Introduction: Alex Cook, Co-Founder, Managing Partner and General Manager Americas at integrated marketing and design group WEPURPLE, is a man on a mission.
He and his fellow shareholders intend to ‘Purple the world’, a nicely evocative mantra encapsulating the heady ambitions of a company that represents some of the biggest brands in global travel retail and beyond.
WEPURPLE’s work embraces store design, retail merchandising, brand activations, packaging, digital development, production, public relations and communications.
WEPURPLE’s stellar reputation – built around its core values of wisdom, imagination and creativity – has been founded on a host of standout campaigns, installations and collaborations down the years.
Its efforts have resulted in many awards for WEPURPLE clients and, notably, a Frontier Award in 2021 for Collaboration of the Year alongside The Moodie Davitt Report in creating and running the acclaimed Virtual Travel Retail Expo 2020.
Cook’s recent relocation from Singapore to Mexico City underlines the company’s global mission, expanding the group’s presence in the key Americas market. The Moodie Davitt Report Founder & Chairman Martin Moodie spoke to Cook about WEPURPLE’s new base; ‘nearshoring’; why the Americas are a white space ripe with opportunities; and a famous first touch on his international rugby debut.
Martin Moodie: To begin Alex, what was the rationale for creating an Americas operation based out of Mexico City?
Alex Cook: Thanks Martin. The answer is lies in WEPURPLE’s mission of what we call ‘Purpling the world’.
Our agency group seeks to apply the purple qualities of wisdom, imagination and creativity to make brand storytelling and consumer experiences more memorable and enriching. At the same time, we want to have a positive impact on the communities we touch.
If you looked back at our global presence this time last year, we had deep Asian roots operating from Singapore and Hong Kong for many years. We had a maturing footprint in Europe, Middle East and Africa through teams in London, Paris and Cape Town.
But, we had no physical presence in the Americas. It was a white space for us, and a natural next step for us to invest in getting closer to this region.
Now, the question I get asked a lot is ‘why Mexico’? On a personal level, my partner is Mexican, but from a company perspective, there is solid logic. You may have heard of a trending business practice called ‘nearshoring’. Multi-nationals are strategically placing operations in Mexico, due to the proximity to the US.
I guess in the agency world, this is our version of nearshoring, but not just with an eye to the north, but south and east into the Caribbean too.
With my business partners Olivier (Grometto), Nick (Sutton) and Lucy (Hillyard), we wanted to take a regional perspective with the ability to service and create impact in North, South and Central America, and develop more intimate knowledge of emerging Latin markets and consumers.
What are your aspirations for the Mexico business?
We want to create value, offering our full suite of integrated retail marketing, communications, design and production services in the region, up to Canada and down to Argentina. We are adopting much of what’s served us well in other WEPURPLE operations, with consistent structures and ways of working, and creating an environment to foster the signature WEPURPLE culture.
Right now, we’re four months in and have a team of five in place, working well together from an office in the trendy neighbourhood of Polanco in Mexico City. We’re really putting in place the foundations for sustainable growth over the next few years.
Travel retail will always be a strong component of our business, but we work in domestic channels too. This becomes very interesting in Mexico City as it’s the sixth-largest metropolitan population in the world with over 22 million people. That’s a huge number of consumers in our home market and middle-class wealth is growing.
The relationship between travel retail and domestic is evolving and getting closer, especially as brands look to leverage synergies cross-channel. At the end of the day, it’s often the same consumer, just with different behaviours and motivations.
It’s early days I know but how is life in Mexico?
First off, it’s an incredible country. Those who have visited will know what I’m talking about. The richness of culture; the history; the diversity of habitats across the 32 states; the food; the music; the colour; the warmth of the people, and so on. It’s a vibrant lifestyle.
Work-wise, the transition from Singapore, where I was stationed for 13 years, has been an interesting one. Singapore is small, very organised and hyper-efficient. Mexico is towards the other end of the spectrum. The political and administrative landscape is complex. It’s a huge country and still an emerging market, meaning there are a lot of areas for improvement and technological advancement.
However, I’m not finding this holding back our business per se. Each day we learn something new for sure, but we’ve set up relatively quickly, and have been able to recruit a high-calibre team probably a bit quicker than I expected.
I’m always interested in the back stories behind entrepreneurial companies. Let’s wind back through the whole WEPURPLE journey. Firstly , how did you get involved in this world and what’s been the story since?
It’s becoming quite a long story these days, so I’ll try to keep it short.
