How Kenny Wilson turned Dr. Martens into a £1bn business

There is a difference between a brand being famous and a business being fully built. When Kenny Wilson joined Dr. Martens in 2018, that gap was clear. The boots were known around the world, woven into music, fashion and youth culture. But the company behind them was smaller than the brand suggested.

“When I arrived at Dr. Martens, it was a brilliant brand,” he says. “I was quite surprised how small the company was.” At the time, revenues were around £345m. Within four years, they had reached £1bn.

The temptation with a brand like that is to do more. More markets, more products, more priorities. Wilson’s approach was the opposite. He narrowed the business around the things that mattered most.

“One of the most important things I’ve learned in my career… is you can do anything but you can’t do everything,” he says.

That line became central to the turnaround. Dr. Martens had a strategy called DOCS, but beneath it sat 44 action points. Wilson reduced them to 11. Even that, he says, was probably too many, but it was enough to create momentum. The strategy was distilled into a sentence: “selling more pairs of boots, shoes and sandals to more people in seven countries through our own channels.”

It sounds simple because it had to be. A strategy that cannot be remembered cannot be executed.

That same discipline applied to markets. Dr. Martens was present in 60 countries, but presence is not the same as focus. “We were in there, but we weren’t really in there,” Wilson says.

Resources were shifted towards priority markets such as Germany, even when that meant taking money and attention away from other territories. It was not an easy decision, but it reflected a larger principle: organisation first, team second, self third. The question was not what suited one market, but what would make the whole company stronger.

The product range was also tightened. Boots came first, then shoes, then sandals. The most recognisable products became the centre of gravity. “It’s easy to amplify,” Wilson says. “If you cut things down, there are fewer things for people to look at and therefore they shine brighter.”

That idea is often overlooked. Range can create the illusion of choice while weakening impact. By reducing complexity, the brand became clearer.

But Wilson’s view of growth was not only commercial. It was cultural. Much of this came from his time at Levi’s, where he learned that leaders are measured not just on results, but on their ability to create future leaders. “Anyone can be the boss,” he says, “but to be a leader you have to have followers.”

That distinction shaped how he entered Dr. Martens. In his first week, he told the business he would not do anything for three months. Instead, he would “listen, learn, lead”. He travelled around the world, met the top 90 people in the business and asked the same structured questions. “If you hear something from 25 people,” he says, “then you just need to listen properly.”

Listening, in this context, was not a soft exercise. It was a way of finding the truth quickly.

That mattered most during Covid. Dr. Martens created a plan called “Survive Now, Grow Later” and made a decision not to furlough staff while the company had the money to pay them. “We said we want to show we care because that’s our value,” Wilson says.

The result was loyalty that could not have been demanded. It had to be earned.

The thread running through Wilson’s story is restraint. Understand before changing. Focus before scaling. Protect the brand before chasing growth. For a heritage business, the job is not simply to make it bigger. It is to hand it on in better shape.