Please Let It Stop (12 page)

Ciaran was sitting next to me, with John Clarke on his right. He obviously found the meeting equally difficult. During the conversation he proclaimed, ‘I don’t have a problem with Ann Summers. I love sex.’ I said I wasn’t interested in his personal views about sex, but I was very interested in our store and the progression of our business. I had been trying to explain very carefully who our target audience were, how they were normal people who were a far cry from the dirty raincoat brigade. They were people who’d often been together for a while and who wanted to add some harmless fun to their sex lives. I had facts and figures, but Ciaran was not listening to my argument. He seemed intent only on relaying his pre-prepared views which bore no relation to what I had been saying. I’d had enough. Having invited them over for what I thought would be a civilised discussion, I was not even being heard.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘let’s just stop for a minute. You’re not interested at all in what I have to say, are you?’ Ciaran’s
response took me aback. ‘There are a lot of nasty people in Ireland and I can’t be held responsible for what might happen to you if you go ahead and open this store.’ What was he trying to say? What sort of advice was he trying to give me? ‘Oh my God,’ I thought, ‘He’s concerned about the IRA.’

I managed to compose myself and then said, ‘Look, you haven’t come to consider my side of the story or negotiate, have you?’ Ciaran admitted I was right. So I did the only thing you can do in those circumstances: I brought the meeting to an end.

I am not a woman who scares easily and the meeting just made me more determined to carry on. That’s exactly what we did. We didn’t panic; we just carried on making plans for the store.

Ciaran’s concern that there were some nasty people out there turned out to be well founded. One day we received an anonymous letter through the post, addressed to me at one of our London stores. It contained a bullet, a real bullet. There was a note with it:

THERE ARE PLENTY OF FREELANCE PROVOS WHO WOULD DO A NICE ARSON JOB ON YOUR CESSPIT SHOP FOR A FEW HUNDRED QUID IF YOU DARE SET UP ON OUR MAIN STREET. YOU’LL NEED VERY HEAVY SECURITY. JUST STAY AWAY. YOU WHORE!!

Colleagues and friends were very worried, with some begging me not to go ahead. Initially, I was terrified but I also wasn’t going to be bullied.

I was to go over a few days before the store opening in October 1999. I had security to meet me at the airport because I had no idea who or what I was dealing with. I’d also hired a Dublin-based publicity team. I wasn’t totally happy with doing this, preferring to use my own London team, but I thought that, given the situation, it might be a good idea to go with locals who had the knowledge. I had also received a phone call earlier that week from the producers of
The Late Late Show
. I learnt that this was a popular TV talk show that reached a lot of people and they wanted me to appear. At the time my media experience was still very limited. Although I wanted publicity for the store I decided that since there had been such a furore about it already – the councillors from the Dublin Corporation were continuing to make waves in the newspapers – it would be best not to do the show.

I arrived in Dublin and went to meet with the publicity team. We discussed
The Late Late Show
and they insisted that I should appear, saying it would be the ideal opportunity for me to put my case forward in my own terms. Up till now Dublin had only heard the other side of the story. I was still very nervous about it but figured that if they thought it was a good idea, I should do it. Michael Crawford was on before me to launch his autobiography
and was entertaining the live audience with his anecdotes – they seemed to be having a good time. ‘I hope he’s softened them up,’ I thought. It was now my turn. The presenter Pat Kenny was sitting on the stage, behind a desk which obviously put him in a commanding position. I sat in a chair next to the desk. My heart was thumping by now and as I scanned the audience, I saw that Ciaran McNamara and Allan Taylor were straight ahead of me, right at the front. I had been set up!

From the start, the presenter took the tough approach with me. He wasn’t exactly Jeremy Paxman but he seemed determined to get me into a corner. I was equally determined to make my point. I said, ‘You know we have had Ann Summers parties in Dublin for years. We are successful because women love them just like they will love our store. Why should they be deprived because a man doesn’t think it’s right?’ I pointed out that I heard no good, factual reason as to why the shop should not open. The presenter decided to involve the audience. Predictably, he threw the first question to Ciaran.

