Great things in store for Richard Holden

By ALISON HORWOOD

But for a phone call Richard Holden would probably have spent the past few months putting his vast energy into the race for the Auckland mayoralty.

Instead, that phone call has taken him to Wellington, where he is now managing director of the venerable department store Kirkcaldie & Stains.

"It's like I have been bred to do this," he says, in his office behind the store on Lambton Quay, leaning back in his chair and clasping his hands.

When you meet Holden, you notice those hands, impossibly big hands. He spent his youth cutting meat at the Westfield freezing works, and it's not hard to imagine.

But these days, those hands are most likely to be clasped across the front of his stylish suit (his own label) and tie, behind a desk or around a boardroom table. Since his days at Westfield, there is not much Holden, now 53, has not done.

He was an Auckland Harbour Board member, who came in third in the 1998 Auckland city mayoral race with 12,477 votes (remember the chocolate-box billboards with the puppy). He has sat on the board of Merino New Zealand, and has been executive director of the New Zealand Herald Foundation. He has his own beer brand, Bean Rock, plus his own top-of-the line clothing range (Richard Holden, of course).

But what Holden is best known for is selling beer.

He was the "Mr Steinlager of the 80s", selling our beer here, there and everywhere. As export manager between 1978 and 1983, he took Lion Breweries exports from $1 million to more than $10.5 million a year.

Then he switched brands, and did great things with Foster's. The year before he took over as general manager of Carlton & United Breweries in New Zealand, turnover was $1.3 million. In 1997, by the end of his eight years, it was $31 million.

But peddling booze is just one of Holden's talents. His other forte is making award-winning frocks for Auckland Derby day (he won twice until he was asked not to enter again), the Melbourne Cup and Foster's Wellington Cup race days.

It is an incongruous mix, but Holden insists it all falls into place with his new job at Wellington's 118-year-old institution, Kirkcaldie & Stains.

"For Wellingtonians, Kirks is their store," says Holden. Some staff have been there for 20 or 30 years. "It's an old culture here, but a good culture."

At Kirks, everyone is "sir" or "madam". Its philosophy - like the great United States department store Marshall Fields - is "give the lady what she wants". It boasts a doorman, a powder room, a fountain in the main entrance, and a pianist playing Chopin on a Bechstein grand.

In some families, five generations of women have shopped at Kirks. Customer loyalty is so strong - according to the hardback book on Holden's desk, Kirkcaldie & Stains, a Wellington Story - that in 1998 a discerning and dedicated Lower Hutt shopper was buried with her Kirks card, specially framed for the occasion.

Although Kirks is one of the few department stores left in New Zealand, Holden insists they are no dinosaurs.

Last year's 2000 annual report boasts revenue of $34.35 million, up 2.2 per cent on the previous year.

"Department stores have to be a shopping experience. You have got to provide the best of everything, or people shop at The Warehouse or Woolworths," he says.

Holden is known as a bit of a marketing guru, but he has no plans to buck tradition at Kirks.

Put simply, he is "coming into something that works already". But he does plan to develop what he says Kirks always did best - that is, made-to-measure suits. He wants to hire a top male and female tailor, and perhaps a milliner. It will mean a customer can walk in with a magazine clipping of a suit, "say a powder blue Valentino", and within reason the fabric will be found and the outfit made. "That's where Kirks started 100 years ago", he says.

"With a floor of tailors and a floor of milliners. That's what people want - good quality in craftsmanship."

Holden says his new role solidifies his skills of managing profitable businesses, motivating staff and marketing. But his new appointment was just as much about good timing and luck as a conscious move out of politics.

The Citizens and Ratepayers group had asked him to stand as a candidate in the Hobson seat in the latest election. "I was just thinking, should I, or shouldn't I, when I was contacted by the headhunters for this position. If I hadn't ended up here, I probably would have stood. Basically, they rang at exactly the right time."

Call it fate, but Holden insists politics is behind him now. "I stood for the mayoralty in 1998 because I had concerns over Britomart. Before that, on the Harbour Board, I had concerns all the assets would be sold off. I have fought those two wars now," he says.

Waitakere mayor Bob Harvey is one local body politician who thought Holden would have made a great mayor. "He has a big presence, he's a real Henry the VIII figure," Harvey says. "He had an impressive campaign and he looked like a fun Les Mills."

