We start with an argument between the photographer and me over who goes first.
I was told 3 pm. So was he. I have to go by 4.30 pm. He has to go even
earlier. So unprofessional.
In walks Mary Portas in a slinky Jaeger shirt dress and bejewelled YSL
sandals. Instant calm. Within seconds she has got the photographer snapping
away, and within minutes she is bossing us around, blue eyes flashing, brown
bob swinging. She has that effect on men — and women too.
Portas, 46, former creative director of Harvey Nichols department store, is
one of the surprise hits of BBC TV’s summer schedules. Her BBC2 series Mary
Queen of Shops shows her reviving beleaguered boutiques, and seems to pack
more common sense and emotion in its one-hour format than other business
shows manage in a series.
That makes her a retail star, and it is not bad for her branding consultancy
Yellowdoor either. Set up 11 years ago, it employs 40 and boasts fee income
of £5m, advising shop and fashion names such as Clarks, Homebase, Mulberry,
Oasis, Thomas Pink and others.
In Portas’s fourth-floor office off London’s Tottenham Court Road you
virtually have to wedge yourself between clients’ clothes, bags and shoes to
gain access.
“We always have a selection here for the publicity team to sell into the press
for stories,” grins Portas. “And yeah, I’m really lucky. I get a lot of
clothes.”
She wears them well. Slim and confident, and still tall without her four-inch
TV heels, Portas exudes the easy charm of a friendly fashionista.
But she also has a shark-like snap to her wit, which gives her options. She
does her own thing — she is divorced and now lives with another woman — and
doesn’t care what anyone makes of it.
Her television series hits the mark, she says, because it’s just an extension
of her day job, and she is passionate about it. And there are a lot of
fashion shops out there that need help. The current series, her second,
received 4,500 applicants for coverage, according to Portas.
But it’s also made by the same production company, Optomen, that turned Gordon
Ramsay into a reality-TV star, and features the same kind of wincingly inept
owner-managers that appear in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. The outsize-dress
shop owner who hates fat people. The out-of-date gents’ outfitters in
suburban Manchester. Like the incompetent inventors on Dragons’ Den, these
shopkeepers often seem to be deliberately chosen so they can be humiliated
for our entertainment.
“I don’t want to humiliate anyone,” says Portas. All the producers ask is that
the businesses are losing money, so they can film the drama of a potential
turnround. She records one programme a month over nine days, enabling her to
focus seriously on each store’s problem.
But when Portas struts in chin-first with her bugeye shades and tottering
heels, you smell trouble. You could also argue that her solutions — fresh
paint, big-name labels, uncluttered approach — are often not sustainable.
“That’s not my problem,” she says, surprisingly blunt.
But that’s cruel.
“No, it’s not cruel. Should I say ‘I don’t think you’re the right people to
run this business, close it down’ ? That’s not my role. My role is to give
you what I think will be sustainable. In the case of menswear, simple
things, get the brands that are no-brainers.”
Which happen to be the brands she has as clients?
She could bristle at this but doesn’t. Last week’s programme had a long plug
for French Connection, which appointed Yellowdoor to create its advertising
in 2006.
“We don’t work with them any more,” she shrugs. “But you know what, we have
worked with most brands.” And that, of course, is how Portas gets access to
them.
But she has form on this, having boasted before about how she got Harvey Nicks
free publicity in the BBC’s Absolutely Fabulous series in the 1990s. She
promised Jennifer Saunders, the writer and star of the show, the run of the
store for research if she namechecked the business. As it was satire, few
quibbled.
It’s sensitive ground, especially given the cosy relationship between business
and media in the fashion sector. Yet Portas is sharp on the fluffiness. I
make her laugh when I tell her how a glossy magazine removed an unflattering
adjective from an interview I had written. In the fashion press it’s hard
covering your advertisers apparently.
Out in the real world of small business it’s rather different — and Portas’s
show is good at revealing that gulf between aspiration and execution to
viewers. Aren’t there some big retailers she would like to make over on
television, too?
She grins. “We looked at many different formats for the series and I was going
to do Marks & Spencer. Stuart was going to give me the King’s Road
branch, but rightly he turned the business round and we didn’t do it. I
would still really like to get hold of one.”
This week might be timely. The downturn in Marks & Spencer’s financial
results may presage a bloodbath on the high street. What advice would she
offer to Rose?
She winces. “I want to be careful with this, as I have a lot of respect for
Stuart. When I go into Marks & Spencer, I feel it’s neither a department
store nor a supermarket but sits between the two. I wouldn’t buy fashion in
that environment when people like Zara have shopwindows like Chanel. That’s
where the next crunch is coming.”
In fact, most of the middle-market fashion brands are heading for trouble, she
predicts, as consumers shift to value, luxury or firms that make an
emotional connection.