Ciaran stood up. He’s a councillor so he’s used to making his pitch in front of a public audience. I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I’m going to die up here. I am going to be ripped apart.’ When he’d finished the presenter pointed to one of the women in the audience and asked her what she thought. It was a brilliant moment. She just cut loose. ‘Who does the Dublin Corporation think they are, telling women where
we can and can’t shop?’ I had underestimated these Irish ladies. More of them joined her and they all turned on Ciaran. The debate continued to open up and widen. ‘There’s a newsagents that sells porn and you haven’t closed that,’ someone said. Somebody else thoughtfully pointed out that drug users were openly seen in the area and nothing had been done about them.

For me this was the icing on the cake. I had opened the store just before going to do the show. We’d been issued with a writ by the Dublin Corporation to close us down but I had decided I was going to take it all the way to court if I had to. We put together a petition on the day and got an overwhelming positive response. We had a record number of people through the doors on the day we opened and we haven’t looked back: Dublin is now one of our top three best-performing stores. Eventually we did go to court and we won, with the result that the Dublin Corporation ended up paying our £20,000 costs.

The next day’s papers echoed public opinion and went on the attack against the Dublin Corporation and their performance on the television programme. I, on the other hand, was commented on for my demeanour and also for the tasteful pale pink suit I wore. I obviously wasn’t the sex slut in cheap red lace and skintight PVC that everyone had expected.

Later on I tried to arrange a meeting with the Irish Prime Minister. Not expecting him to oblige, I was very
pleased to see that he at least sent his second in command, Jerry Hickey. I met him in the Dublin store and told him what we were trying to achieve. He was very supportive, a complete contrast to the Dublin Corporation.

Now we have five other stores in Ireland and they are all very well received. To illustrate how times have changed, when we opened in Cork the Mayor wanted to have his picture taken in the store. He knew the value of good publicity! The O’Connell Street store is now one of the highlights for visitors on the Dublin tour bus. I haven’t heard the commentary but I would like to think they say something like, ‘This is the scene of a major battle between Ann Summers and the Dublin Corporation. As you can see, the lady won.’

CHAPTER NINE

When I reflect on my move into Ann Summers I think I was very brave. I walked into a situation where I was totally inexperienced, I wasn’t getting total support from the board and I had the handicap of being related to the owner so I had far more to lose. I was being driven only by gut feeling, by the responses from women I’d met at that first party I attended in Thamesmead and my own self-belief. It is not easy to step into an industry that is dominated by men and has an image that is more sleaze than sensuality. But that’s what being an entrepreneur is all about. You have to take risks and go where others are too afraid to be. That’s the thrill and it’s also the difference between people who have ideas and those who make them happen: the latter step outside their comfort zone. And they don’t stop once they’ve tasted success. Being an entrepreneur is not just about making money: if that is your only motivation your business will fail. You need to be hungry for success,
to want to build something and put your own stamp on the world.

As the business developed, so did the challenges and the competition. Just after we started, a company called Silver Rose suddenly appeared on the scene. The man who ran it, Geoff Silver, had one shop selling erotic underwear and he wanted to set up a party plan scheme. What better way than to poach some of my people? Chris Rogers and Ann Galea decided to go off and join him. They took thirty of the women they’d recruited with them. This was literally only a year or so after we’d started which was bad news, not so much in terms of the people we lost but in trying to make sure that the remaining sales organisers were not discouraged, so one of my key tasks at this point was to ensure that morale remained high. Some of them took the defections to Silver Rose quite personally and, although I tried to point out to them that life goes on, they decided to leave as well. Nonetheless, our recruitment rate was very high, at about thirty new party organisers each day, so we recovered quickly.

