Mar 20, 2025 People
Murray Crane: So, do you want to make this a Murray Crane story or a Crane Brothers story?
Henry Oliver: Mostly a Murray Crane story.
MC: Y’know, you know a lot of people, you work with a lot of people, you’ve seen a lot of things happen, you’ve been around a while… For me, it’s always more about the brand.
HO: I guess it can be a blessing and a curse that you share a name with your brand.
MC: You kind of know what you’re signing up for there. And you always have more control and more leverage over what you own if you put your name on it. It’s not a new path to take, but at the same time, it does create its own set of challenges. You’re obviously kind of always on. You’ve made that decision that your personal life and your private life are intertwined, and it’s probably more that you’re focused on your work. Work becomes what defines you over time.
HO: And is that what you were planning for?
MC: To be honest, I just didn’t really think about it. When I started [in 1999], the only thing I knew was that I didn’t want to have some kind of monosyllabic, nondescript name for the business. I wanted a good, traditional name. I wanted to start my business in a way that people walking past would look at it and think, “Oh, how long have they been there for?”, even though we were a new business. Even to the way we did the fit-out, so people would walk in and get the sense that they were walking into something that had already been there for a while. It didn’t feel too new or experimental — it had that heritage feel to it, which a lot of brands were going for at that point. Especially in menswear, there was a real resurgence in tailoring; a lot of those old companies were being bought out by new people, and they were really revisiting their history and heritage. I’d always had the idea in the back of my mind that I wanted to call a business Crane Brothers.
HO: And you were brothers?
MC: Yeah, we were, but when I started the business, Mark, my brother, wasn’t involved, so the name came before the partnership. The name’s endured and the partnership didn’t. Then I thought, well, maybe one day I’ll have kids, or I’ll have boys, and they’ll be brothers. My grandfather was a brother, my father was a brother — he lost his brother. So there’s some history there.
HO: How long was your brother involved?
MC: About a year.
HO: Oh, so not that long.
MC: No, and it kind of came to a screeching halt because of the fire. There was a fire in the basement of the Hotel DeBrett about a year after we opened [our first shop there in 2000]. It was a really stressful time, you know? We’d put everything into this thing. Then it was like, “Well, this is all going to burn down in front of me”, which is pretty much what happened. So then we had to move out. We moved to Lorne St. I didn’t want to call it Crane Brothers, so we called it Little Brother. That’s when we started developing that part of the business.
We had a massive legal fight with the insurer because they wanted us to discount and sell the product. I was like, “I don’t want to do that. It’s going to completely kill our brand.” I wanted it destroyed. We only had business interruption insurance completely by chance, because the insurance broker just ticked the box without thinking about it. That time made me realise how naive I was, and how easy it was for everything to just completely unravel in front of your eyes. I vowed to myself I wasn’t going to let that happen, so it was a real turning point for me. I was visiting my lawyer every second day, fighting with the insurance company, trying to run a business, falling out with my brother — I had all this other stuff going on.
HO: That just proved too much for the relationship?
MC: Yeah. I felt like I was a lot more emotionally invested in it than Mark was. And over the years, that’s been a sticking point.
HO: And that’s been borne out with time, right?
MC: Yeah, exactly. He went on and did his own thing. He had his opportunities, the same way I did. And I think both businesses were better for not being involved with each other. I think Crane Brothers would be a completely different business if we had stayed working together. Probably wouldn’t have survived.
HO: But have you mended the relationship?
MC: Oh, within reason, yeah. But, you know, siblings — family is family, right? It’s difficult, it’s always difficult. It’s never easy when you’re in business with them. I think even family businesses that have endured and survived, there’s always tension. There’s always something.
HO: Did you bring him on because you wanted it to be a family business?
MC: I brought him on because I trusted him. He was family, and I thought that was the best relationship. That’s the relationship where you’re never going to have that 5% doubt that you might have with employees. The loyalty’s in the DNA, right? But what I realised quickly, and the fire was the catalyst for this, was that if you’re going to run a business and grow a business, you actually have to surround yourself with people who are good at things you’re not good at. Mark was good at the same things I was good at. So there were these gaping holes.
