My Fight to the Top (6 page)

I was devastated. I couldn’t believe I’d lost my job. The job I’d fought so hard to get. What were we going to do for money? How were we going to survive? We now had two kids and a mortgage to pay with just Michael’s salary.

God, are you trying to test me?

Not long after, I got a letter from Whitbread offering me a job with a better car and a better salary. It’s funny how what life throws at you sometimes make you realise what’s important. I now had a choice: I could keep climbing the career ladder or take the redundancy money – something like £20,000. That was a lot of money back then.

Almost losing Declan had made me anxious about leaving his side. I didn’t want to be on the road until late at night any more. I wanted to find a job where I could spend more time with my family. Maybe it was time to start up my own business. Michael agreed I should take the money to enjoy doing things as a family for a while.

Six weeks later I went to a dinner-dance with Michael. It was just a rugby dinner-dance. I was sitting at a table with all of our friends and I had a long black dress on. Underneath I was wearing a cleavage-enhancing bra. It was bloody uncomfortable. The wires were digging into my chest. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was saying to people so I excused myself and went to the toilet. It was while I was taking off the bra in the cubicle, that I had a ‘Eureka!’ moment. I knew what I was going to spend my redundancy money on.

I’ve found that over and over again in my life I’ve had to sink to rock bottom before I can reach the top. But every time I come back I reach even higher. I bounce back bigger than I’ve ever been. When I push that button,
whoosh
, it’s turbo-mode. I returned to the table with a big smile on my face. I turned to everyone and announced, ‘I’m going to design a bra.’

They all looked at me like I was nuts. I remember Michael saying that I couldn’t even sew a button on a shirt. ‘What do you know about bras?’ he laughed.

‘I’ve got a pair of tits – I’ll figure it out.’

Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.

‘
O
h, my god, I need to find these implants!’ I shrieked.

‘Michelle, we’re on holiday,’ Michael said.

‘I know but I have to contact this company,’ I said, shoving the magazine under his nose.

We had used a bit of my redundancy money to go on a family holiday to Florida four months after Declan was born. We were staying in a villa with friends Nigel and Andrea and they had brought their baby boy along as well. I was supposed to be recharging my batteries after all the upset with Declan but I couldn’t. I was lost in my thoughts all the time we were there. My idea to design a bra was rushing around in the back of my head. I picked up a magazine I’d seen lying around on a coffee table in the villa and spotted an advert for breast enhancers – or ‘chicken fillets’, if you like – you know, the squidgy implants you stuff inside your bra to make your boobs look bigger.

The idea was now in my head and I couldn’t let it go. I needed to find out who manufactured these enhancers because I knew they were what I was going to invest my time and my money into. These enhancers would be amazing to put inside the bra I wanted to invent. ‘I need to find these chicken fillets!’ I said to Michael.

I made Michael go to the mall with me. The poor guy, I dragged him into shop after shop, asking people, ‘Do you know where you can get these?’ pointing to the magazine. I eventually found a store that stocked the enhancers, but they couldn’t tell me who manufactured them. I bought them anyway. They were great; they felt like real breast tissue. The drawback was that they were expensive, costing £150.

I spent the whole two weeks driving and phoning around stores, trying to track down the manufacturer. I was like a dog with a bone. Honestly, I think I drove my friends mad. But I was hit with a wall of silence. No one would tell me. Which wasn’t surprising, really, as the details of a supplier are the unique selling point. Guarding them is the way stores make their margins. I came home empty-handed but of course that didn’t stop me. I was determined. I spent another two months trying to track the fillets down. I kept phoning stores back in the USA, sometimes the same stores twice. I made up a story to get some answers.

‘I’m setting up a shop in the UK and I really want to buy from the supplier. Please can you help me?’ I pleaded. It was this wee lassie, over the phone in one of these shops in Florida, that finally told me.

‘Yeah, sure, here you are,’ she said and she gave me the name.

