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She may be a Westie, but Karen Walker’s not into living the slow life. She works every day—often till three in the morning—and has just opened her first offshore flagship in Taiwan.  So what drives her? And is Walker still flying the flag back home?

Idealog July/August, page 30. Photograph by Derek Henderson

You weren’t able to show at Air New Zealand Fashion Week last year. Was that a hard decision to make?

Well, we had a piss-up.

The most important thing, surely!

A lot of the time that’s all people want from Fashion Week isn’t it?

It’s all about everyone getting together and having a good time. And we had no choice—we couldn’t show because the schedule was moved to the same week as New York Fashion Week. We only got back three days before the one here.

But did you feel pressured, or obligated to support the New Zealand fashion industry?

The only person I have an obligation to is myself.

Okay, so you’ve done New Zealand and you’ve done it well—are you done with it?

No. The focus is firmly on making an interesting product—wherever it sits in the world. The focus is primarily on the product and not so much on the market. We’ve been working in a global niche way for a long time, rather than a ‘that market—tick, onto the next one’ kind of thing.

You speak a lot about selling to PLUs (people like us). Have the PLUs changed as you’ve got older?

I started this when I was 18 and I’m 37 now, so the product’s changed in that time. I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve grown older, or that I’ve become more experienced—maybe a better designer, or maybe a worse one. But has the audience changed with it? I don’t know. If you look at the people who come to our stores, there’s everybody from the 14-year-old girl who wants a pendant for her birthday, to a 60-year-old lady who wants a nice pair of slacks. But if you ignore the age differences and the career differences, there’s a common thread in their personalities. I meet a lot of my customers and what they all have in common is that they’re interesting people. They’re all a lot of fun to be with, which is great, because it would be awful if they were all really boring.

You have namesake clothing, eyewear, Swanndris, jewellery and paint. Do you always like to learn about new things?

Yeah, I really enjoy the process. When we went into jewellery four years ago, I didn’t know the difference between carats in stone and carats in gold. And it was just one of those things … you think oh I’ll learn about that one day—yeah, when I learn about wine.  And so I knew nothing. All I knew was what I liked in terms of idea and design. I was constantly throwing designs at our craftspeople and they’d say “How do you expect us to make that? It’s physically impossible!” But after six months I felt completely comfortable in that world. So, you know, you’ve got to learn and I enjoy that element of it, but really what I enjoy most is the product.

Do you have work/life balance, or is work life and life work?

I don’t know what I’d think about, if I didn’t have this. Life would be pretty boring. I don’t think of it as work, this is what I do and I’m often doing it seven days a week—at nine o’clock or at midnight or three in the morning when I should be sleeping, or whenever. Everyone I know, everyone around me, all have really big projects in the areas that they work in. I don’t really see any other way of doing it either—because everybody who I look up to, love and like hanging out with, lives exactly the same way.

Are you a big believer in motivational courses and books?

I don’t read any motivational books. I think there’s a lot to be said for having an environment around yourself—whether it’s courses or books or people—that opens up space for you to see new possibilities. And over the last 20 years for me it’s been in terms of the people I surround myself with.  You know I have Mikhail [Gherman, Walker’s husband] and a terrific board, and I have mentors, friends, business associates, etcetera, who just are doing exciting, unreasonable things. That’s how I keep myself motivated as well as giving myself unreasonable kinds of projects. For me it’s not in reading books, it’s in getting out there and doing it—and surrounding myself with interesting people.

Bob Harvey said in his book Westies that your passion for clothing and design is matched only by your concern for the environment. Is he right?

He’s right in that I’m interested in the environment in terms of things like I drive a hybrid car. And he’s right in that I care about the environment in terms of the surroundings in which I live—because I’ve got 12 acres of forest out in Swanson and I get a lot of joy from that. A great Sunday for me is driving out to Te Hinga and having a cup of coffee in the café in the sand dunes and going for a walk. And so I think he possibly meant it in two ways.

How do you incorporate environmental concern into your business?

As many ways as we can: reduce, reuse, recycle; photocopy both sides of the paper; don’t have lights on unnecessarily; offset all our carbon emissions in cars and air travel. We’re looking into other ways to be completely carbon-neutral in the next 24 months.

Do that do-able?

I don’t know if it is or not—it’s a huge process—but we’re in the second stage of it now. It’s more than just offsetting air travel. We’re moving away from using cotton as much as possible, and moving away from using inorganic cotton when we do use it. This season the new t-shirt we’re doing is 40 percent organic cotton and the rest is hemp. The whole thing is never going to be perfect, and it’s never going to be complete, because how can it be?  But it’s very much where modern businesses should be looking now, and I apply that to my own. We’re really questioning everything that we do. 

How do you reconcile your environmental concerns from your seat at the helm of consumerism? Don’t we need to buy less stuff?

We do need to buy less stuff. I know, it’s irreconcilable—the two ideas are conflicting. And I do struggle with that, but I believe there is a way to reconcile it, but I just don’t know what it is yet. I’m still searching.

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