Push on up

Michelle Mone has seen an initial investment of £15,000 blossom into a market-leading business worth more than £30 million, after her unique Ultimo bra design became an international best seller FLASHES OF INSPIRATION that lead to successful business ventures tend to come at odd times. For Michelle Mone, it happened on the night she took off her bra at a formal dinner dance. “It was uncomfortable,” she recalls. “I thought it was wrong that women should suffer so much pain just to look good, so I decided to do something about it.” What she did was scour high-street stores for every design of brassiere she could find, unpick them to find out how they worked, and then enlist a team of German engineers to make a better one. After three years of research, they came up with the Ultimo bra, which was launched at Selfridges, London in August 1999. Within 24 hours, they had sold six weeks’ worth of stock. When the product crossed the Atlantic to Saks Fifth Avenue in New York a few months later, the waiting list was six weeks. Barely a decade after her bright idea, the Glaswegian mother of three children, aged between seven and 14, has seen an initial investment of about £15,000 – which came from a redundancy payment from her previous job – transformed into a market-leading business, with seven brands and 3,000 products worth in excess of £30 million. It has been a roller-coaster ride, involving a close brush with bankruptcy, and Mone admits she has made mistakes. “When the product took off, I think it went to my head a bit. It all happened too quickly and I became complacent. I thought I could rely on this one bra and two colours forever.” Mone’s response to the near-failure of her business was to ditch a social whirl with celebrities and supermodels in favour of focusing on developing new products, and watching the opposition like a hawk to ensure she stayed ahead of them. Now, at the age of 35, she is a regular on the lecture circuit and gives motivational talks. Given her background, this resilience is hardly surprising. Mone was raised in a two-room tenement in the East End of Glasgow, where bath time was a trip to the local swimming baths every other night. “Mum gets upset when magazines say we were poor. We didn’t think we were poor. We thought we were normal. My mum and dad worked really hard to make a living, and we had everything we needed.” But the East End of Glasgow in the 1970s was a tough, no-nonsense place, where people struggled to make ends meet. When Mone was 15, her father was confined to a wheelchair with a spinal cord disease and lost his job in a print works. Shortly before, her brother had died of spina bifida. She often heard her mother crying and decided to help out. It began with a newspaper delivery round, negotiating a deal with a local newsagent and recruiting a team of teenagers to deliver them. When they began selling bread rolls with the papers, the profits went up. Mone left school at 15, but jobs for a youngster with no qualifications were hard to find. Being tall and slim, she was eventually taken on by a fashion model agency. After marriage at 20 to Michael, now her business partner and managing director of her company, MJM, and the birth of her first child, she decided to gain business experience and joined a beer company as an office junior. Within a couple of years she was heading up its Scottish sales and marketing team, only to be made redundant when the company was taken over by Whitbread. This was when she came up with the idea of a brassiere that would enhance cleavage without feeling like a medieval torture clamp. Several years of research then commenced, involving a German team that had developed padded bras, to perfect the gel-filled Ultimo design, by which time MJM was in debt to the tune of £240,000. The success of the product, however, was a fast track to world young achiever awards, an invitation from Prince Charles to join the board of his Prince’s Trust, and a platform with Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev at a leadership symposium. Sales were boosted by the actress Julia Roberts wearing the Ultimo in the film Erin Brockovich (a role for which she won an Oscar), and by a succession of supermodels signing up to be the “face and body” of the product, from Rod Stewart’s stable of ex-wives and girlfriends to the current MJM cover girl, Helena Christensen, for one of the ranges. The latest recruit is Jade Jagger, for a joint venture brand with Debenhams called Adore-Moi. In Mone’s office, the biggest photographs, however, are of her children. “We have a nanny, and I make sure our home runs like clockwork, but my kids know I’m here for them whenever they need me.” This is one reason Mone has refused to move her operation from Glasgow to London, where her UK clients are based. “This is where my family and friends are, the people I can trust.” She would love to base manufacturing in Scotland, but a study concluded that moving MJM would not make financial sense. “In this country we don’t do small volumes, and we’re not competitive enough for large volumes.” Which is why MJM employs about 45 staff in Scotland, 45 in Hong Kong, and more than 1,000 in China. Mone has rejected tabloid press criticism of low wages paid to the Chinese workers, insisting that they receive above the national minimum, in accordance with an MJM ethical code of practice. “I could go to sweatshops in Bangladesh and make more money, but I won’t have our garments made by children in terrible working conditions.” It was a rogue distributorship in America that precipitated the close call with bankruptcy by absconding with cash and stock. It taught Mone a hard lesson. “For anyone starting out, I’d say always check out business associates and never give too much credit. Calculate if your company can survive if they run off with the loot.” Mone, who previously presented BBC’s Mind Your Own Business programme, advising business owners on where they were going right or wrong, says hard work and a positive mental attitude are vital for success. “In this company, we never allow anyone to say ‘we can’t’. Those are banned words.” She says many entrepreneurs give up too easily. Her advice? “Put money away for lean times, give your retailers a unique selling point: why they should buy your product over others. And always think about what you can launch next.” Her own next venture, due to be launched at Christmas, is a radical departure from the lingerie industry: a homeopathic remedy for obesity. It has been developed in association with a leading herbal expert, and Mone has proved personally that it works. A period of stress led to a gain in weight, but with her new product she lost four stones in nine months. Meanwhile, she has some words of encouragement for women. “We are very good at multi-tasking. That makes us special, and we should celebrate that. We can cook the dinner, talk business on the phone and sort out the children at the same time. Women should have more confidence in themselves. It’s amazing what we can do if we set our minds to it.”