Die Welt

Fine Thread

Thomas Schmitz founded the label “John Crocket” 25 years ago and has relied on typically British style ever since

BY GUIDO M. HARTMANN

Anyone who walks into the outfitter John Crocket on Cologne's Friesenstrasse feels transported to another world.
Old floorboards, English leather armchairs and tall shelves of suits, jumpers and shoes bring a touch of elegant London to the middle of Cologne's former red-light district.

“Here we still offer the quality that was usual on London's Jermyn Street 20 years ago,” says owner Thomas Schmitz, who fits perfectly into these surroundings in his classic suit and white shirt with cufflinks. The range includes, for example, shirts in two-ply or double-twisted fabric of particularly high quality.
And at what the 54-year-old Schmitz considers a perfectly reasonable price of 64 to 74 euros. “A two-ply shirt stays silky smooth even after countless washes, without looking feminine,” the economist, who holds a doctorate, says enthusiastically of these fabrics. While still a student, Schmitz had traded in cashmere jumpers from Great Britain, some of which he sold to friends and acquaintances from the boot of his car. Cashmere jumpers of the kind he had come to know and appreciate in Ireland and England, he says, were hard to find in Germany in the 80s.
And instead of joining a company after graduating, as his friends of the same age did, Schmitz went straight into business for himself in ready-to-wear clothing. He rented a first small shop on Cologne's Albertusstraße 25 years ago, under the label “John Crocket”. Schmitz arrived at the name because every name connected with cricket, the British national sport, was already protected. Instead, the young Cologne entrepreneur put two crossed cricket bats and a tennis racket into the company logo. Yet many long-established clothing goods of particularly high quality have not been made in Great Britain for a long time, laments the Cologne native, who has regularly spent family holidays in Ireland since childhood. John Crocket, too, has its shirts made in Turkey. “But from fabrics sourced through a long-established cloth merchant in London,” says Schmitz.
His jumpers for women and men, however, are “genuinely Scottish through and through”, stresses the retailer, who studied at Trinity College in Ireland and in Exeter in England and then completed a doctoral thesis at Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main.

Both the sturdy Harris Tweed and the softer Lovat Tweed for the jackets come from Scotland. The renowned firm Brisbane Moss of Lancashire, England, in turn makes the almost indestructible corduroy trousers for the Cologne retailer, which are offered in almost as many colours as the jumpers. While the choice for men here is almost overwhelming, the range for women is rather more modest. It includes, for example, cashmere jumpers, jackets and scarves. And, of course, classic blouses in two-ply cotton.
As early as 1998, Thomas Schmitz launched an online business that now accounts for three quarters of the turnover of John Crocket GmbH & Co KG. The stylish entrepreneur prefers not to give any figures, however. Orders for the garments currently come in at 50 per cent each by email and by telephone. The calls are taken and handled not by a call centre but by the staff in the office on site, as Schmitz explains during a tour of the small administrative wing: “This means personal, individual advice is possible on the phone too.”
The warehouse is right next to the shop as well: “The advantage is that in our Cologne shop we can offer customers almost every product in every size and colour straight away,” says Tina Schmitz (42), who supports her husband in the business. For 12 years now the company has occupied the spacious shop in the Friesenviertel, which has since become a fashionable nightlife strip.
There have been setbacks in the business too: from 2008, John Crocket suffered under the banking and financial crisis, and demand for suits and ties suddenly collapsed. “We first had to make up for that with products such as duffle coats and corduroy trousers,” says Tina Schmitz. As a result of the crisis, the branches in Düsseldorf and Bonn were also closed. Thomas Schmitz decided on a kind of slimming-down and put even more emphasis on online retail.

“Our business is essentially made for the internet,” says Schmitz. Once customers know their size, he says, they can usually reorder online without any difficulty, even if cuts change slightly from time to time. “A size 52 stays a 52.”
It is much the same with shoes, he says. For some years the Cologne company has had its own brand, “Crocket's Finest”, made in Spain. A renowned tannery in Trier supplies the naturally tanned sole leather, while the calf leather for the uppers comes from France: “A thoroughly European product,” as the head of the company puts it. John Crocket made a virtue of necessity here, having previously represented a well-known English shoe brand. But that brand was offered considerably more cheaply through other channels, while John Crocket was bound by a ban on discounting. So the Cologne company decided to have its own shoes made. What is more, they can offer them at even better quality and at a considerably lower price, Thomas Schmitz assures. Since 1995 the company has produced a catalogue twice a year, which it also sends out to its customers. These are mainly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. But orders are now increasingly coming in from the Netherlands, Great Britain and Ireland as well, he says. What all his products have in common, the entrepreneur stresses, is that they last a long time. Once, at a fashion trade fair, a colleague recognised from its colour that Thomas Schmitz's jumper must have been around 25 years old. “There was nothing wrong with the jumper,” the style-conscious entrepreneur stresses. Even if it may well have dated from the days when he sold from the boot of his car.