My career was blessed by an early introduction to the marvellous travel retail sector straight out of university in 2004. I’ll be forever grateful to Peter Lightfoot for that opportunity. At Lightfoot Marketing, I learnt an incredible amount from working with accounts such as BAA (remember them?), World Duty Free and TFWA, and on the brand side with the likes of Puig, Luxottica and many others.
This job took me all over the world, allowed me to participate in fascinating projects and connect with deeply passionate people. The travel retail channel was witnessing fantastic growth as it reinvented itself after the abolition of intra-EU duty free, and I was hooked.
As a fresh faced 20-something year old, I was so lucky to be exposed to so many amazing people in the business. I received incredible support and encouragement from some pillars of the sector past and present.
Some names that spring to mind are Mark Riches, Sarah Branquinho, Rene Riedi, Patrick Bouchard, Francis Gros, Jaya Singh and many, many others. Not for one second do I forget or under-value the impact the people in the sector have had on my career. They know who they are, and yourself and Dermot [Davitt] are included in that, Martin.
Fast-forward to 2010 and I relocated from London to Singapore to establish Lightfoot Marketing Asia. Asia Pacific was starting to boom and it felt like the right move to make. Rémy Cointreau was a founding client of that operation and Peter Sant, Matthew Hodges and their successors were very supportive. The client base continued to grow with the likes of Mondelez, King Power and Lotte Duty Free.
In 2016, I decided to have a crack at running my own company. Alongside my business partner Nick Sutton, we founded FILTR, headquartered in Singapore. We grew quickly from a team of five to around 30 with our client base expanding to the likes of Edrington, Shiseido, Victorinox and Rituals and we branched out with a small operation in London.
2019 was a record year and we were thinking about how to scale up the business even faster. M&A was a new route for us to explore and around this time, we entered into a conversation with Olivier Grometto, the co-owner of rival agency Qingwa Group.
Then we all know what happened… COVID struck.
We paused… but we didn’t stop thinking. We asked ourselves if the fundamentals of what we wanted to achieve in an agency combination changed due to COVID?
The answer was no, and so in August 2020 we formalised the merge of FILTR and Qingwa, bringing the best of both companies to an operation that would then cover Singapore, Hong Kong, London and Paris. This set in motion the group that we are today.
I suspect you have alread touched on the answer but what was the biggest challenge along the way?
Like everyone, COVID was a really tough period and challenged us in ways we never imagined. Under pressure, it showed what we were made of. We fought very hard to keep our team together, pivoted our business and acquired new skills along the way.
Our collaboration with The Moodie Davitt Report on the Virtual Travel Retail Expos was a part of our pivot, but also a major challenge. Disruptive; innovative; exhausting… in equal measures.
Martin, you know the efforts both our organisations went to deliver a product that, I think, played a really important role in the recovery of the sector.
If I’m not mistaken, the first virtual event in 2020 ranks as the second-largest gathering of travel retail executives ever, behind the TFWA World Exhibition in Cannes obviously, and you and I both have a lot of pride in scooping a Frontier Award for the venture.
I bet you never saw the day The Moodie Davitt Report received a trophy from its [leading -Ed] rival DFNI-Frontier.
You are right on that one. But full credit to both the judges and the title. Let’s roll forward and talk about WEPURPLE’s global presence today.
Across our six locations, we have over 50 incredibly talented and hard-working Purplers. They come from 12 countries and speak over 15 languages. To a person, they’re really good people who are a pleasure to work alongside. Together we’re working on hundreds of projects at any one time, so there’s a lot of moving parts. Cohesion and teamwork are essential.
Not that we ever set ourselves targets or quotas on this, but I’m proud we’ve attracted a team that’s 70% female, and around 60% of our Directors and department heads are female.
We invest a lot in our Employee Value Proposition and I think it’s significant that our People & Culture Director Lucy Hillyard (daughter of long-serving Allders International/Nuance Group executive and general great human being Nick Hillyard) is a partner in the company and sits on our Board of Directors.
We have a clearly defined strategy. That is underpinned by a strong set of values, way of working and culture. We have a loyal client base that we are very proud of, with many of the relationships dating back over ten years.
I can honestly say that today is the best we have ever been, but we’re committed to being even better tomorrow.
And your longer-term ambitions for the company?
As a group, we’re comfortable in our own skin. We know who we are. We know what makes us different and, in my view, better. We’re not trying to copy anyone else, as we know how to create and add value our way, and we know how to establish ourselves as long-term business partners of our clients.
However, we have set ourselves ambitious mid-term goals, based on constant incremental improvements and organic growth, twinned with strategic investments.
Some important recent appointments have laid a platform for future expansion. Elssy Teo was promoted from within to become the General Manager of our largest office in Singapore, and Valerie Halo was recruited from outside as the new General Manager of our French subsidiary.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic to see our Group reach up to ten locations in the coming years. In creative agency terms, that starts to make us quite a relevant global network.
