A Pocketful of Holes and Dreams (25 page)

‘It’s between him and me,’ I said, still staring at Dingo.

‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘I will not tolerate this kind of behaviour in the club.’

He took me into the club house, telling me to sit down and wait. A few minutes later, he returned with the club president and official steward for the Hurlingham Polo Association, the governing body of the sport in the UK. They don’t come much bigger in the polo world.

He and the club manager positioned themselves directly opposite me, two judges facing the guilty party. The club president spoke first. ‘This type of behaviour is not acceptable,’ he said. ‘This is a gentleman’s club, and gentlemen do not resort to street fighting to resolve issues. There are established procedures for resolving issues, and we adhere to those procedures. The penalty for fighting is instant dismissal from the club, revocation of your membership.’

I looked at them both across the table. I appreciated that there were rules, I said, and was willing to abide by them, but I thought it only fair that I was given a chance to explain my side of things. I told them that I had been sworn at three times now, each time just for asking a simple question. They were shocked by what I told them, finding it hard to believe that one of their ‘gentleman’ members would behave that way. I was asked to wait outside. It was Dingo’s turn to go into the clubhouse now.

I couldn’t believe what had happened. What had I done? Six new horses? A new wagon? All that money spent on the stables and polo ground? My sponsors and all the money that they had spent – what were they going to think? I felt pretty lousy, but I still felt right was on my side. Just because I was from humble beginnings did not mean that I was a lesser person and could be spoken to like that.

After ten minutes, I was called back in, and the club president gestured me towards him, saying that Dingo had something to say.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘Will you accept my apology?’ I couldn’t ignore his outstretched hand and returned his handshake.

The manager clapped us both on the back. ‘Come on, you two,’ he said, ‘that’s the end of it. No more swearing, and certainly no more fighting.’ Dingo and I shook hands again, and we all smiled. The club president even put his hand on my shoulder, took me to one side and apologized for the ‘welcome’ I had received!

A couple of years later, I went with the club manager to Guards Polo Club at Windsor for a special four-week course on becoming a Grade One umpire. As well as enjoying every minute of it, we both passed with flying colours. I got on well with him, and some time later, he invited me to play in a team against Prince Charles. Unfortunately, Prince Charles fell off his horse and badly injured his arm a few weeks before we were due to play. The match was cancelled, but I did end up umpiring the game that took its place that day in the grounds of the club president’s fabulous home, Hembury Hall. Princess Margaret was presenting the prizes, which was definitely a highlight, as one of them was for me!

The rest of that season was a great success. Jaguar were more than happy with their sponsorship deal, and agreed to finance the Jaguar polo team the following year. Gina and I were eventually accepted and made to feel very welcome in the polo world.

22. Tickled Pink

By thirty-five, I was a millionaire living the dream, with everything I could possibly wish for. I had a gorgeous wife and two lovely, healthy daughters, a large house in the country, stables for our horses and garages full of new cars. I also had a successful business that was doing unbelievably well. Girls Talk and Kids Talk had become so popular we had queues at the doors every Saturday. The power of our brand names had become phenomenal, with teenagers saying that if it wasn’t from Girls Talk or Kids Talk, it wasn’t fashionable.

Karen Foster had joined me in 1985 and was now area manageress, looking after all our shops. She knew how Gina and I worked, and how much importance we put into attention to detail. She was absolutely fantastic at her job and took a lot of pressure off us. So did June, my sister, who was now the manageress of my first shop, in Church Street.

I knew everything was in good hands, but I just could not just sit back and enjoy what Gina and I had built up over the past ten years. I was a workaholic. It wasn’t in my nature to sit still; I was only happy when I was running at 100mph. Perhaps it had something to do with my childhood, or my mother urging me to better myself. Or maybe it had something to do with Mrs Jones, my teacher, and her comment on the day I left school that no good would ever come of me.

I was still driven, wanting to achieve more. But I still could not read or write, and I lived with the shame and embarrassment of it every day. I had organized my life to try and hide it from the world, avoiding anything that would expose me, like writing a cheque or reading a menu, but it was always there. I felt like a criminal, always on the run.