Yes. Finally
.

I tracked down the guy. He was called Jack Lewis and was based in Miami. It was a family business and they were Jewish. I told him my background with Labatt and how I really wanted to be his distributor in the UK and Europe. ‘Can I come over and see you?’ I pushed.

Jack was laid-back and he just said to me, ‘Yeah sure, why not? When do you want to come?’
Whoosh
, that rocket inside me took off again.

‘In a couple of days,’ I told him.

‘This is mental,’ Michael said, as I was booking the flights for the both of us.

‘No, it’s not, it’s going to be huge,’ I said with conviction.

‘We are going to have to pay for the distributorship. They won’t just give it to us,’ he said.

I turned to Michael and said, ‘Yes, they will. I’ll get them to give it to us.’

We left the kids with my parents and we flew back to Florida the next day. I went into the meeting and we chatted for hours. Jack was maybe about ten years older than Michael and we all got on really well. We became close – Michael and I went out for dinners with Jack and his wife, Val. Jack told me he couldn’t give me the exclusive rights to his breast enhancers for the European market.

‘You’ll need to pay for that,’ Jack explained. I needed to haggle. And it came naturally.

‘Look, I don’t have the money but I’m telling you I will sell these like nothing else,’ I blagged.

‘I can’t, Michelle,’ he said.

A few days later, I was about to go to the airport for my return flight and I decided to try one last time. I wasn’t taking ‘No’ for an answer. ‘Please, Jack, don’t make this a wasted trip. All I can say is that I promise you that this will be the best thing that’s ever happened. I will turn this business into something huge in the UK and Europe.’ And then I came down hard. ‘But I’m not doing it unless you give me the distributorship. I’m not wasting my time. I will get them into all the papers and magazines and then people will buy from you as well, so what’s the point in me doing the hard work for you to see the rewards? And I tell you what, I’m going to do them anyway. I’ll just find another manufacturer.’

Jack went very quiet but I could tell I was winning him over. Michael was staring at me like he wasn’t sure if I was his wife. He’d not seen this side to me before. ‘Look, what have you got to lose?’ I smiled. ‘You’re not selling it in Europe at the moment anyway.’ Jack looked me in the eyes. I knew I had him. ‘So give me it and I’ll make it worth your while.’

Michael was staring at me, Jack was staring at me and then Jack drew in a deep breath. ‘Okay, deal,’ he said.

We left for Glasgow with the distributorship and we hadn’t paid a penny for it. The agreement was we would buy them at a certain price with my redundancy money and sell them at a certain price. So Jack would make his margin, I’d make my margin and the stores would make their margin.

I came home feeling incredible. But as with all my victories I didn’t just sit back and enjoy it. For me, it was like, what next? What can we do now? I’m always driving forward. So I hit the ground running. The first thing I did was register my company. Michael suggested it was named after him, his initials – MJM International – in 1996. I then hit the phone.

It was my aim to stock these enhancers in every store. My sales pitch was that I had these revolutionary silicone gel pads that would enhance your boobs by two cup-sizes. I got appointments everywhere – thinking back, I don’t know how I managed to get all those meetings. I came to London with a case containing samples from Jack. The gel pads were very expensive at £150 retail and that meant I had to target high-end lingerie boutiques like Rigby & Peller. I sold the pads everywhere and then I started the PR. I wrote my own press release, sent it to all the newspapers and the publicity just kept coming and coming.

The enhancers were called Monique but they were soon nicknamed ‘chicken fillets’. The local papers wanted to interview me. Who is this woman who has launched these ‘chicken fillets’? And then the Scottish national, the
Daily Record
, wanted to interview me. Seeing my name in the paper I’d read since I was a kid was a really big deal. They now call me the ‘bra tycoon’ but back then I was a ‘businesswoman’. My mum and dad would ring me up and tell me how their neighbours were talking about me, how Gran had read about my success in her tea leaves. Dad said his friends down the pub had read about how I’d started up my own business. Sadly, I also heard a rumour that people were saying, ‘It won’t last’, but I shrugged it off.

