My Fight to the Top

by Michelle Mone

  ‘Er, no,’ I said, confused. I was used to the beer industry where you just turned up to somebody’s pub, they greeted you with a smile and would ask if you want a whiskey at lunchtime. From beers to bras – I thought you could do the same thing.

  ‘No, you have to have an appointment,’ she said in this very posh voice. ‘What’s this about?

  ‘My name is Michelle Mone. I’m from Glasgow. I’m pregnant with my third baby. I’m £480,000 in debt. It’s taken three years of my life to invent this bra. It’s the best cleavage bra in the world and Selfridges need to stock it,’ I blurted.

  ‘I’m sorry. It doesn’t work that way. You have to send in your prototype and we will get back to you if we like it,’ she cut me dead.

  I didn’t have time to wait. ‘Please, I can’t go home, I need to sell this bra,’ I begged.

  She eventually took pity on me and phoned the buyer. The buyer came out. I remember her name to this day – Virginia – and she was Canadian. ‘I’ve heard you don’t have an appointment. Can I help you?’

  I told her the same story, with even more urgency. ‘Please, try it on. What size are you? I’ve got all the sizes here,’ I said, holding out my carrier bag.

  ‘Well… I’m a 34B.’ She was taken aback.

  ‘Great, please try this on,’ I thrust her the prototype.

  She obviously felt sorry for me but she had rules to follow. ‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t work like that. You have to send in your prototype. We have a selection meeting and we will call you if we are interested.’

  I started to cry. ‘Please, I can’t go home,’ I sobbed. Tears were dripping down my face. I was crying through fear of being in so much debt and from exhaustion.

  She panicked. ‘Do you want a seat? Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I sniffed.

  ‘Okay, just be careful about the baby.’ She got me a coffee and then I tried one last time. Virginia caved in. ‘Okay, I’ll try it,’ she said. She came out five minutes later with a massive smile on her face. ‘Oh, my god, this bra is incredible! I’m buying it. How much stock can I buy? What’s the minimum order?’

  She asked for six months’ worth of stock. I couldn’t believe it. The problem was, we had run out of money. How were we going to place orders with the Portuguese factories in time for a summer launch? We had a listing in the best department store but we didn’t have the stock to give them to sell. Can you imagine?

  Throughout my life I’ve always got to there and thought the job is done, but it’s not. Then I have to get to there and then when I get to there I have to get over there. That’s the whole story of business. Don’t think just because you’ve got an order, that’s it. That’s only the beginning.

  ‘The banks won’t give us any more money. We can’t remortgage our house again,’ I cried to Michael. I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. But instead of the pressure crushing me, it made me want to fight harder. I hadn’t gone all this way and put everything in jeopardy to give up now. I needed to think outside the box. ‘I’ve got it,’ I suddenly screeched. Michael looked nervous. ‘Oh, my god, I’ve got it! I know where we are going to get our money from.’

  I remembered reading in the papers about a Scottish entrepreneur who had just sold Sports Division business for £300 million. He had grown up in Dundonald, Ayrshire – a rough area like mine. This guy had started off selling trainers from his van. ‘It’s just like my story!’ I said. ‘He’s going to see himself in me, and give us the money.’

  I remembered chatting to the guy in the unit next to my office, George, and finding out he was doing some artwork for Sports Division. I charged on around there. ‘George, this is really important,’ I said. He looked up from behind his desk. ‘You are doing work for Sports Division, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, we did a point of sale for them,’ he said, confused about where this was going.

  ‘Right, okay, do you know Tom Hunter?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’t really know him, but everyone wants to know him,’ he rattled.

  I steamrolled in. ‘How can I get to him?’

  ‘Oh, I think that will be quite difficult.’

  ‘No, I need to get to him.’

  So he gave me the details for Tom Hunter’s friend, Ian Grabiner, who now runs Arcadia Group, the high street retailing giant taken over by Sir Philip Green. I practically sprinted back to my office and picked up the phone. I managed to get through to Ian and I gave him the chat. ‘Ian, I’ve got this incredible idea for a business and I’ve got this order from Selfridges,’ I sang down the phone. I was unstoppable. ‘I need to see you. Please, just give me half an hour of your time.’

