VISORE X is honoured to have collaborated with Samuel Ross and Yi Ng as key speakers for Deloitte Finance Day 2025.
In this candid conversation, Samuel Ross and Yi Ng, SR_A Co-founders, explore the evolving intersection of design, luxury, and performance. They reflect on how redefining ideas can merge with luxury, emphasizing authenticity, innovation, and intention. They share personal strategies for navigating creative pressure, offering a thoughtful perspective on resilience, freedom, and the courage it takes to shape the future of design.
SR_A has developed a model that includes multi- year partnerships with LVMH, joint ventures with Inditex and the first external design consultancy with Beats. What is your view on mediating creativity with the financial pressures of sales performance?
Yi Ng: Well, first of all, thank you for having us. It really comes down to a short- term budgeting to have the agility to have these iteration loops for creativity and also long- term budgeting of innovation. This model that Samuel and I have developed has then allowed us to be able to oscillate and create long-term joint ventures or multi- year partnerships, creating a co-branded watch with Hublot at LVMH that sells for upwards of 100,000 Swiss francs to then creating 50 footwear co-branded shoes with Nike. We believe that the way in which we view the future of discretionary consumer products is really financing for experimentation and ultimately risk-taking.
Samuel Ross: I think that's a really good point. Just to tag on there, a lot of the context that you're seeing is really about identifying what's valuable to the next generation of wealth or aspiration. And, you know, prior to founding SR_A together, you and I built our first fashion brand and company, A-COLD-WALL, that was recently acquired by Fraser's Group only last year. You know, within that remit, we opened 10 global concessions and we've had permanent stores in Selfridges and Harrods and Dover Street Market. It's always about understanding that fundamentally, within the arts, value is driven from emotion and being part of a cultural conversation and finding where there's space to tell new stories and to disrupt in classic consumer categories. I'm just going to go back a couple slides so we can give some context to what you're actually looking at. This was us last year at Saloni. We were looking at where are there legacy industries where there's space for new stories to be told. I don't just mean aesthetics. We're talking about patents and IP here. This is a new recyclable epoxy that was developed in cohesion with the Cola family and Mr. Cola. It went on to debut in Saloni as part of a multi-year partnership that Yi structured and brokered. This now has won various awards within the category and kind of has established a notoriety. Our place in the sector of luxury goods is tied to newness and innovation and having a forward outlook of what is next to come.
And Samuel, I think Yi mentioned this previously, but from a designer's perspective having worked on six-figure tourbillon watches with Hublot and as having art dedicated in the Met and the V& A inLondon how do you use performance pressure as a catalyst? How do you balance that to still be able to speak to your audience?
SR: The easiest way to put it is that we've never taken on debt. We've always relied on innovation and being able to speak to emotion and technology to build demand. It's a complicated scenario, but I wouldn't say I'm just a designer. This company and the last I'm the founder of, there are bedroom businesses which have scaled globally. I might be on the front end to help tell the story, which gives passion and belief, but fundamentally it's believing that radical ideas should exist in luxury, but they should also exist within retail to reach a broader audience. We should also touch on the actual data and metrics of the watches that you're looking at. As we were rightly saying, they retail at 150,000 GBP. We do small runs with Hublot LVMH. It's a partnership that we pitched and have brokered for years. We're talking about 22 million in GMB over the past three to four years, which has been completely allocated and sold. Now that’s moved on to partnerships with Acqua Di Parma and others that Yi can also speak to.
YN: Yeah, I guess fundamentally, how we see the consumer is taking this new generational class of consumers across the 24-7, seven-day-a-week life cycle. We want to speak to the person that's buying, yes, a luxury watch, but also a luxury fragrance with our partnership with Acqua Di Parma or previously, as we mentioned, entry and more accessible and democratic fashion apparel with Inditex. The way in which we structured after, as Samuel said, independently scaling the first venture to an exit is actually finding these new models of joint intellectual property partnerships with the incumbents. We've been quite discerning on how we've modeled that. If it's luxury, we only work with LVMH. If it's sport, it's only with Nike. If it's with consumer electronics, it's with Beats and Apple Group. And ultimately, as Samuel said, we still speak to this new generational class of luxury consumers across multiple touch points. So where it might seem that there is a dichotomy when we want to produce a toilet to a luxury watch, we see that these are all tangible opportunities that we can actually speak to a consumer across multiple purchase decisions and really have a visual language that then crosses across footwear to bathroom to luxury watches.