“In a world where we all feel a bit frightened about what’s happening, we want
to go back to places we trust and feel safe in,” she says. “My only thing
with Marks & Spencer is I wouldn’t fight the price wars like they have.”
Portas’s opinions make her as many enemies as friends. Yet, unusually for a
television star, she tones down her character on screen not up. “Ask some of
my clients,” she laughs. “They get me bigger than that.”
She has always been a performer. She had to ditch a place at the Royal Academy
of Arts at the age of 18 when her her father died two years after her
mother. Portas, the fourth of five siblings, stayed home in Hertfordshire to
look after her youngest brother.
Her father had been sales director at Brooke Bond teas. Part of his selling
skills clearly rubbed off. “Dad could charm anyone. I am most like him
physically. He always said I would be great in sales.”
But she was a troublemaker at school and fell into retailing by chance,
completing a course in retail display at Watford College of Art. A
traineeship at Harrods followed and a move to Topshop, where she was spotted
by Burton Group chairman Sir Ralph Halpern.
“I was 24, display manager, and he used to make me present to the board. All
my little sketches. Can you imagine?”
She hit her stride at Harvey Nichols, helping to create a top brand emporium
renowned for its style and fashion savvy. And then she stopped because, she
says, after opening Harvey Nichols in Leeds she just needed more variety.
“I never wanted to be a big retail chief executive. I am much more interested
in transformation. What we did with Harvey Nichols was so exciting — not
doing it again would be awful.”
Television was another way of chasing that buzz. She turned down an approach
from the production firm Talkback before agreeing to the Optomen series.
She says Mary Queen of Shops is half her ideas and half Optomen’s — the naff
title came from an old newspaper headline. But many prefer her cajoling
approach to Ramsay’s bullying, and longstanding Yellowdoor clients say that
it’s a pretty fair reflection of the Portas style.
“Mary’s extremely forthright and challenging,” says Rosemary Carr,
marketing director at Clarks, the shoemaker with sales of £1 billion. “But
she’s got incredible experience, and people find her inspiring.”
In particular, they like her emotional brio. She really cares. It has its
flip-side, however.
Portas’s partner at Yellowdoor, Peter Cross, formerly with Dunhill, jokes that
half his job is working out when a client might get the hump.
“Mary’s a big personality, and not every chief executive or brand we work with
wants that.” But, he adds, she has “the rare and infectious talent of a
visionary”.
Portas says television fame hasn’t really changed anything, though she is
understandably edgy about the press shuffling round her private life.
Teenage children still at home, she now lives with Grazia fashion editor
Melanie Rickey.
But she keeps herself off gay power lists and is very funny about “girls who
like girls” trying to turn her into an icon. What she hates is any inference
that she had an unhappy marriage.
She credits her husband, a former Unilever executive, with giving her
invaluable career support and advice. They set up Yellowdoor together.
“I had an amazing marriage. It’s an insult to my great husband and me to say
otherwise. We just grew apart. He was brilliant. He’s my mate.”
Point made, she chats cheerily all the way to the lifts. There will be a third
television series, she promises, but it will be different. And given current
economic climate, the queue for advice could be even longer.
Hail the Queen.
The life of Mary Portas
VITAL STATISTICS
Born: May 28, 1962
Marital status: divorced, with two children
School: St Joan of Arc Convent, Hertfordshire
University: Watford College of Art
First job: management trainee at Harrods
Pay: undisclosed
Home: Maida Vale
Car: black Toyota Prius
Favourite music: Crazy At The Weekend, by Sunhouse
Favourite book: Love in The Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Favourite film: The Lives of Others
Favourite gadget: “My son Milo gave me a Tefal energy-saving kettle
with water filter. Brilliant.”
Last holiday: Seville
WORKING DAY
THE Yellowdoor creative director wakes at her north London home at 6.45 am.
“If I’m not filming, I’ll take my daughter to the school coach,” says Mary
Portas. “Then I jog in Regent’s Park, shower and change.”
She drives into Yellowdoor’s West End office by 9.30am. “Then it’s meetings
with clients, or with teams to look at work in progress. At the moment it’s
working with Thomas Pink on what its image should be. A lot of it is gut
feel.”
She finishes at 5pm to meet her daughter off the school coach.
“I try to keep socialising to a minimum in the evenings. I worry I could have
done more if I had networked more.”
DOWNTIME
MARY PORTAS relaxes in her garden. “I have got into gardening. I really love
it now. I came back from Clarks in Somerset the other day and sat in the
garden with the kids, and thought, ‘God, I made this. It’s great’.”
She spends her money on art, wine and theatre. “We always go to the Royal
College of Art shows. And I love buying wine from The Winery in Maida Vale.
And I adore the theatre. I’ve just seen That Face with Lindsay Duncan, which
is superb.”
Is she an actress manqué? “I do a lot of lectures and I do love it. It gives
me more buzz than going to a fashion show.”