I remember seven-year-old Katie and five-year-old Faye asking me to read them a story one night, and passing me a book of nursery rhymes. It had lots of pictures and large writing. I was terrified and began to panic. Looking at the pictures I made up the words. They started giggling and said, ‘Daddy, you’re being silly, it doesn’t say that.’

That innocent comment from my young daughters nearly destroyed me. I was their father and I couldn’t even read them a simple bedtime story. If I could have traded in all my wealth there and then, just to be able to read the simplest of words, I most certainly would have.

Gina was very happy and contented with everything, but I was beginning to realize I needed a new challenge. One night, we sat and talked for hours about different business ventures. After a couple of weeks, we’d narrowed it down to two: property development or launching a new clothing brand into the fashion industry, this time producing and selling our own brand to other retailers. After discussing it for some time, we finally agreed to stay in the fashion business – ‘Better the devil we knew …!’ We decided to set up a new fashion company, designing all our own styles under our own label, specializing in teenage girls’ clothing. It was all very exciting.

The first step was to choose a name, one with global potential that would appeal to the female market. We chose an old English expression, ‘Tickled Pink’. I applied to register the name as a brand, and within a few weeks, it was accepted. The next step was to find suitable premises. London would have been ideal, but it was too far away; I didn’t want to be away from my family for long periods of time. Basing ourselves in Manchester made better sense. It was only an hour or so from home, and the shops in Liverpool and Chester were about the same distance away. And it was the UK’s second busiest city for fashion after London, and there were lots of companies supplying the trade in the area.

I soon found the perfect place – a 2,500-square-foot showroom in Stephenson Square, near Manchester’s Piccadilly, surrounded on all sides by other fashion houses. Ironically, it was also just around the corner from my old friend Mrs Kumar.

Wasting no time, we opened on Sunday 2 October 1988, just in time for the busy Christmas trade. I put a full-page four-colour advert in the
Drapers Record
, a weekly fashion-trade magazine, inviting everyone in the fashion business to the grand opening. We served pink champagne and pink cakes, and over a hundred inquisitive customers turned up, among them some nervous competitors, who seemingly anticipated I would be a threat.

We had spent a lot of money on the new showroom, framing the windows with ultra-modern pink-neon lights and dressing the mannequins in up-to-the-minute styles. To begin with, we sold other companies’ designs, and even a little bit of ‘cabbage’, as we needed six months to organize our own designs. I wanted to get the showroom up and running before introducing our own label.

We started off as wholesalers, essentially a cash and carry, which meant that shop owners from all over the north of England could call in once a week to buy their stock, paying for it there and then. I took on new staff, and having learnt the power of media and advertising from the very beginning, I set up a campaign to market the brand, starting with a front cover on the
Drapers Record
. It was a full-colour photograph of a top model wearing Tickled Pink’s newest look. It cost a fortune, but it was worth it, because it generated a buzz; everyone in the fashion business was talking about Tickled Pink, wanting to know who we were and where we had come from.

Gina and I set about putting a spring/summer collection together for 1989, with Kirsty, a young fashion designer we’d taken on straight from university. We wanted to be different from our competitors, to stand out, so we decided that our very first collection was going to be all fluorescent colours – neon pink, yellow and green. Bright! This was a brave decision. Other companies had tried and failed miserably. What we did that was different, however, was to trim the bright colours in black.

There were ten styles, the tops and T-shirts all bearing the Tickled Pink logo embossed in black. We had five different styles of ‘bottoms’, including black lycra cycling shorts. To complete the collection, we added a washed-out-denim range with three-coloured neon cotton embroidery on each piece. The samples were so fabulous, we decided to put ourselves under even more pressure by producing all the styles for younger girls aged between two and twelve. This had proven so successful in the past that it was worth taking the risk.