  I had a meeting with Ian and he introduced me to Tom Hunter. Tom, who is now Sir Tom, was exactly like his picture in the paper. He was bald, with a grey goatee beard and looked very dapper in a blazer worn over jeans. He gave off an air of confidence and success. He had such a presence and I was in awe. Michael came with me but he let me speak. He didn’t have much choice! I was fighting for my life again. ‘We need the money to make the order. We can’t deliver to Selfridges in five months,’ I explained. ‘I swear I will make this brand the biggest brand in the country, I’m going to take on Wonderbra. Just believe in us.’

  Michael chipped in too – but we were faced with two extremely clever businessmen, one of whom, Tom, had just sold out for £300 million. It was to be a seriously steep learning curve for both of us. Silence filled the room. I could tell they were chewing the idea over. Tom was the first to speak. ‘I want to look in the whites of your eyes,’ he said.

  To any normal person that would have sounded weird. But it reminded me of the East End. I used to eyeball people to work out what their next move was. It was how you read people. So I looked straight back at him.

  ‘Okay, darling.’ He grinned. ‘You’ve got passion. We’ll help you out.’

  I wanted to scream. Michael’s mouth fell to the floor. Tom and Ian were going to invest £200,000. In return, Tom got 20 per cent of the business and Ian got 5 per cent.

  I made Tom and Ian a promise there and then. ‘I’ll never let you down. I will make you money,’ I said. We put the order in with the Portuguese and I got cracking on the marketing. I didn’t even have a name for my bra yet.

  I worked with a marketing agency recommended through the Prince’s Trust. I sat for hours with the designer. She came up with loads of names. I came up with loads of names. ‘Ultimate’ was one, but we couldn’t register that because it was an actual word.

  ‘Boost?’

  ‘Nah,’ I dismissed it as tacky.

  ‘Ultima?’

  ‘No, I don’t like it,’ I said.

  ‘Ultimo?’ I suggested.

  Ultimo! The word just rolled off my tongue. The translation of this Latin term is ‘the end’. I interpreted that as the end of looking for bras for my customers – that this is the bra. I just thought it sounded very Italian and glamorous.

  Then we started to work on the logo. ‘I want something curvaceous, that mimics a bust,’ I directed. ‘You know the Nike swoosh? I want something like that, that people will recognise everywhere.’

  She drew a ‘U’ but it wasn’t right. We worked on it for hours until we got it just so. No sooner had I registered it as a brand than I started sending prototypes to film companies, designers, stylists…everyone and anyone who might be able to use it and give us publicity.

  We planned the launch at Selfridges for August 1999, well before I was due to give birth. We were going to sell one design in both black and white. We had no pictures, no marketing and I only had £500 left for the launch of the bra. How do you launch a product on the global market when you are competing with the likes of Playtex and Wonderbra? I was still frantically trying to come up with a solution when my waters broke. Can you believe it? Four weeks before the launch in Selfridges and I was going into labour. And what was more, my labour lasted for an agonising 28 hours.

  Bethany was born on 1 July 1
999. She was tiny, weighing only 5 lbs 4 oz, and she had white blonde hair. She was born on the day Scottish Parliament opened. She had to spend a day in intensive care for observation, but it wasn’t anywhere near as serious a situation as it had been with Declan. I went back to work two days later. I had to – my house was up for security to the bank, I had new business partners and I had too much riding on this launch.

  I can’t describe how I felt as Michael and I packed for the big day. My emotions were a cocktail of nerves, excitement and hormones going crazy from having just given birth. I had my foot on the pedal and nothing could slow me down. We booked ourselves into a Travelodge for the night before the launch, leaving the three kids with my mum and dad.

  As we were getting ready to leave for Glasgow airport, I got a call from Tom Hunter. ‘There’s a jet waiting for you at Prestwick airport.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Get on my jet,’ he said casually.

  ‘Get on your jet? Sorry, what did you say there?’ I thought I was hearing things. Okay, so I had gone up in the world – I was now living in a five-bedroom house and driving an Audi, but this was unreal. We headed for Prestwick.