These days, a significant part of improvement as a company is to be a better corporate citizen. This applies to WEPURPLE as much as it does to our multi-national clients.
We recognise our role in society, for people and the planet, and as part of this we’ve been working hard to put our company into a position to achieve B Corp status. We hope to apply for this accreditation by the end of the year, as another major milestone in our wider sustainability agenda.
I asked you about the challenges. What about the highlights along the way?
Too many. We really care about the little things, so every project is special for us, from writing a press release to designing a 5,000sqm duty free store.
If I had to pick one, it would be the way our integrated model came together for the Frontier award-winning Oreo Café at Hamad International Airport. It was WEPURPLE demonstrating our true value as an ‘ultimate business partner’ across inter-connected services.
We worked with Mondelez and Qatar Duty Free in the conceptualisation, design, construction project management and amplification campaign of this first-of-its-kind hybrid space from such an iconic global brand.
The communication work generated over 22 million impressions in the first few months and the outlet became one of the best performing at the airport. The project also paved the way for WEPURPLE to work with Qatar Duty Free on more projects, and Senior Vice President Thabet Musleh and the team have become great partners.
How would you sum up the WEPURPLE values?
WEPURPLE’s values are built on what we call our 4Cs. Curious – the spirit of exploration. Can-do – a state of mind.
Cohesive – a special place to work as one team from many backgrounds, across all locations and specialising in different design and communications disciplines. And Celebratory – taking pride in our achievements and the achievements of our clients. Living these values every day, it really puts the ‘We’ in WEPURPLE.
You sometimes work with multiple clients in a sector – for example beauty or liquor or retailers. How do you manage balancing such a portfolio?
It’s a good question and a key one. Brands and retailers work with us because we’re specialists in retail and brand experiences in specific categories and the travel retail channel.
Of course, it’s crucial that we respect their sensitivities. The reputational damage would be catastrophic if we were anything less than extremely professional. We’re open with our clients, and put in place measures around different operations and teams to manage the portfolio.
I’ve seen other agencies take different approaches on this, including setting up alternative companies, but I suspect that’s largely camouflage and not really our style.
What does Alex Cook do when he’s not working?
Sleep… occasionally. I’m kidding, but the older I get the more I recognise the need for balance in life.
I’m blessed with three wonderful children, Isla (13), Jake (11) and Leo (6), and I enjoy encouraging them to explore the world with eyes wide open.
And of course, I’m forever grateful for the love, patience and listening ear of my partner Maria Jose. Aside from forging her own very successful career, she’s the rock of our household. I love how she always inspires me to be best version of myself.
Family-time aside, and despite my years, I’m still playing competitive rugby in Mexico. Two weeks ago, I played in the final of the Mexico National Championship and my new side, Black Thunder, won a close-fought game.
The guys there have been so welcoming and I am really happy for them. As national champions, they have written their own bit of history and it’s really deserved for the effort and application everyone put in across the season. The celebrations weren’t bad either, as you can imagine.
Rugby has been a big part of my life since school. I’m not the young buck that ran out on the rugby field at my first Cannes in 2004. Did a spritely Martin Moodie play in this one? Sadly this would be the last time this annual full-contact rugby game took place, but we had a blast.
I was fortunate to win the Singapore Premiership five times and represent Singapore at international level on several occasions, including scoring a try with my first touch on debut against the Philippines. When I watch the footage, it feels a very long time ago.
Although it wasn’t professional level, I learnt a lot from being part of a higher-level sporting environment, while trying to balance the day job and home life.
Training up to six times a week. Gym at 5am before work. Nutrition. Recovery management. Attention to detail. Setting and buying into team standards and holding each other accountable to them. It all helped shape a lot of my character and approach to leadership today.
Any final comments to the industry?
I would ask the industry to look in the mirror and ask itself truthfully, are standards held consistently high enough day-in day-out, everywhere?
I travel a lot and at its best, the industry is the premier retail channel, second to none. Experiential, enticing, thrilling, spectacular. However, I witness a lot of mediocrity that doesn’t get reported on. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about Martin. We have to call that out more and do something about it.
Turning a negative into a positive. I see the opportunity in travel retail to elevate standards in every store – big or small, every category – mature or emerging, across a holistic travel experience including F&B and every other touchpoint, to better serve the incredible cross-roads of humanity that is our customer base, day-in day-out.
And I know without a shadow of doubt that WEPURPLE can support in achieving this ambition across the Americas region, and worldwide, ‘Purpling the world’ with our work as we go. ✈