Once all the final designs were completed, I set off all over Europe looking for factories to produce them. A daunting task for anyone. But for someone who could not read or write, a nightmare. I ended up in Greece, where they specialized in manufacturing light-weight cottons and lycra. I felt it would be best not to put all our eggs in one basket, so I chose three factories: one to manufacture the cotton garments, one for the lycra and a third to produce the washed-out-denim collection.

Ten days later, having worked at least twelve hours a day with the respective factories on the designs, I placed orders for 60,000 garments, the value of which came close to £300,000! Many saner people would say I was crazy to take such a big risk so early on, and in our first season. However, if I had learnt anything in life, it was that there are ‘ditherers’, there are ‘doers’, and there are those with ‘lots of balls’! I was aware that I stood to fall at the first fence, losing a lot of money and possibly ruining the Tickled Pink brand overnight. But I also knew we stood to make a huge amount of money if we had got things right.

Being successful in the fashion business requires spending all your time gambling on your judgement and instinct. It’s all a numbers game, and not for the faint-hearted. As long as you win more than you lose, you are doing all right. I never felt the need to gamble on horses, cards or anything else: my life and business were a perpetual gamble.

As soon as I got back to the UK, I had to open three irrevocable letters of credit from my bank, guaranteeing the Greek factories money. Without this, they wouldn’t start producing our designs, and the clock was ticking away. There was no going back now. I had once again put my neck on the proverbial block and could only pray that my gamble paid off.

All the stock was due to arrive at the end of February, so I booked a stand at the Birmingham NEC fashion trade show and produced a glossy brochure featuring the collections. Tickled Pink was definitely a ‘family’ business. We had Katie and Faye modelling the clothes for the kids’ range, and professionals for the teenagers.

Our merchandise arrived from Greece on time, and the showroom looked fantastic with all the new neon styles. Despite all this, I still had a sick feeling that the collection would not be as successful as we had prayed for.

We set up our stand at the NEC the day before the show opened. I’d had a large, electric fluorescent sign made with ‘Tickled’ in blue and ‘Pink’ in pink. It hung in the middle of our stand, with mannequins on either side, dressed in our new designs. By the time we had finished, we were exhausted but proud at how brilliant it looked, and returned to our hotel, full of excitement at the thought of the following day. We had attended enough exhibitions in the past as buyers, but this time we were there as exhibitors!

The next morning, we were feeling more nervous than ever. Would the buyers like our styles and the bright neon colours? And would they actually place any orders for immediate delivery? We were taking a risk. Nearly all the other companies exhibiting were ahead of the game, showing styles for autumn delivery, some six months ahead, while we were showing for that season.

Nine o’clock sharp, when the main doors opened, thousands of buyers rushed in, and within what seemed like minutes, we had a large gathering around our stand asking questions about Tickled Pink, wanting to know how long we’d been established, and how competitive our prices were. They loved our styles, and we spent the next eight hours doing nothing but taking orders. We were literally mobbed, and it was impossible to leave the stand. The show was supposed to close at 6 p.m., but we still had people on the stand. At 6.30, one of the security guards had to show us out through a back door. It was mad. Absolutely, wonderfully mad!

Gina and I were in a state of shock. All the buyers wanted our concept in their shops straight away. At the end of the show, we had sold over 25,000 pieces and opened 67 new accounts all over the UK. We had sold over a third of our initial 60,000 in the three days of the show. We were also inundated with enquiries from fashion agents wanting to carry our samples and represent Tickled Pink in their regions. They had noticed our stand was one of the busiest at the show and wanted to be involved. Gina and I took their names and phone numbers and I told them I would get in touch.

Back in Manchester, we found out that the showroom had also been very busy with cash-and-carry customers, and that the Girls Talk and Kids Talk shops had sold out of certain styles in just a couple of days. Some of the most popular styles had to be repeated from Greece to keep up with demand; an extra 20,000 pieces in all. By the end of August, we had sold every last piece. Tickled Pink was up and running, the decision to do the children’s sizes proving to have been a good one. And it didn’t stop. Over the next few years, we went from strength to strength, becoming the fastest-growing brand at the time.