HO: Which were what?
MC: Just boring stuff that I didn’t want to do. Stuff that I’ve learned to do and am actually quite good at now, but back then, it was more the logistics — the business side of being in business. I was all about the brand, sales, customer experience, and the product, which is all the secret sauce, but you still need someone steering the ship. I’ve probably become that person more now. But [the fire] taught me the biggest lesson by far — that you needed to have your shit together. You always need to plan for the worst-case scenario. Since then, I’ve always done that. I’m always managing risk. It’s what you need to do in business, but I learned it the hard way. It made me realise the fragility of it all. If you don’t have things in the right place…
HO: How close did you get?
MC: Oh, we were toast, literally, yeah, figuratively. We probably should have shut down. It was a knockout punch. But somehow, we managed to get through it. I think it was just the fact that we were so early on in the journey, there was that energy and naivety that helped us push through. I thought we’d be reopened in four weeks. We ended up being closed for six months. We were running out of money, paying off the fit-out, and had stock we hadn’t even paid for. It was pretty wobbly there for a while.
Rob [Niwa] was working for me at the time. I remember getting a call from him on a Sunday afternoon. I was with Ange [Murray’s wife, Angela Bevan] — she was pregnant with Monty — and I answered the phone. He said, “There’s smoke and flames coming through the floor.” I was like, “Fuck.”
By the time I left Ponsonby to get to the store, the whole building had been evacuated. The store was full of smoke. There were three fire trucks outside. My cellphone had died, and I was just standing there thinking it was a Sunday afternoon, it was dark, and I could see everything I’d worked for disappearing in front of my eyes.
HO: You mentioned Rob Niwa, who’s basically worked for you from the beginning.
MC: Yeah, Rob was our first employee.
HO: And he’s still with you?
MC: Yeah. He went away for a while, worked for Louis Vuitton, but then came back.
HO: That brings up something: you’ve had, at different times, a reputation for being difficult…
MC: Yeah, I am difficult. I make no excuses for that.
HO: There was quite a public falling-out with Jordan [Gibson] from Checks that was in the media.
MC: Yeah, thanks to him. I don’t really want to get into that.
HO: Okay, but with your reputation, some people would be surprised to hear that you have multiple people who have been with you for so long.
MC: Oh, plus all my original suppliers and vendors, who have been with me for over 20 years, yeah.
HO: So when you say, “Yeah, I am difficult…”
MC: I am. I wouldn’t want to work for me.
HO: Why not?
MC: I just never stop. I’m challenging. I’m just… I’ve definitely learned to dial it back, but I’m always on. I’ve got a complete vision of what I want to do. Nothing’s going to come in my way. It’s almost to the point of obsession, but not obsession — just very deeply immersed in what I do. There’s no work–life balance, there’s no ‘switch off’. I get up in the morning and I live and breathe what I do every day.
HO: You said you’ve toned it down. Is that for your own benefit or for others?
MC: Fundamentally, I’m not a mean person. I’m not an arsehole. I definitely care about my staff. I want them to be happy, and I know when I’ve overstepped the line. Any of them would say, “Yep, Murray can be an arsehole sometimes, but he will always come back and apologise.” And, we’re talking maybe, what? Two times in the last three years where I feel like I’ve completely lost my patience over something? Generally, it’s because a customer’s had a bad experience. That’s the thing that really tips me over the edge. I just get annoyed by it because it shouldn’t happen. We’ve worked so hard to give our clients a great experience, but it’s always the one person who has a bad experience that creates the issue. And maybe I react to that, worrying about them more than I should, but at the same time, I don’t want that to slip through the cracks. If you don’t address it or deal with it, it’s a slippery slope.
HO: Were you like that working for other people?
MC: Yeah, yeah.
HO: So it’s not necessarily that you built a business around this way of operating, it’s just the way you operate.