Expansion is necessary for a business but it brings with it a lot of risks. In 1989 I employed a woman called Joyce Greenhill to run the party plan operation in the north. I had known for some time that we should be operating up there but it would have been foolish to try and run the process from our southern base. Joyce was very good at what she did and helped us get organised for our northern operation. In a
way the party plan business organises itself: you train some people up, they recruit others and it perpetuates itself. As we progressed, I began to feel that Joyce wasn’t quite right for us. Yes she could do the job, but there were things about the way in which she did it that weren’t right. We now needed to project a more sophisticated image and I felt she was not going to be the right ambassador for our brand. The people I needed were a lot more polished and professional: that was the image I had been working hard to cultivate for myself and it was what I expected from my senior staff.

There are many people in business who are uncomfortable with change and I think Joyce was one of them. She didn’t like the formalities of the business, formalities that become necessary whenever you grow in size, which was what was happening to Ann Summers. The more people you have, the more necessary it is to put in structures, otherwise you end up with chaos. I think Joyce felt we could just continue as we had always done, but becoming a bigger version of that. Not surprisingly, she was unhappy, so that when a company named Lovelace came calling, she was flattered. Lovelace was owned by a man called Carl Slack and we hadn’t considered them major rivals. Fundamentally, Joyce wanted a directorship or she would leave. I said no and she went – and so did many of our party organisers. She was actively poaching them, forcing me to enact a campaign of damage limitation. I spoke to our organisers and told them to handle the defectors with good
grace by letting those who were leaving know they were always welcome at Ann Summers. We lost around 500 ladies in all. Less than a year later Carl Slack’s business was in trouble. I saw an opportunity to buy him out and get my staff back. It wasn’t that easy. We bought the party plan channel of Lovelace but many of the ladies, fed up with the politics of the whole thing, decided that party plan was no longer for them. The deal meant we wouldn’t lose any more staff and we gained a few back, but that was about it. The poaching issue was to rear its head again in 1994, when a company called Intrigue, in what was quite a brazen move, placed ads that said, ‘Ann Summers girls wanted.’ However, they continued trying to steal our party organisers. Intrigue had employed one of our ex-area managers and were effectively targeting our sales force with their ready-made lists of our people. In other words, they were setting up a company using stolen lists without doing any of the hard work or training or bearing any of the costs. We were actually preparing for full-scale legal battle when we heard they had gone into receivership. I will not hesitate in calling in top lawyers to fight anyone who tries to steal our business and I will go to any lengths to protect the business from anyone who dares to unlawfully or unethically jeopardise the Ann Summers brand.

As Ann Summers became more successful, I had more money to reinvest in the business and was planning for the
future. By the early 1990s we were growing 20 per cent year on year. By 2001, having expanded the number of Ann Summers stores to fifty-two, we also had enough evidence to realise that our retail operation was not siphoning off business from party plan: in fact, it was helping increase party bookings. In the following four years we opened eighty-three more stores. We were very careful to ensure that the shops communicated to the customers in the same way as the party plan business. That meant they had to reflect the same brand image and the same ethos of being fun, female-friendly places that women wanted to visit. In February 2000 the high-street chain, Knickerbox, came up for sale. I was very interested and not just because I knew it would be relatively cheap. At this time Ann Summers was still struggling with credibility and I felt that not only was Knickerbox a good fit with our business, but it would add something positive to our brand. I had tried to buy it a few years earlier when it came up for sale, but failed. Now they were really in trouble it was time to get serious.

At the time Knickerbox was losing £5 million a year and I knew it was just a matter of time before they went into receivership. That might sound a bit vulture-like but it’s the way business operates – why pay more for a company when you can get it at a knock-down price? Of course, operating in this way is a gamble because someone else could come along and whisk it away from under your nose. This is exactly what happened when I tried this tactic with
La Senza, which was snapped up by the owner of Rymans, Theo Paphitis. Theo is one of the dragons on the television programme,
Dragons’ Den.
This time I was determined to do the deal. I went to meet the owner, the very brash and colourful Gary Klesch. He is one of those people who is in every sense larger than life and greeted me wearing a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. He must have stood at about 6 feet 5 inches. There was a pretty blonde at reception and, all in all, I felt like I’d stumbled into JR Ewing’s office!