Ted Baker is a British clothing retail company that was founded in 1987 by Ray Kelvin, who labels himself “The closest man to Ted”. In March 1988, his first store was opened in Glasgow, which was quickly followed by three more stores, where he exclusively offered men’s dress shirts, and offered dry cleaning with ever shirt they sold. By 1996, Ted Baker had launched the Ted Baker woman & Ted Baker lite lines in conjunction with opening more stores and starting wholesale trading in the UK and America.
In 1997, Ted Baker became a PLC trading and branded itself as “No Ordinary Designer Label”. In 1998, they opened their website for the first time and launched a new range of skin ware and underwear. By 2004, they unveiled new stores across the world including Australia, New Zealand, San Francisco and Las Vegas. They also offer customers the chance to buy reduced Ted Baker products that are no longer available in their stores through their online outlet website www.
teds-shed. com that is run by MandMDirect. com on Ted’s behalf.Ted Baker has since become a global brand with over 140 locations throughout the world (excluding UK) and through a wide range of trendy and innovative collections that include: mensware, womanswear, childrens clothing, accessories, fragrance, footware and watches.
Ted Baker has positioned themselves at the high end of the market competing with Reiss, Paul Smith etc. They use various distribution channels: Retail, Wholesale and Licensing and through the internet. In 2009, the ‘Born’ collection was launched and more stores opened in Taiwan, Orlando and Boston.Also, an exclusive lingerie collection was created for Debenhams. To date, Ted Baker prides the organisation as a leading designer label, which involves three key strategic elements: continually reviewing collections to react to trends and customer expectations, controlled distribution channels for margin growth and carefully managed overseas development for expansion. With reference to (Gunnigle, P.
Heraty, N. and Morely, M. (2006)), they state that people are the lifeblood of organizations and that an organization’s workforce represents one of its most potent and valuable resources.This is very true, and it is quite evident that an effective workforce management policy focuses on improving the organizations efficiency and performance, through the management of their personnel. This can be challenging due the fact that people are inherently different. The general maintenance and how an organization manages its workforce can be defined as Human Resource Management.
When discussing the importance of HRM, it is essential that the HR policies meet and fit the criteria of the business strategy in the overall performance of the organisation.Effective HRM can create a differential advantage against competitors, while being an integral part to any organisation for future development of their workforce and market growth. To implement a viable and favourable HR policy structure, it is required to evaluate the approaches that an organisation uses to identify and influence the decisions of the organisation in relation to strategy and HRM. Shown below is a framework that (Gunnigle, P. Heraty, N. and Morely, M.
(2006)) have conveyed to highlight these factors.The external environment is becoming more & more complex for global brands in terms of economic activity, technology advances and labour/production markets. It is demanding due to the rapid changing and uncertainty surrounding economic performance (be it a decline or advancement), social changes (education, living standards) and product market performance (market share). All these aspects have a significant influence on strategic decision making and the approach to HRM.
These points are discussed below in greater detail in relation to Ted Baker.