MC: I think so, yeah. I mean, you can talk to colleagues I had when I was working for Zambesi [early in my career] — talk to Liz and Neville [Findlay, Zambesi’s owners] — they would say the same thing. And if you talk to other colleagues, both here and internationally, most of them would have some element of that DNA. If you go to a great restaurant, the chef’s probably going to be an arsehole. It’s the same kind of thing.
I don’t think I’m an arsehole. I just want to be the best at what I do, so I’m not prepared to compromise. I don’t compromise myself, and I get annoyed when something’s done badly. Near enough is not good enough. In a market the size of New Zealand, with its tyranny of scale and distance — because we’re so far from everywhere and have such a small audience — you don’t have the luxury of another customer walking in the door. Every customer is precious. You might be gauging the success of your business on the fact that you get five people walking through the door in a day. Whereas if you were in New York, London, you’d have hundreds of thousands walking past your door every day. It’s a different experience.
HO: Right. Is that attitude part of why some people have stayed with you for so long? It must be especially rare in retail.
MC: If I had to pin it down to one thing, I’d say it’s probably that I’ve never asked anyone to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. I’m there with them every day. I work alongside them. It’s not an industry where you can just tell people what to do from behind a desk. If they have to stay late, I stay late. If I need to be there early, I’m there early. I’m with them in the highs and the lows.
HO: By having those standards, does it also mean you have high staff turnover?
MC: Yeah, we get people who are like, “I’m not going to work for him, it’s too hard. I don’t want to work that hard.” They want their lunch break at the same time every day; they want to read their book in the shop. They just want to be there and make sure no one steals anything. That’s what most people in retail do, which is why so many retailers are struggling. I think it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — “We’re not busy, so I’ll put a low-paid person in the store because I can’t afford someone good.” But if I put someone decent in there, our sales would go up. It’s not difficult to say, “How are you today? How can we help?” That’s a pretty basic thing to do. And our philosophy is that we genuinely want to help, not just say it.
HO: Do you see that philosophy tied into the product and the aesthetic of the store?
MC: Yeah, there’s no smoke and mirrors. There’s no bullshit. We know our product’s well made because we know how it’s made. We’re not standing there reciting some brand story. We’ve done the hard work, and we’re still doing it. When I think about the brands I loved when I travelled, they all had that institutional, heritage quality to them. Especially in tailoring. You go to Savile Row and you’ve got Gieves & Hawkes, Anderson & Sheppard, Holland & Sherry — they’ve been around since 1836, with Winston Churchill’s waistcoat pattern in their archives. That’s the stuff that really got me excited.
HO: In this digital age, do you think that interest still holds?
MC: It comes and goes. People are always fascinated by the past. For my generation — born in the late 60s, growing up in the 70s — I was fascinated with that postwar period, the 40s and 50s. For younger generations, it’s the 70s and 80s, or the 80s and 90s. There’s always a fascination. Whether it’s electronics, hi-fi stereos, cars, watches or art, people always want to reference something.
HO: So how do you stay relevant? How do you update a heritage brand?
MC: The first decision I made was to stop doing the Little Brother stuff. I didn’t want to be my age now and still designing clothes for 20-year-olds. What I love about tailoring is that my client base can grow and evolve with me. They’re having the same life experiences I am, at the same point in life. Over time, the brand will change a little bit. Right now, we’re going through the biggest change because we’re trying to reconnect with a younger client base. Part of that is existing clients bringing their sons in. That’s a very traditional route in tailoring. It’s like an inheritance — clients who’ve been with us are now bringing in their children, and hopefully it’s reflected in our messaging and product.
The underlying thing is that there’s a trend back toward tailored dressing. We want to be there for that, but we don’t want to play whack-a-mole with the brand. If everyone’s wearing hoodies and cashmere track pants, we’re not going to follow that trend. We are contemporary tailors; we are specialists. If you want the proper experience, come to us. We haven’t deviated from that.
HO: But that ‘contemporary’ still holds, right? And what’s contemporary now may not have been contemporary 25 years ago. How is the Crane Brothers suit different today than it was 25 years ago?
MC: It’s all about silhouette.
HO: So, what’s happened to the silhouette?
