God, it is horrible just thinking back to it now. I suppose what made it even harder was that I kept all of my hurt locked up. I now had a public reputation. What about my name out there? You know, who was this star in business? I was in fear of the press finding out. I was in fear of my friends finding out. I was in fear of being a failure. And I couldn’t have it.
So I kept on fighting.
10
BRINK OF BANKRUPTCY
The brick walls aren’t there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us the chance to show how badly we want something.
I had a bad feeling about them.
We were standing outside the W New York, a hotel in the American city. We’d just had a meeting with a Canadian couple who wanted to look after the distribution of Ultimo in America. The Saks department store chain had told us we needed a warehouse in America, we needed people on the ground and we needed a distributor.
This husband and wife team from Quebec, Lydia and Paulo, came highly recommended by the editor of an industry magazine called Contours. They were so charming. Very smartly dressed, they knew all the right things to say. But something was burning inside. I was using the intuition I’d developed while growing up in the East End. I’d scanned them and I didn’t trust them. The couple wanted us to send them all our stock and they wanted to get paid by Saks and then they would hand our earnings over to us. I wanted it the other way around. Their way was high risk for us. My way was to pay them after they sold the stock.
Now that Tom and Ian had taken a back seat, Michael and I were making all the business decisions, but Michael ignored my reservations. We went back into the hotel and did a deal with the couple. It was decided that we’d send them every item of stock – ten months’ worth – and gave them credit as well. Not long after, Tom and Ian started asking questions. ‘Has Saks Fifth Avenue paid us yet?’ asked Tom.
‘No, they haven’t,’ Michael casually brushed him off.
‘Well, you better chase it,’ Tom insisted.
Michael wasn’t getting any answers though, so I eventually picked up the phone. The line was dead.
Oh, my god.
I tried their mobile. It kept going to voicemail. I tried their house but it went to answer phone. I knew it, I bloody knew it. I turned to Michael: ‘They’ve run off with our money and our stock.’ I shook my head in disbelief. Taken together with our other stock issues, I knew that this could send us under.
‘No, they haven’t,’ he shouted.
‘I’m calling Tom and Ian,’ I said, panicking.
A massive fight then broke out between us. There was screaming, shouting and we threw things across the office. It was awful.
I ran to my car and I drove down the motorway, tears streaming down my face. I rang Tom. ‘Tom, I need to see you,’ I cried. Poor guy, there he was, this multi-millionaire, probably having a relaxing Saturday afternoon with his wife and his kids and he’s got this woman screaming down the phone.
‘Come now, come to my house, darling,’ he said as he calmed me down. I arrived at his mansion in Troon, a blubbering wreck.
‘They’ve stolen the money and the number’s gone dead and they’ve run off with the stock and I knew it. I told Michael outside the hotel, he’s told me I can’t do it any more. I need to get a divorce and what’s going to happen to the business? I can’t fight any more,’ I blurted out in one breath.
Tom had a special way of calming a crisis.
‘I’ll support you, whatever you want to do,’ he reassured me. ‘You’re a very special person and you’re talented.’
‘I’m scared. I’m scared I’ll fail on my own,’ I said, wiping my eyes.
‘The fight you’ve got inside you is incredible. Don’t be afraid. You’re a true entrepreneur,’ Tom said comfortingly.
I felt deeply unhappy but my business needed me and my kids needed me – I couldn’t get out of it now. So I dried my tears, got in my car and went back home. The couple had run off with £1.3 million and six months’ worth of stock. All of it – gone, poof. They had done what in business terms is called a ‘phoenix’. They had taken all the stock and they had transferred their company name into all of their aunts’ and uncles’ names. We found out they were serial fraudsters and had done the same to four other companies.
We were thrown out of department stores Saks and Neiman Marcus because we didn’t have the stock to supply them. Our lead-time was ten months so we could never replenish the stocks quickly enough. We were haemorrhaging money.
