SR_A share the strategy behind building a luxury brand portfolio through innovation and partnerships
By building joint ventures and sharing intellectual-property rights with its clients, design studio SR_A has launched lucrative projects with the likes of Apple, Inditex and Hublot.
British-Caribbean artist and designer Samuel Ross (whose accolades include an MBE for services to fashion) and Singaporean entrepreneur Yi Ng have been business partners for more than a decade. Ross founded luxury sportswear brand A-Cold-Wall* in 2015, with Yi Ng joining as partner in 2016, before the pair sold it nine years later. It was a prudent business move that allowed the duo to focus on their design studio, SR_A, which launched in 2019.
“I had been working on a thesis at Cambridge about seeing whether you could run an independent start-up by working with incumbents,” says Ng of the decision to launch SR_A. The project provided inspiration for a business model focused on having joint intellectual-property rights with clients, rather than contracting out design services. “Everything that we do has evolved into joint ventures,” says Ng. So far, SR_A has been hired by Apple’s Beats as its first external design studio, launched a project with Spanish fashion retailer Inditex to design clothing (SR_A Engineered by Zara) and created new patents for US-based bathroom brand Kohler. Recently, the duo took on an investor role with wearable-technology brand Whoop. SR_A launched its fourth watch, its first signature model equipped with the Unico chronograph calibre, for Switzerland’s Hublot.
Tell us about SR_A’s ambitions in the luxury sector.
Yi Ng: SR_A is a thesis for the new virtues of luxury. It’s about shifting the economics of scarcity and scale, and looking at how the view of the luxury consumer extends outside of fashion by pursuing different, long-term partnerships and joint ventures, and even taking on investor roles with some of the largest incumbents of each category. It’s always underpinned by the view that luxury is about reconciling traditional craftsmanship with engineering excellence.
Samuel Ross: We want to pair a sense of material innovation with the cultural sentiment of the time. It’s about ensuring that the value of the work is felt emotionally and is within the remit of moving the particular categories that we operate within forward. It’s about being rooted in true design with a cultural view.
How is this reflected in your partnership models based on building joint intellectual property?
SR: If you look at our partnerships with LVMH, Inditex and Apple, both commercial and cultural performance come into play. The partnership that we have brokered with Inditex’s Ortega family, for instance, is based on our commitment to democratic design. That’s also why our profits have been dispersed annually for the past seven years through grants and philanthropic efforts. But this is also an opportunity to work with a leading global vendor that owns most of its supply chain. The partnership means that Inditex can take and realise aspects of the designs that we want to deliver at a competitive price. It can do this without deteriorating the product value.
To a certain degree, we focus on specialising in every category that we work in. We assess where the partners’ capacities have remained untapped. It starts from the strength of their expertise and then it’s a case of seeing whether that can be chiselled or refined.
YN: The model of SR_A is to look at who’s leading in terms of innovation and who can give us the opportunity to be able to disseminate our ideas at scale. With these partnership models we’re able to communicate our discernment by developing, innovating and engineering the best product for a particular price point.
Could you tell us about your work with Hublot?
SR: It’s the largest watch manufacturer in Geneva and the largest within the LVMH group. As a vessel to hold hardware, a watch is unusual in that it’s one of the few things that are actually accepted as something you wear on your body. There’s an expectation of acuity and innovation that comes into play with that. When it came to the partnership, we wanted to broaden the material developments that hadn’t yet been brought to market.
Working across sectors, do you find SR_A is constantly appealing to different audiences?
YN: No, because the same consumer who wants to buy a timepiece from us also wants those same values in their house or in the consumer electronics that they wear.
SR: It comes down to being able to syndicate our ethos through every factor of what it means to live. Our work draws from the well of eudemonia – or human flourishing – through design. It’s a perspective, a desire and a search for cohesion, which we know can be applied across categories.
How is this reflected in practice in SR_A’s different products and design projects?
SR: There are two things that underpin SR_A. One is to fortify and enhance the body, and that goes through consumables, wearables, software, hardware, headphones – all of those aspects that ensure the body can perform. The second is to enhance and define environments. This includes our work with Kohler, the temporary pavilions developed with the British Council Arts globally and the runway and retail environments established with Inditex. The red thread would be that SR_A is architecture for the body, whether that’s internal or external.