MC: It was skinny, then it got skinnier, then it got a little wider. It’s gone full circle, back to where we are now, where everything’s a little more relaxed, a little looser. And within that, you’ve got tailoring. A suit or tailored trousers and jackets, instead of just a two-piece suit. Obviously, Covid changed a lot, accelerating how people dress. Now, formal dressing has gotten even more formal, because day-to-day dressing has become more casual. People want to dress up again for weddings, milestone birthdays and celebrations.
HO: Because they’re no longer dressing up for work?
MC: Yeah, exactly. They still want to dress up, but they don’t have the chance in their daily lives. They’re wearing half-zip sweaters or working from home in their pyjamas, or wearing Nike shorts and Lululemon shirts. So when they have a reason to dress up, they do.
HO: That shift in silhouette must be slow, though, right?
MC: Very slow. It’s not like women’s fashion, where trends change rapidly every six months. Men’s fashion moves more gradually. A trend like wide-legged trousers takes time to filter through. We’ve been selling wide-leg trousers for the past three seasons. The first season, we sold one pair. By the second season, we sold 30 pairs. Now, this season, every second trouser we sell will be a wide leg. But we still have clients asking for skinny pants or suits, because that’s what they’re comfortable with. Men tend to be anxious about change — they don’t want to look foolish. That’s why Levi’s jeans, Doc Martens and white t-shirts have endured for so long.
HO: But there are certain things, like just the width of a pant, which is an easy metric to measure a change in style…
MC: Yep, absolutely. It’s all about metrics.
HO: … it goes out and it goes in, it goes out and it goes in. So when you sense, like, “Oh, it’s going out again”, how long does it take to filter into what you’re actually selling?
MC: I would say at least 18 months, if not longer. So it’s not like a radical shift where everything we do this season is going to be wide, because that’s not going to work.
HO: And you don’t want to be the one to help push it?
MC: No, no. I never wanted to be. That’s where I came from, that’s what I was doing at Zambesi, which was a lot more avant-garde, a lot more pushing the envelope. You know, we were dealing with designers like Rei Kawakubo from Comme des Garçons, Helmut Lang, Yohji Yamamoto, Jean Paul Gaultier, who were at the forefront of avant-garde fashion for both women and men. I could see that there was an interest in that product, but no one was buying it. They’d come in and go, “Oh, that’s cool, I really like that shirt with three sleeves, but have you got a version with two sleeves in black or navy that I could buy?” Guys with the money to drop $400 on a shirt wanted to find the ultimate white shirt or the ultimate navy shirt. That’s the market I felt existed here.
HO: Twenty-five years ago, there wasn’t a Chanel store down the street. There wasn’t a Gucci store. How has the arrival of global luxury brands — particularly in lower Queen St — impacted your business?
MC: I think it’s probably been positive. When it comes to apparel, it’s a very small part of their business. If you go into Prada or you go into Louis Vuitton, you’ll see a handful of garments in very specific sizes, targeted at a very specific audience. So, if you have a young lawyer who wants to buy a suit for his wedding and he goes to Prada and can’t find something that works for him because they don’t have stock, they don’t have his size, but he has that taste level and he wants something slightly elevated — like a very nice fabric, something made in Italy that’s very tailored for him — then we become a really credible option. Maybe not his first choice, but we’re his logical choice. And that’s fine. I don’t mind.
Some of them might be like, “I’m going to fly to Hong Kong and get this or get that.” There’s always going to be that market. We don’t want to chase that market. If they come to us, that’s great, but most of our clients are still guys who own construction companies, or they’re electricians, or they work in finance or banking. They’re just normal guys. They’re not like, “Yeah, my parents have a house in the south of France. I remember going to a Chanel show with my mother when I was three.” Like, those people don’t exist in New Zealand. Well, they do in very, very small pockets, but you can’t build a business on those people.
HO: Tell me about the new Crane Brothers Design Award that you recently became the patron of, as part of the Arts Foundation’s Laureate Awards. What was the history behind that? Were you courted?