And just as I was recovering from that news, I got the scare of my life. It happened after Michael had gone to the football when I was at home with the kids. Bethany was asleep and Declan and Rebecca were playing in the kitchen. Suddenly there was blood everywhere – over the floor, over the kitchen units. It was Declan suffering a nosebleed. I rushed to his side. He had been having nosebleeds since he was one year old. He’d had his nose cauterised a number of times in the past five years but I’d never seen anything like this.
‘Hang on, baby.’ I pulled a big saucepan out of the cupboard and folded him over the pan. I phoned an ambulance and Declan passed out on the kitchen floor. ‘Michael, Declan’s bleeding, you need to come now,’ I screamed down the phone. I cradled Declan in my arms. Blood was pouring everywhere. ‘Please, God, let him be okay,’ I cried.
We were rushed off to Yorkhill children’s hospital and I held his hand the whole way. Michael came charging through the doors not long after. All our fighting and all our problems were forgotten. We had to save our boy. Declan had lost so much blood he needed a transfusion. We signed the papers and they rushed him into the operating room. It brought back all the horror of the days after he was first born. I’ll never forget sitting by his hospital bed, playing the Celine Dion song again and again, just as I’d done when he was a baby in intensive care. I was holding his hand when he finally came round. He slowly opened his eyes.
‘Mum, where’s my monkey?’ was the first thing he said. He’d had that monkey toy since he was a baby. I pulled it out of my bag, Declan smiled and I knew he was going to be okay. The doctors couldn’t explain the nosebleed but he had to stay in hospital for a week. Obviously, at that point, I didn’t give a shit about the business; I just cared about my son. But as soon as I knew my boy was going to be okay, it was back into the fray.
We needed money. The losses had become too great. The Clydesdale Bank called in our overdrafts and gave us two weeks to pay the debt before we were closed down. Our house was up for security again. I had 11 different credit cards in my purse to get credit for the business. I was panicking, panicking. I was binge eating like you wouldn’t believe. I turned to Tom for help but he refused to put more money into the company. Tom and Ian had had enough.
I had an argument with Tom over the phone. I was feeling desperate. ‘You’re being mean,’ I snapped. ‘You can help us out.’ I called him names, words I now deeply regret. Tom offered to give me half as long as I could come up with the other half. To be fair, I would have done the same thing if there was someone in the business I didn’t believe in, but his offer wasn’t enough to save us. We were going under. We had a massive falling-out: it’s the only fallout I’ve had with Tom in 15 years and we are still good friends to this day.
Then it was back to fighting with Michael. It was relentless. One fight was so awful that I took a quilt and a pillow and drove to an Asda car park after the kids were asleep and slept in the back of my BMW X5. I felt so low, so alone and so very scared about our future. My dream was collapsing around me. I rang my mum at 2 am, crying.
‘Michelle, you are not sleeping in a car park,’ my mum said. She came and rescued me and took me back to their house. I used to stay at their house a lot around that time. I’ve actually blocked a lot of my memories out because it was so bad, so hurtful. It was just one thing after another. Bang bang bang. I coped in the way you would expect a woman who has been working full-time, full throttle, since she was 15 – by working even harder. I di
dn’t stop and I didn’t let anything in because I couldn’t absorb it. Pain was piled on top of pain until I reached breaking point.
One morning I was so exhausted that I opened up the medicine cabinet in our bathroom and I scooped everything I could find off the shelves. I had all the pills strewn across the floor. I took them out of their foils and built a mountain out of them. I didn’t know if they were harmful or not. They were all I could find in the cupboard. A real cocktail. I’m taking them, I’m taking them. I didn’t want to go on any more. Tears were streaming down my face.
On the surface I was this business star, walking down the red carpet and having high tea with Prince Charles but behind doors it was a horror movie. It was a shambles. A complete shambles. I scooped up a handful of pills and brought the cocktail to my mouth.
11
SAVED BY THE BELL
Be the master of your fate not the slave of your problems.