SR: The reality is we are a fashion brand and company. That's how we came into the industry, worked under Virgil for quite a long time and others, and we continue to work with these groups. But we don't just believe that fashion is on the body, you know, it exists on different scales. It's, of course, the headphones that we develop with Beats as brand directors there and being able to impact and affect all of the product SKUs of the past three years in which their inline SKUs and sales have increased by having this perspective. Fashion is soft goods and it's hard goods, and we believe there's so much space in these pockets to tell very intense stories. Those breakthroughs naturally have a longer throw of trickle-down economics and values that can be inlined. We're always searching for what the new chapter of that is. But our value is really, again, in engineering and in an aesthetic value and bringing those two fields together, which reflects, of course, our background in industrial product and fashion.
The next question is kind of, I guess, a marriage between the two of you in terms of your skills and your expertise. Fashion is underpinned by generational shift in values of consumers. With that statement, how do you make decisions that respond to, I guess quite the rapid shift in consumer sentiments whilst also maintaining trust with the finance team?
YN: I guess to start, I don't come from a design background. I read law and did my graduate thesis about this model of SR_A at Cambridge. The way in which Samuel and I operate is both, of course, underpinned by more quantitative metrics, but there's also qualitative metrics that we hold and share just as much value to and how we then make decisions with these large PLCs is the dynamism in which we’ve established between coming from such disparate backgrounds but also allowing us to then iterate and test this overarching thesis with these consumers that we speak to. When we are showing up to an LVMH or an Apple office in Cupertino, we've done our iteration loops and our testing to then be in the room and present some of these bold ideas that, yes, has an element of risk, but it's also underpinned by the qualitative and quantitative testing that we've both done prior to that.
SR: Absolutely. I think really it comes down to the metrics, and there are two prospects. There's the sell-through as one conversion factor that any of these PLCs or leading groups need to see exists. I think, as you were saying, the past 12 years of our placement between culture and consumer goods, which has always been the primary anchor of what we produce and have to say, has proven that this is a model that can mature and clearly grow and scale. On the other prospect, as you were rightly saying, how do you know basically where to go and what's coming next? You need to be a cultural disseminator. For you all here, it's making sure that you have those individuals in your companies, in your orgs, that are part of the bleeding edge and that conversation. We're not talking hyper-radical bohemians here. We're still talking about people who have come out of the top art schools in the world. For example, we only really hire out of the RCA or CSM, and we've developed a not-for-profit, which has been running for five years, that has the King's Foundation, the RA, and the British Fashion Council, and the halo of Apple's leadership, who help us steward to bring in new talent, because this is as much about innovation and finding space as it is about including the consumer or the future consumer on the journey with us. That's how we kind of fortify these prospects.
I'm sure you both have lots of lessons learned and things you can share with our audience today when it comes to budgeting for creative projects. As I said, what advice can you give to our CFOs and finance leaders with us here today to be more risk-taking and less focused and strict on some of the financial control when investing in creative growth, to be able to allow that growth to happen.
YN: I think the first is the agility in terms of the financial modeling and really not just, of course, looking at traditional timelines of a quarter or annual timeline, but actually be more reactive to the consumer. If there is a consumer shift that is happening, you need to then, at that particular point, be remodeling your P&L. The consumer, because we come from discretionary products, is moving 24-7. So then attuning to a more traditional quarterly or annual timeline doesn't actually allow you to then have the edge and have the food-first or second-mover advantage speaking to the consumer. I think the second is to be more open to new models of integration with other incumbents, whether that sits within the traditional form of where you view competition or actually look at other pillars. How we've been able to maneuver across incumbents in luxury, consumer electronics, bathroom, sport, is by being able to think not in a traditional sense of the guiding principles for that particular vertical, but be able to have a semblance across industry.
So I think what we take away from this conversation, number one, CFOs should show courage when establishing a budget in order to push for growth. Number two, be bold. Innovation requires risk sometimes. And three, not every investment shows a linear correlation between spend and revenue.
SR: I would like to add that the modeling that we have put into place over the past five years has turned substantial profits for a very lean SME continuously, hence why we're able to actually onboard some of these macro companies in place. So there still needs to be a level of resolute behavior when it comes to the thin modeling in place.
This interview has been conducted by Lily Johnstone.