Certainly, successful candidate John Banks saw Holden as a potential threat. Several months back, he rang and invited him to lunch at Euro. "He wanted to know if I was standing for the mayoralty. He said if we both stood, [Christine] Fletcher might win. I told him if I did stand I would wait until the first poll came out. If he was ahead, I would let him take a free run," Holden smiles.

He won't say much about Banks' future as a city leader, but he will say, "It was a great lunch. He paid."

So Holden is back in Wellington, region of his birth, after spending two-thirds of his life in Auckland.

He says he loves the capital - "it's like a village here, and I mean that in a good way" - and its harbour. His uncle was captain on an interisland ferry, and it is no coincidence he has put in an offer on a townhouse at Roseneath overlooking the sea.

The once-divorced father and grandfather will move south with his partner - whom he calls the beer-baroness because she runs his Bean Rock company - his chocolate lab, Maisie, and cat, Samuel. The home in Herne Bay he has owned for 22 years will be tenanted. Over the decades Holden has created a masterpiece in the garden and a four-wall mural in one room, and he is far too fond of the house to sell it.

Holden laughs about his links with Kirks over the years.

"As a child we always went to sit on Santa's knee up the road at James Smiths," he laughs. "But we came to Kirks to see the Christmas decorations."

Funnily enough, he visited the department store last year to try to sell his men's knitwear range. "The buyer didn't like them, but they took a few at the menswear store across the road."

Holden and his twin, Alistair, spent their early childhood living with their mother in Naenae and the Hutt Valley. When they were 11, they were sent to live in Auckland with their father. Relishing her new-found freedom, their mother sent a telegram saying, "Don't come back, it's your father's turn now."

Holden, who didn't visibly suffer too much from the rejection, attended Rangitoto College, but left school the day he turned 15 to work in the display department of Wisemans department store before going to Westfield and working elbow-to-elbow with Waka Nathan on a learners' chain.

At the age of 22, Holden got a job as a window dresser for Lion Breweries, impressed his bosses ... and the rest is history.

John Lister, former general manager of exports for Watties and president of the Export Institute in the mid-80s, now CEO of the Spirit of Adventure Trust, credits Holden with putting Steinlager on the world map.

"It wasn't easy, we were just a little country at the bottom of the world.

It took bloody guts to do it, it's not easy to get a New Zealand beer out there internationally when you are up against Denmark, the Germans and the Brits. Its remarkable what Holden achieved."

In 1984, Lion was one of two New Zealand companies to receive a New Zealand Government export award in recognition of its contribution to trade.

A year later Holden switched brands.

His sponsor's tents at the Foster's New Zealand open polo tournament in Auckland and the Foster's South Island classic were legendary. The Wellington Cup and Symphony Under the Stars, which also bore the Foster's name, became famous for Holden's bacchanalian hospitality. As fashion guru, and friend since the late-60s, Paula Ryan, puts it: "He's enthusiastic. He's fun. He doesn't have a negative bone in his body. I take the mickey out of his fashion design and he knows that, but he's one of the greatest men at pure celebration."

Lister pins a lot of Holden's success on the "ability to think outside the square".

"He has charisma. It's a philosophy of 'If you don't want to follow me, move over'."

As illustrated by this anecdote from the first year of the Wellington Cup in 1987. Holden discovered that the Trentham racecourse management had agreed to a Lion Red tent in the carpark. Holden dealt directly with Lion. His message: unless the tent goes, a Foster's-sponsored skydiving team would parachute into Douglas Myers' next garden party and hand out six-packs of Foster's to each guest. The tent went.

Next, Holden discovered the starting gate was covered in DB signs. He went public, offering DB 30 cases of Foster's in a swap for the banner, or 50 cases if DB threw in their Mangatainoka brewery.

He also refused to sign the million-dollar, three-year sponsorship deal with the Wellington Racing Club until Foster's got the starting gate.

As legend has it, Holden's fashion forays (he has won fashion laurels at the Melbourne Cup and Foster's Wellington Cup about 13 times, but it's hard to remember) began in 1986, when Foster's first sponsored the Wellington Cup.

Holden scribbled his first design on a starchy Park Royal tablecloth just to get the ball rolling.

He says, since then, "they" sometimes try to push him out in the preliminaries, but he responds with trademark cheek by changing the names on his entry forms, including that of his pets.

As Lister puts it: "It takes quite a person to cut it with the tough guys of booze and also design frocks."