Blue Cast: David Tring on His Career and Educating Denim’s Next Generation
Blue Cast is a podcast series from the TENCEL™ Denim team. Each episode features a conversation with a special guest from within the industry or the fringes of the denim community. The following is a recap of episode 405.
What makes the denim industry stand out? For denim veteran David Tring, it’s the sense of collaboration.
“We are a community globally and that’s something that I love about our industry,” he said during the latest episode of our Carved in Blue podcast. He added, “We share our problems. We look for solutions together.”
David—who has called Hong Kong home for more than a decade—chatted with Dennis Hui, Lenzing’s Hong Kong-based global business development manager, denim, about the many phases of his denim career. His work in fashion and denim started in his teenage years at a military supply store that sold brands like Wrangler and Lee. By the age of 19, he was managing the store and its visual merchandising.
In the mid ‘80s, David took a job at H&M. While he worked for the fast-fashion retailer, he relocated from his hometown of Nottingham to London to work at its Oxford Circus store. His next step was becoming a merchandiser and then buyer for H&M, which led to an eventual move to Stockholm. In this time, his colleagues helped him gain an understanding of clothing manufacturing as they traveled around the globe. “Mentors are so important in your life,” David said. “That’s the luck you get in a career, I think is about the people you work with. Everything else is hard work.”
After H&M, David moved over to Wrangler in the 1990s. While at the brand’s parent company VF Corporation, he got a chance to move to Hong Kong in 2006 and he took it, calling it the “second best decision I ever made.” He has called Hong Kong home ever since. “I absolutely love Hong Kong,” David said. “I love the people here and the lifestyle. And it was clear for me Asia was on the rise.”
In Hong Kong, David helped to grow the Lee brand in the Chinese market from number three in denim to number one by 2015. Part of the success came from strong design. “One of the mistakes people make is they don’t invest enough in design,” David noted. “Cutting back on designers is very rarely something that’s really going to save you money in the long term. It’s a very short-term exercise, and I see a lot of that happening in the industry right now. But design is the way to lead and to really dominate if you want your brand to grow.”
At 61, David took an early retirement so that he could focus on his current chapter: denim education and his consultancy, The Magic of Denim. Among his initiatives is a project with the Hong Kong Design Institute that selects six students to receive mentorship and education in the industry. Among the experiences in the program was the chance to visit Lenzing, Advance Denim and Jeanologia. The students also get access to materials so they can create denim garments.
While there are strong collegiate denim programs in places like London, David saw a need for educational outreach closer to manufacturing hubs. “Our industry needs new blood; we need new people coming in,” David explained. “It’s a mature manufacturing industry, if you look at it in a very practical way. And certainly on the supply chain side, young people don’t always see the romance and the excitement that can come, so we need to find ways to bring new people in and get them excited.”
The up-and-coming creators are also going to have an impact on the industry’s ecological profile. This is one of the things that makes David hopeful for denim’s future.
“This is a really important generation, and I think they can make change…They really want a more sustainable world, you can see how they’re starting to live and act in a very different way,” said David. “With the right level of education, they can come into communities and they’ll educate their families, they will go into companies and brands and that gift of education can flow in the opposite direction, that young people can also be bringing education to older generations.”
Listen to the episode here.