  ‘Oh, my god,’ I squealed as we stepped onboard. ‘It’s just like the films,’ I said to Michael. Carpeted floor. Massive leather chairs. There was so much room I didn’t know what to do with myself. Shall I sit in this chair or that chair?

  ‘Would you like a glass of champagne, Mrs Mone?’ The air hostess carried out a tray with two glasses of bubbly. Is the Pope a Catholic? Tom treated me like a princess and it didn’t end there. We arrived in London to be picked up by a chauffeur-driven car. Ring ring. It was Tom again.

  ‘You know how you booked a Travelodge?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, still recovering from my private jet experience.

  ‘The driver is going to drop you off somewhere first. I want you to see something,’ he said mysteriously. The driver pulled up outside a hotel opposite Hyde Park.

  ‘This is the famous Dorchester! Oh, my god,’ I said, staring up at the grand Mayfair hotel. ‘Jesus, this is where they have high tea and everything.’

  I was awestruck. This was the pinnacle of everything I had dreamt of. I pulled out my camera, just like any tourist. The driver came up behind us and cleared his throat to get my attention. ‘Mr Hunter has booked you in here tonight.’

  ‘Us? You’re kidding? No way,’ I spluttered.

  The manager approached us with a key card. ‘Mr Hunter has asked me to show you to your suite,’ he said politely.

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ.’ I cupped my mouth with my hand.

  I’d never seen a room like it in my life. Big lounge. Big dining room. Big four-poster bed. Huge bath. There were flowers, chocolates and champagne. I stared at it all in disbelief. A suite would have cost us £10,000 plus for one night.

  Michael was from a different background to me but even he was shocked. I phoned my mum and dad, screaming. ‘Mum, you’ll never guess what’s happened!’ I screeched.

  ‘Calm down, calm down.’ Mum tried to get some sense out of me.

  ‘I’m in a suite in the Dorchester. I’m taking pictures. I can’t believe it.’

  Remember I’d just had a baby, but that didn’t stop me jumping up and down on the bed like a big kid. ‘Calm yourself down, Michelle,’ Michael laughed, tugging me back to earth.

  That night my thoughts soon turned to the next day’s launch. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I kept turning over and writing in my notebook. We’d spent our last £500 on hiring 12 actors to dress up as plastic surgeons and picket Selfridges. The message was, ‘You don’t need a surgeon, this bra is the answer to your dreams.’ I kept imagining how it was going to turn out. Was it the best way to spend the money? Too late now. So much was riding on this. There was nothing Michael could say to me to get me to switch off. I was wired. I woke up with butterflies in my stomach. We jumped in a taxi and headed down to Selfridges to meet Tom in time for the launch.

  ‘Oh, my god.’ I turned to Michael in disbelief.

  The plastic surgeon actors were blocking Oxford Street, waving banners and chanting ‘Ban the Ultimo bra, ban the Ultimo bra.’ When I say they blocked the road I’m not kidding – one of them even lay down to stop the traffic. The ‘surgeons’ were carrying kidney bowls as part of their outfits and people threw money, thinking they really had lost their jobs. The story swept across all the news desks within 15 minutes and the next thing I knew, Sky News, BBC and ITN were on the scene. I remember standing outside the department store in my massive maternity gear. I was leaking milk out of my lime-green shirt when the presenter for Sky News came up and asked if she could interview me for the 6 o’clock news.

  ‘You want to ask me questions for the TV?’ I stammered, overwhelmed by what was going on. I felt like a fish out of water.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, bemused.

  ‘Oh, no, you need to ask my husband.’ I backed away. I was camera shy back then!

  Michael didn’t want to be on TV and told the lady she needed to speak to me. ‘She’s the one who designed it,’ he said proudly.

  ‘What do I do? Where do I look? Is it live?’ I spluttered.

  ‘Hang on, I need to find a new shirt,’ I panicked, pointing to my milk-drenched top. Selfridges found me something to wear and I did a row of interviews there and then. I was scared at first but after the tenth I started to feel natural in front of the camera.

  Meanwhile, Tom Hunter was trying to get my attention. ‘Michelle, Selfridges has sold six months’ stock in five hours.’

  ‘What?’ I yelled across the commotion.