Suddenly I woke up. I had all the pills in front of me in our bathroom but I thought, I can’t do this. I don’t know if it was God, because I really do believe in God, but I just snapped out of it. I looked at myself in the mirror. ‘You silly bitch,’ I shouted at myself. Why are you even thinking this? It wasn’t like I had a child who died, as had happened to my mum and dad. It wasn’t like I had cancer or was confined to a wheelchair, like my dad – it was just money. There is no way you can give up, I thought.
Your family needs you. Your business needs you. You need to fight your way out of this.
So I decided I was going to fight and find a way. I actually don’t know how I’m alive today. I know a lot of people go through a lot of terrible things much worse than what I’ve suffered, but the situation was severe for me. I’m not exaggerating: it was unbelievable how completely my life had fallen apart. But the thing with me is that when I do bounce back, I bounce higher and even more determined than before. Sometimes you’ve got to fall before you can fly.
I turned things around in my head because – remember? – if you can control your mind, you can do anything. I thought, I’m lucky that none of this has broken me. It’s actually taught me everything I’m going to need for the rest of my life. So I racked my brains for a name I could turn to for help. Who can I call, who can I call? I could hear the countdown in my head – a loud ticking of a clock telling me we only had two weeks left before bankruptcy.
Suddenly I remembered a networking lunch I’d been invited to four months ago by one of the most powerful guys in the media – Richard Desmond. He was the owner of OK magazine, and the Express and the Daily Star newspapers. There had been only 12 of us in his boardroom and a butler. I sat next to a guy from HSBC bank. I’d started chatting to him: ‘Are you Richard’s bank manager?’
‘You could say that. I’m Sir Keith Whitson, chairman of HSBC Global.’ He held out his hand.
‘What, you’re the boss for the whole bank?’ I choked. At the end of the three-hour lunch he gave me his mobile number. At the time I never thought I’d need it, but now the shit had hit the fan Sir Keith was my only lifeline.
I don’t believe in luck, I believe in making the most of the resources you have. You make your own luck in life.
I pulled out Sir Keith’s mobile number.
‘Do you remember meeting me?’ I asked, trying to stay calm.
‘Oh, Michelle, how are you?’ Sir Keith sounded happy to hear from me.
‘I really need your help, please, I need you to re-bank us. I’ll never let you down,’ I begged. I told him we had two weeks left to pay off our debts. I filled him in on the theft, the stock problems and the nightmare that my life had become. Sir Keith told me to stay calm and sent in his team to look at our books.
It was hopeless though – they needed more time. ‘We just can’t do it, Michelle,’ Sir Keith told me. ‘We need six weeks to do the due diligence.’
‘But I don’t have six weeks,’ I panicked. I begged our bank for an extension but they denied us.
I’ll never forget the morning of the day they were coming to close us down. Michael was in a room with one of Tom’s financial advisors, fighting. ‘They can give us more money,’ he was shouting at Tom. I was pacing the room, trying to come up with a solution. And then Michael suddenly picked up his car keys. ‘I’m going out,’ he announced.
We all said, ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to get my car washed.’
And he left to wash his car. I thought, How bizarre. Our life was about to go pop and he wanted to wash the car. Maybe that was his way of dealing with it. Who knew? Michael was always trying to show he had more power than Tom and Ian. But Tom and Ian had already made it. I think it went way back to when they asked Michael to leave the business.
Tom’s financial advisor also left and I was alone, thinking, Is this really happening? Keep going, must keep going. I picked up the phone again and made a last ditch attempt to save us. ‘Please, please help us,’ I cried down the phone to Sir Keith. I pleaded, I begged. But his hands were tied. He couldn’t perform a miracle in minutes. It was 4.45 pm on a Friday afternoon in 2002. We had 15 minutes to come up with the money or we were going under.
Michael was just about to tell the staff to clear their desks. ‘It’s over. We need to tell the staff.’ He threw his hands in the air.
‘No, it’s not over,’ I insisted. Giving up wasn’t part of my vocabulary.
Michael shook his head and gathered the staff around.
Ring ring. The office secretary said Sir Keith Whitson was on the phone.
‘Hello.’ I picked up the reciever, trembling.
