The Economic Planning Unit

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Charles and Keith - private international company

Charles & Keith, a fashion brand company founded by brothers Charles and Keith Wong in 1996. With a key focus on footwear and accessories, Charles & Keith emphasizes its attention to detail, with the aim of creating "emblematic looks" for the elegant and sophisticated. Over the next few years, Charles & Keith increase its distribution, offer new products and wins new customers.

Charles & Keith mapped out their strategic managing by take controlled the entire shoe business operations, from stocks to design and even shoe sizing. This company also now has 390 stores in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

This company using Thompson's and Martin's Strategic Management Framework as a tool to create their successful strategic managing to expend their brand. Figure 3 shown the framework by Thompson's & Martin.

C&K make their research by using SWOT analysis to take their strength plus treat and improve their weakness by take opportunity. The result from this analysis related with their objective to make their brand as a strong name in fashion industry.

The Wong Brother's ( C&K) applied their corporate strategy by choosing which product to sell, which market to enter and whether to acquire a competitor or merge with it. The two siblings determination to cut out the middlemen who forced up prices. With their firm grip operations, the two founders were able to steer the fledgling company on a steady growth part even facing their first major test : 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis.

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Figure 3 : Thompson's & Martin's Strategic Management Framework

Charles & Keith make competitive strategies began distributing its line of shoes to Taiwan, and the same time opened its first international store in Indonesia. Even as the Wong Brothers were forging ahead overseas, they were also setting up the second home local store in Causeway Point, Singapore.

Then, C&K made a name for itself on the global stage when Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH) invested 20% as Charles & Keith shareholder. This partnership means a luxury giant international brands can saw value and worth in investing in a Charles & Keith.

After expending into the Philippines, C&K ventured beyond the South-East Asia region and set foot in Dubai. In Saudi Arabia & Jordan, C&K teamed up with Alhokair Fashion Retail, which bring international brands such as Zara to those market.

Charles & Keith monitoring their product by made sure that it had control over the entire chain of operations product. In the area of manufacturing, more than 30 factories in Malaysia and China make shoes exclusively for the company.

Conclusion

The public organizations are faced with the greatest challenges in decades. The pressure is on many organizations to change the mission and practices of the organization is made up of rule making bodies, such as legislature or a board appointed by public official. Constraints limits the flexibility and autonomy, goals are often vague and in dispute, the leader's authority is limited, political interference and scrutiny by outsiders can be expected as a strategy is formed, broad accountability is required, and performance expectations continually shift. For the private organization, the strategic management planning more wide and variety method to used based on their creativity to make sure their objective, mission and vision achieved. The chosen of technique is not detailing and complicated as public organization strategic management. The differences method as mentioned adopt by EPU and Charles & Keith shown that there make sure the management process going smooth and maintain the successful result by monitoring continuously the strategic process that can lead to a sustainable competitive advantage to the organization.