  ‘They’ve sold out of bras,’ he shouted. Selfridges had never seen anything close to it apart from the Furby toy craze at Christmas. Strangers cuddled me in the street, saying, ‘You’ve changed my life, I’ve got boobs!’ It was the biggest ever bra launch in Europe. It cost £500 and I got PR worth £52 million.

  I had literally just stepped into my office back in Glasgow when our new employee, Angela, handed me the phone. ‘There’s an American woman on the line for you.’

  ‘I don’t know an American woman,’ I sighed. I was completely exhausted.

  ‘It’s Barbara Lipton, she’s the president of Saks Fifth Avenue, New York.’

  ‘Yeah, right, that will be my friend Ilene winding me up,’ I snorted. Ilene and her husband, Bernard, were probably our closest friends. They lived next door to Michael’s parents and I’d known them since I first started dating Michael. Ilene was 15 years older than me and had become a sister to me. We’d had a spell of winding each other up because of this radio show that was going on at the time called The Wind-Ups. I picked up the phone and said, ‘Ilene, what is it?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Look, stop with your phony American accent,’ I went on.

  ‘Do you know that Julia Roberts is wearing your bra in Erin Brockovich? The film premiered in Times Square last night,’ she went on.

  It was too much to take.

  ‘Look, enough! I’ve been up breast-feeding Bethany all night. I’ve got cracked nipples, I’ve got cabbage leaves in my bra, now piss off,’ I snapped.

  I put down the phone, and then a fax came through with the crest of Saks Fifth Avenue, saying: ‘We want to launch Ultimo. I couldn’t understand your Scottish accent, can you call me back?’

  I was mortified that I’d told her to piss off. Of course I called her back! Barbara told me she wanted to launch my brand in all of her 54 stores. We’d hit the big time. I sat for a moment and reflected. The reason Julia Roberts was wearing my bra was because I had sent prototypes to wardrobe people, stylists and celebrities. I must have sent out 200 bras and Julia Roberts’ stylist happened to pick one up. Apparently the stylist had designed a bra for Julia Roberts using parts of Ultimo. So that was a major lesson: never wait for people to come to you; you’ve got to go out there and get the opportunity yourself.

  8

  RAGS TO RICHES

  Never forget the o
nes that matter.

  ‘Oh, my god! I’ve been invited to tea at the Palace with Prince Charles,’ I screamed, waving the gold-embossed invitation.

  Michael and I had become millionaires overnight. My bras were selling everywhere from Debenhams to John Lewis and we were about to launch in Australia and Canada. Prince Charles invited me to join the Scottish board of the Prince’s Trust. Tony Blair nominated me for the World Young Entrepreneur award. I won businesswoman of the year, designer of the year, export brand of the year… you name it, I won it. I was in the Sunday Times Rich List as the third richest in the under-30 category in the UK – I was a millionaire by 28! Millionaire, in terms of the company value.

  We didn’t splash out though – at first. It was amazing that when I put my card in the cash machine it no longer spat it out with a ‘F-off’. Yeah, we bought a flash car, a Bentley GT Sport, and I had an extension built onto our house to double its size, but when your business starts flying, you don’t get time to stop and party. It wasn’t like that. I was run off my feet trying to meet all the demand for Ultimo. I was constantly setting more goals. More targets.

  And I was as nervous as hell when I was invited to have tea with Prince Charles. I got that same feeling I had when meeting Michael’s parents for the first time – I was out of my comfort zone. I may have moved to a posh part of Glasgow but I was still an East End girl.

  ‘Here are three notepads I want you to get signed for family and friends,’ Mum said. She was so excited for me.

  ‘Mum, Prince Charles is not going to sign your books,’ I sighed.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to watch your kids on Saturday night, then,’ Mum bartered. She crossed her arms in defiance. I took the notepads to keep her happy.

  I was very nervous when I arrived at Clarence House, on the Mall, but I composed myself. I was me; I wasn’t going to be something I’m not. Michael wasn’t invited because it was me who originally got the grant from the Prince’s Trust. He was now working full-time for Ultimo and looked after the finance, manufacturing and operational side of the business. Michael took on the title of managing director although I think he found it hard to see me take the spotlight.