Ross Bailey: Appear Here’s ideas man

It’s very easy when you spend a day with Ross Bailey, the founder of Appear Here, to get caught up in his enthusiasm for life and retail. This is a man who works at 100mph and expects you to too. He does not sit still. Ever. But nor does anyone else at Appear Here. Which is probably why this start-up – born from a Diamond Jubilee fashion stunt where its failure made it a success – has grown, it says, to become London’s biggest retail broker by volume and value in little more than five years. Not that Appear Here would ever call itself a broker, of course. That’s old-school real estate speak. What Appear Here is in the business of, says Bailey, is making ideas happen. Appear Here, if you haven’t heard of it, is like an Airbnb for retail. It is a marketplace for individual entrepreneurs and some pretty big brands to find the right space for their own audiences. It officially started life in 2012, following an epiphany Bailey had during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee when the then 20-year-old made his first foray into fashion. To celebrate the jubilee, he was going to create something that wasn’t souvenir tat, he was going to create something iconic. A T-shirt with the Queen’s face, doctored to look like Ziggy Stardust. Lizzie Stardust. Genius. Bailey convinced Shaftesbury to give him a space and, boom, he was in retail. Until the T-shirts got banned. Which was almost immediately. But the ban was the making of Bailey. The T-shirts suddenly became a must-have and the theatre created around how you got hold of one – having to buy them prohibition-style with an invite from a friend – fuelled it. Hundreds of people queued to get their hands on one. “This is where the idea came from,” says Bailey. “We had set up a website but what we sold in one month on the website was what we sold in one day in the store. We were getting discovered because we were on the street.” Because there was an audience. It is a story that Bailey shares with everyone who comes to work at Appear Here. It builds the excitement. That little bit of naughtiness. That feeling of doing something you know some people just aren’t going to like but that lots of people will want. It is infectious and inspiring. And you can see it in everyone who works at Appear Here. The story of how it came to be and how it is challenging the status quo of finding and leasing retail space has been told numerous times. The pushback that Bailey and his team had in the early days from investors and landlords alike is well reported, so too has been the gradual turn to the firm’s way of thinking and the millions of dollars of investment from funds such as Fifth Wall and Balderton Capital. [gallery type="slideshow" link="none" size="large" ids="984783,984785,984784,984781,984780,984778,984777,984776,984775,984774,984773,984782"] We have launched 8,000 stores – more stores than have closed – and many of those have been opened by individuals. How many of them would have been able to do that without us? The view of Bailey – and the team he has built around him – as young, cocky and arrogant, while still held by many traditionalists, is starting to ebb. As the firm starts to build its portfolio of brands – from individual entrepreneurs to Gywneth Paltrow and Louis Vuitton – the terminology and ethos that this unapologetic 27-year-old has been pushing into the real estate world for the past seven years is starting to take hold. Space as a service is probably the most overused term in property today, the latest buzzword. But it is what Appear Here has done from the outset. “We hate the word property,” says Bailey. “It is not at all inspiring. And what is the word ‘tenant’? Who wants to be a tenant? Who wants to be the person who sits in a room? You want to be the person who does it, who builds. What is a tenant? It is an idea. What is property? It is space.” Appear Here’s mission statement is to create a world where anyone with an idea can discover a place to make it happen. It has helped turn some 8,000 ideas into stores – more openings than closures – and it is hungry to do more. Appetite for change Appear Here has more than 200,000 brands signed up to its platform across the globe and is currently active in London, Paris and New York. It is also the biggest “broker” by volume in New York and Paris and is on a mission to imitate what it has done in London and take the value crown too. Bailey says the team has more than 5,000 years of ideas waiting to happen. “At the moment we are very good at making ideas happen. What I want to do next is help those ideas grow and help those ideas travel,” says Bailey. “I want to work on taking what we have built in London, Paris and New York to other cities. To make this a global network. “We are in a world where everything is suddenly about walls and borders and restriction, and what we are trying to do is create something that is the opposite of that.” He adds: “We have launched 8,000 stores – more stores than have closed – and many of those have been opened by individuals. How many of them would have been able to do that without us? We’ve got big ambitions, but if this doesn’t work no one can take it away from us that we made those stores happen.” Last year the firm appointed Angelo Zegna, of Italian fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, as its head of stores to help it achieve one of those big ambitions. The label is famed for its fabrics and makes suits for brands including Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Tom Ford, so Zegna knows a bit about retail. At Appear Here, Zegna is tasked with finding potential sites to completely re-fashion the department store. He is currently scouring London, New York and Los Angeles for the perfect property. “There is no global-quality department store,” says Zegna. “Department stores are all run by accountants. They all look the same and are based on a model that no longer works.” Zegna’s job is to create a department store that is not based wholesale, but that creates space to tell a story, space that enables an audience to interact with a brand, space where ideas can come to life. And he has several potentials in his sights. “We are not trying to take something away,” says Bailey. “We are trying to build something. Retail is not dead, it is just broken. You have got to set out with the intent that you can make a difference. If you aim high and fall a bit short, well that happens. “I’m excited,” he adds, “more excited than I have ever been. We have a massive opportunity and are going after something big.” It could be argued that becoming the biggest facilitator of ideas – or retail broker if you want to be traditional – in London by value and volume is already doing something big, but for 100mph Bailey it is not big enough. It means more to him. He has a Duracell bunny-like capacity for energy and is armed with a special view of the retail market, from the idea-makers to the content producers and the space providers – a team of passionate individual experts. A sneak peek over the shoulders of the Appear Here data team reveals the depth of insight available on individual locations. Big is fixing retail, going global and delivering world-class spaces and Bailey and his team are itching to take it on. “Everything we do comes down to energy,” he says. “If you’re not pumped by the problem you are solving then it is time to move on.” Portraits: David Vintiner Store photographs: Appear Here To send feedback, e-mail samantha.mcclary@egi.co.uk or tweet @samanthamcclary or @estatesgazette