‘Welcome to HSBC,’ he said.
I punched the air with joy. We were back in business. ‘I promise you, sir, I’ll never ever let you down,’ I cried. That bank saved my arse and we’ve been with HSBC ever since.
I decided to mark the close of that awful chapter by moving office. A bigger team had evolved – we had separate departments for design, technical aspects, marketing and PR, finance, production, warehousing and logistics and I needed somewhere to put them all. I picked an open-plan office in Govan. I wanted it to look and feel like New York because that’s where I got a lot of my inspiration from for my designs.
I poured all my creativity into it with the help of an architect called Brian. I said, ‘Listen, this is what I want. I want it to be different. I want it to feel cutting edge, but comfortable at the same time.’ Brian got me and I got him and it worked out really well. We had big glass bricks on the wall to create that exposed brickwork look. We had real wooden floors mixed with slate. It was out of this world. The office looked like an industrial warehouse from the outside but it was an oasis when you walked through the door. The only downside was being located in a rough area of Glasgow. Occasionally whenever there was a Rangers match, we would get our windows smashed in by drunken supporters marching past.
I’d managed to save the business but I didn’t have time to sit back and celebrate. I had to come up with something new – an idea, a PR stunt or an invention that would catapult Ultimo back into the public eye. Ideas come to me all the time. They just hit me – bang. I could be getting dressed and then I start thinking, Why the hell is there nothing to solve this problem? But sometimes I have to kickstart my inspiration. I have to go somewhere I can think, somewhere I can breathe. I booked myself into a room on the highest floor I could possibly get at the Four Seasons Hotel when I was back in New York on business.
I played Andrea Bocelli followed by Celine Dion and looked out the window. I knew that I had to keep coming up with inventions for the business to survive. I had to be different to stand out against competitors who had the money that we didn’t. ‘Why the hell is there nothing to solve this problem?’ I said, over and over again, until the answer finally appeared. ‘That’s it, that’s bloody it!’ I shouted. I had the first of what would be 15 new inventions.
As soon as I was back in the office I made an announcement. ‘We’re going to launch a backless body.’ I heard a loud
groan from the technical staff.
‘You can’t do it,’ one of my designers grumbled.
‘Really?’ I countered, just like I’d argued over my wedding dress all those years ago. ‘Just watch me.’ I grabbed a pair of scissors and a piece of fabric. I wasn’t a technical person and I didn’t go to college but I knew you should never take ‘can’t’ as an answer.
‘Put this on,’ I said, wrapping the fabric around one of the girls. I cut it down there, sewed it there and there, around there, at the top and there – boom, I had it. Of course, we had yet to perfect the fit, which took the best part of a year, but the concept was there. I was back in the zone. I was filling up my notebook with goals and targets and dreams. I was chasing the money, chasing the lifestyle.
I needed someone to show off the new design. Bang. The idea hit me. I needed someone to be the face of Ultimo – I needed a cover girl. I just knew I couldn’t afford advertising. I’d done the surgeon stunt outside Selfridges but I couldn’t keep doing stunts. So if I get a face then the face will get me the press. I needed someone linked to a celebrity actor or artist. I thought, Well, I’ve grown up listening to Rod Stewart. His records were playing when I got my dad out of the pub. And Rod had this new girlfriend that everyone wanted to know about. The public was asking, ‘Who is she? What does she do?’
I managed to track Rod’s manager down in LA and he gave me a contact number for Rod’s girlfriend, Penny Lancaster. I spoke to Penny’s assistant. ‘I really need to meet up with her. Please let me meet Penny,’ I pushed.
Penny and Rod were staying at the Dorchester in London and I flew down from Scotland to see them. I thought Rod might buy into my idea because I was also Scottish and Ultimo was obviously a Scottish company. Wow, I thought, meeting a legend like him. Rod was such a cool guy. I gave them both the chat: ‘You really need to do this campaign. Okay, my business is only three years old but I’ll direct the photo shoot and I’ll do it really well. Please be the face of my brand.’
My Fight to the Top Page 8