MC: No, not really. Not courted at all, actually. There’s a lot of history with Jo [Blair] at Brown Bread, who we worked with on a project for Christchurch Art Gallery as well. We did some work with them when we first opened in Christchurch [in 2018], and we’d been looking for something else to work on together. We didn’t know what we wanted, but we were like, “It would be nice to do something.” Originally, we were looking at partnering with AUT, but didn’t really have much idea about specifics. And then, I was in Christchurch. I literally had 15 minutes with Jo. I walked in and said, “Hey, we should do something.” And by the time I left, like 10 minutes later, we’d worked it out. So, it was like a 10-minute conversation, pretty much. And then she actually texted me that night and went, “Hey, that was amazing, but is this what we actually talked about?” And I’m like, “Yep, that’s what we’re doing.” So it all happened really quickly, but it was at the end of a lot of talk and thinking. It just happened fast because it presented itself as being the right thing to do.
HO: So what was the impulse? What’s the motivation?
MC: Oh, probably having countless friends and colleagues who’ve banged their heads against brick walls for the past 40 years trying to make a living in the wider design industry. Yeah, trying to get any kind of acknowledgment and just being like, “What the heck?” Like, if you weren’t a rugby player, a league player or a sailor, good luck trying to get any kind of support at all. And it was just kind of my family, right? All my friends were either trying to make it as commercial photographers, or graphic designers, or spatial designers, or industrial designers, or run a magazine. They were all trying to make a living out of something they were good at, something creative. And it was always an absolute struggle. They were all working as baristas, or landscape gardeners, or, you know, selling their soul doing something that they didn’t want to do to allow themselves to have a creative outlet.
It just seemed like the right place to be. And y’know, it’s only a small contribution. We’re not Fletcher Building. [The Design Award is $35,000, given to an arts laureate every second year.] It’s not like we’re just signing a cheque. It’s a conscious decision to do it, but I kind of feel like maybe if we do it, someone else will do it. And then all of a sudden it kind of starts. People are like, “Oh, we can support the arts, or we could support design” — which is actually, in some ways, even more relevant. People go to Britomart and they go, “Oh, I love all this.” They go to Amano and say, “Oh, I love this”, or whatever. It’s like, not everyone understands what good design is until they experience it. But then even when they do, they still don’t quite get it. It’s not like you’re looking at a picture on a wall and saying, “Oh, I like that picture” or “I don’t like that picture.” I guess most artists, though, would probably argue that design work is easier; they’d go, “Well, if you’re a designer, you can go work for Fisher & Paykel, or you can go work for Cheshire [Architects].”
But I think the other thing for me is what we’re starting to see now with artificial intelligence. I think that the value of original thinking and ideas is going to become increasingly important in the next 10 to 15 years. Like, you’ve got people who are actually coming up with things that aren’t influenced by the internet or by an AI program. Where is that coming from? Who’s doing that? Is there going to be a whole generation of kids who come through and say, “I don’t want a phone, I don’t want a smartphone, I want to go to a library”? Maybe, if they’re pushed by their parents, but I can’t see it happening.
But I’m old enough to remember when, if you wanted to find out about something, you had to go and hunt for it. And part of the experience of finding out about things was the hunt. Whether you were rifling through magazines or looking at the back of an album cover to see how someone was dressed or whatever. You couldn’t just type into a search engine and say, “Give me five outfits that’ll work for _____.” It’s all there now.
We’re now seeing graduates coming out of design and fashion schools and conceptually they’re kind of stuck. Where do they go to create something that no one’s seen before? How do they figure out the process of making something, of creating something new? The whole design process has been completely changed. You could’ve written this article on me without coming to see me; you could’ve just typed into ChatGPT, “Write me a three-page article on Murray Crane’s history relevant to today’s reader”, and you would’ve gotten something probably good enough to publish online. So how do you break through all that?
And it’s no different for someone building a house or designing a piece of furniture. It’s never been easier to do these things easily. So we need to celebrate the people who still do it properly and have their process. They’re the ones who will get us somewhere different than where we are now. Because otherwise, we’re just going to end up spinning our wheels, doing things that have already been done. And that doesn’t make any sense.
