6. Richard Wharton - Co-founder of Office, Founder of Offspring, Poste and Poste Mistress

In this episode, Katie chats to Richard Wharton, best known as the Co-founder of Office, Founder of Offspring, Poste, and Poste Mistress. He has over 40 years of experience in the footwear industry. A master of footwear retail, his varied experience stretches from luxury to high street, men's to women's, sports to dress.

He is a self-professed shoe nerd whose chance cash-in-hand job unloading a lorry of espadrilles led to a long-term career in footwear. He also has an unparalleled archive of footwear, about 1.4 million images of every shoe ever bought by his group, and nearly every designer brand from the 2000’s all tagged and categorised. And throughout the podcast shares with us shoe designs that influenced his buying and business.

Listen to his journey from Norfolk schoolboy and a hated factory apprenticeship, to art college and then homelessness in London as he sought his fortune. With frankness and humour, he describes how Office came to being, the evolution of both the brand and function of the business as it went from two men and a van to a fully-fledged chain of premises.

Discover how Office led the way in blending fashion and sport retail and that taking a chance on a design that you love can open doors. With an eye for the unusual and passion for fashion the conversation is a wonderful romp through the mid 80’s fashion madness to the current day.

Find out more behind the importance of scalability and the need to appeal to both ends of the market, the most expensive and coolest shoe at the top down to the decent cheapest version of it.

Katie and Richard finish with a discussion about the challenges facing the future of the Highstreet and a call for a return to middle end footwear creating decent grade products and for companies to take a risk to battle being bland.