got going on, anything they need help with away from work as well as at work.

I'd like to think they'd be approaching me and asking me if I can help them and all of that good stuff.

I'd know every garment that's in the store. I'd know it inside out, every stitch. I would know the detail.

I'd know the community that the store is situated in. I'd be active in the community. I'd be a positive presence in that community.

So why is it businesses seem to walk away from that as they scale?

One of the things I really push at AllSaints and John Varvatos, but particularly AllSaints because it has much more scale than John Varvatos, is this:

Every shop's our only shop.

That's the mindset that I want.

Every customer, it doesn't matter if they're not in the glamorous big smoke of London or New York or LA or Tokyo, deserves to feel amazing wearing our brand.

Our team members deserve the same support, and so do the communities that we operate in.

Part of the setup is to try and embed that way of thinking so that we don't get lazy as we scale.

So, back to your question about how that fits.

To help me answer your question about what is core, it just so happens — actually, it hasn't happened by accident — that our head office for AllSaints is above the shop.

We've got a shop in London, which makes sure that we never forget what it's all about as leadership.

The same with John Varvatos.

When we first got involved with John Varvatos, that wasn't the case in New York. So I've made sure it is the case.

We've leased a store on Worcester Avenue in Soho, directly opposite the entrance to our HQ for John Varvatos.

What I'm trying to embed is, again, this notion that scale isn't something you hide behind.

Actually, it's a one-to-one, very personal connection.

If somebody walks into our store in Edinburgh, or one of our Miami stores, and the team member they meet has a frown or is rude to them, then that customer is going to think AllSaints is unhappy, or AllSaints is a rude brand.

It's really important to embed the culture.

I know I'm labouring the point, but I think once you have that, then what sits where becomes less important.

As the world changes, we used to have our customer experience team all sitting in London.

After the pandemic, fewer people were visiting our stores.

So I'm thinking: how can I ensure that our store teams have enough to do so that I don't ever have to think, "Oh, maybe we have too many people in our stores"?

We found a way to have our store teams engage with customers not only who may or may not enter their physical stores, but to help us look after customers who are online or nowhere near their store.

It's a way of redeploying, adjusting and evolving to the world that we live in today.

So I guess I'm very flexible and very open-minded — probably a better way to put it — about where people should be.

It's about whether the talent they're bringing is talent that's going to help us.

Rather than manage physical location, it's about managing performance.

Bill Jordan: Yeah.

You want quality in your team. You want to have access to the best possible team that you can get.

Peter Wood: Exactly.

We've got a very diverse team. I'm very proud of that.

But I have never once said, "Can we have a team that looks like this, with all these demographics?"

I've just said, "Can we have a culture that says, if you think you can help, come on in?"

You're going to be welcome here.

As a CEO, why would you want to limit the talent pool that you have available to you?

I hope that helps answer the question.

It's essentially about embedding the idea that every person is important, every customer is important, every store is important and every community is important.

If you have that and it's solid, then I think it actually gives you more freedom to find the talent that you need wherever that talent shows up, and find a way to make that work for you.

Bill Jordan: I love that answer, Peter.

When I think about the talent pool available in India — 1.4 billion people — they graduate more people in computer science than you can imagine.

They always say to me, every day is Black Friday in India because they do as many transactions every day as the US does on one day a year.

They have a mindset and a capability that's pretty awesome.

Is there any learning you could share with us so far? You've been going through this journey, and it sounds like it's been pretty successful. It sounds like the team's embracing it.

Any key learnings you'd want to share?

Peter Wood: It's that human piece of continuing to bang the drum.

I think you do have to allow for people to be not quite as confident or as comfortable with change as you might hope they would be.

You have to make sure you've got a way of catching that and helping people work through any hesitation or questions.

So, being open, facing into any questions that anyone's got.

I always try and go about my business that way anyway.

But I think sometimes when things are moving quickly — and we had to move quickly because we were crying out for some talent, and it would have taken a lot longer to find that talent through the conventional routes in London — you have to recognise the human side of that speed.

The flip side was that people had new colleagues, not just one new colleague but a whole team of new colleagues, pretty quickly, all on the same day.

With a little bit of hindsight, we could have done a little more to bring everyone together on day one, versus it feeling like we were throwing everyone together.

But the team have got great talent, and both the Bhartiya Converge team that joined us and our merchants in London figured things out pretty quickly from there.

If you're asking for a learning, I think it's just that you have to be on hand to help and give space for anyone to work through anything that's on their mind that they think hasn't been addressed.

Normally, when there's change, the first thing anyone thinks is, "How's this going to impact me?"

But often people are a little bit shy just to say that.

So I think you've got to create a little bit of room for people to get over that and get comfortable with any questions that they might have.

Bill Jordan: I couldn't agree more, Peter.

When I led my businesses, it was all about communication.

Telling the story. Telling it repeatedly, over and over and over again, so that everybody's singing from the same hymn sheet and understanding the why.

Once you have that, you can go really far, really fast.

But if people don't know what you're doing or why you're doing it, it becomes a little bit more challenging.

Peter Wood: Yeah.

Bill Jordan: In our last few minutes, would you mind going to what I call a little rapid-fire close?

Peter Wood: Sure. Sounds like fun.

Bill Jordan: It's pretty quick. Kind of one-word answers. Don't overthink it.

One word to describe the future of retail.

Peter Wood: Essential.

Bill Jordan: I love that.

The most overrated concept in fashion today?

Peter Wood: What happened last year?

Bill Jordan: I like that, too. So true.

One decision every CEO should make sooner rather than later?

Peter Wood: I think maybe, "When it's there, address it."

I think that would be the classic answer I'd give to that one.

Don't let it fester.

I've done that before, and you turn it over and over. A quick decision is always better than a wrong decision.

Bill Jordan: Build versus buy?

Peter Wood: In this context, build. But I would say both generally. I'm open to both.

Bill Jordan: What does The Great Build mean to you? That's the name of our podcast.

Peter Wood: You've stumped me.

Capability to scale. To grow.

It's an enabler. It's a growth mindset.

Bill Jordan: I love that.

One word that you want your team in India to live by?

Peter Wood: Quality.

Bill Jordan: Quality.

That's fantastic. What a great word to close on.

Peter, this has been an awesome conversation. I've really enjoyed it, and I know our listeners are going to take a great deal from it.

Thanks for being so generous with your time and your insights.

Peter Wood: I've enjoyed it a lot too, Bill. It's been really nice to chat.

I'm very excited about what we're doing with Bhartiya Converge.

We're continuing to build on the relationship.

So, nice to talk, and I'll see you again soon.

Bill Jordan: And to our listeners, if this conversation sparks something for you, please share it with others who need to hear it.

We'll see you on the next episode of The Great Build, the podcast where vision becomes reality.

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