Again, food is a great analogy. There’s so much similarity across so many menus and so many restaurants. You can go into one, and half the menu will be the same as another, because they’re all drawing from the same sources. That’s why I love Cazador so much — it still feels like an original idea. That’s what makes the good stuff stand out — it’s pushing back.
HO: The Crane Brothers Design Award is a biennial award?
MC: Right, yeah, and we’ve committed to five. So we’ve committed to 10 years.
HO: What’s your horizon thinking for Crane Brothers? How far ahead do you think?
MC: At least 10 years. My big-picture thinking is that I want to get to 50 years. That’s my ultimate goal — probably just to still be involved in the business at that point. But I’ll be pretty decrepit by then. But I go to Italy, I go to see the companies I work with, and the old guys are still there in the corner, the best dressed, getting their coffee first, nodding. They’re still very much involved in business. Like Giorgio Armani; he’s 90. Well, I’m not comparing myself to Giorgio Armani, but, you know, I’m sure he wakes up every morning thinking, “What am I going to do today?” There are people in the industry who are completely laser-focused on what they’re doing — Karl Lagerfeld was the same, Miuccia Prada’s the same, Calvin Klein’s the same, Paul Smith, Ralph Lauren — bang, bang, bang. How long a list do you want to make? Look at Liz Findlay. Liz is still going. Karen Walker will still be doing it for a long time.
People always ask about an exit strategy: “What’s your exit strategy?” Why is that? It’s such a start-up mentality — people think you create a business to make money and sell it. That’s not why I started. I always say, “Well, you know, the best exit strategy is if your business is doing really well.” That’s the one you should focus on, because if everything’s working, that’s what someone’s going to want to buy.
HO: Do you think it could exist without…?
MC: Yeah. I won’t be relevant forever. There will be a whole new generation of clients who don’t deal with me. That’s the goal, really. If I’m not relevant any more, then it’s time to stop.
HO: You’d need something else to do, to channel that obsessive nature…
MC: Yeah, I’d still do something.
HO: And would Crane Brothers need a new obsessive person to run it?
MC: Possibly, yeah. There are more of those people out there than you think. You just have to find that thing that gets you out of bed at 5.30 in the morning.
HO: Because that can’t really be taught, right?
MC: No, it can’t. It’s got to be in you.
HO: I saw Mike Tyson saying something about how his son is training and wants to be a boxer, but Tyson’s like, “He’s never going to make it. He went to a private school!”
MC: He didn’t get the crap kicked out of him. You can train as much as you want, but it’s not the same. You’ll never make it if you haven’t had that adversity. That’s the thing, right? We all have a story. We’ve all got stuff that’s formed us, whether it was good or bad — whether you got bullied at school, had a teacher who didn’t like you, a father who was tough, or had to do chores on Saturday morning while everyone else was out. Those experiences shape us. And I feel like that’s something that’s really lacking now. Life’s just become too easy. There’s no winners, no losers — everyone’s a winner. But that’s not how life works, and now, more than ever, that’s clear. The gap between the haves and have-nots has only gotten wider.
You look at people who’ve gone on to do amazing things in their industry — Taika Waititi’s a great example. Zane Lowe [the DJ, producer and presenter] is another. Zane came from a broken family. His mum lived in a house in Ponsonby. He went to Auckland Grammar, wasn’t in the top stream, but he was obsessed with music. He knew what he wanted to do. He could’ve been just as happy working in a tiny studio, making music. We all know people who do things because they have no choice — they just have to do it.
Now that we have a whole generation of people who’ve grown up getting all their information, all their entertainment, all their inspiration from a screen, there are going to be people out there who’ll say, “I don’t want to do that. I want to do something else.” And that’s happening. People want an immersive experience. They want to learn about wine, how chocolate’s made, how garments are made, or take a creative writing course. Or learn about letterpress printing. You see these people getting really geeky about these things, but it’s only because they don’t want the other stuff. They don’t want everything off the screen. They want to come into a store and interact with a person who says, “How can I help you?”