I worked from a desk in my bedroom with Declan’s cot by my side. Michael was still in pensions but he would do the books and the legal stuff for me at the weekends and in the evenings. He wasn’t that interested in the creative side of things but he liked the trips. By then I was earning ‘okay’ money, more than at Labatt, but nothing to set the world on fire. I was always thinking, What’s next?

Keep going. Must keep going.

I thought back to my ‘Eureka!’ moment in the toilets at that rugby dinner and dance. My dream from day one had been not just to sell a Monique-style enhancer but to invent a bra with a Monique built into it. The problem with the current product was that they were solid silicone. I’d been wearing them myself to promote the brand and they were weighing me down. I wanted to design a liquid silicone version that I would incorporate into a bra.

I convinced Jack to give me the contact details of the chemist who had designed the Moniques. I was straight-talking – I told Jack that I’d still buy his breast enhancers but that I needed to earn more money, that I needed more products and I had this idea for a new bra. We had become really good friends and I’d earned Jack a lot of money in the space of a year so he was happy to help me out.

I’d gone from finding the store that had sold them to finding the guy that distributed them to finding the guy who had invented them – in a laboratory in Germany. I was now about to find out what it was like to design my own bra.

By now I’d also gone from the desk in my bedroom to my very first office, thanks to a grant I’d won from the Prince’s Trust. I was back in a rough area of Glasgow – Hollybrook Place, near Govanhill – but it was a start, and it was a five-minute drive from our house. The grant of £5,000 got me my first computer and some furniture for the office, a mezzanine over two floors. There were desks at the top and I stored all the boxes at the bottom. It was like a mini-warehouse down there.

After I spoke to the German scientist over the phone, he sent me sacks of silicone liquid gel to look at and over time refined the composition to my specifications. It took about a year to get the gel right and then I had to design the gel into the bra. I cut up old bras and sewed the gel sacks into the fabric but it wasn’t giving me much of a polished look. So what did I do? I applied for the job as the distributor for Elle Lingerie & Nightwear for the UK.

‘You’re nuts, you’re mad,’ Michael said. I guess he was enjoying the calm after the storm in our relationship and didn’t want us to do anything that might rock the boat. But I had to rock it if I wanted to take things to another level. I knew that I needed to find out more about manufacturing to make my invention a success. A job at Elle would open doors because getting distribution rights would mean I could get to know the manufacturers personally. And besides, I needed a job like this to fund my project.

‘No, I’m not mad. We need more turnover, we need to investigate more options,’ I reasoned.

Tons of people went for the Elle job but, bloody hell, I got it. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t mess around. I was quick to ask the bosses if I could visit the factories that were making their underwear. I explained my interest as ‘research’. The bosses said, ‘Okay, you can go and visit them.’

You beauty, I thought. I was in. I was going to find out exactly who was right to make my bra. Michael came along – he liked the trips! We flew out to Portugal and met up with factory owners. I kept asking, asking and asking, because if you don’t ask, you don’t get. I was constantly building relationships. I was networking like hell – networking at events staged for women in business. And all the while I was making incredible business for Elle. I was selling their bras and nightwear everywhere. I got them the best sales they had ever recorded in the UK. Again, I did above and beyond my job description – my role was just to sell rather than do their marketing or their PR but I helped with the photo shoots and the brochures.

I became really friendly with the owners of one particular factory in the north of Portugal. It wasn’t one of the largest factories, but it was big enough with lots of sewing machines and cutting rooms and all the rest of it. I turned up with my silicone gels and showed them what I wanted. My fingers came alive as I sketched the bra. It was the same magical feeling I’d had when I’d designed my wedding dress nearly five years earlier. I told them the shape I wanted. I picked out the microfibre fabric I wanted. It was good having Michael with me because I didn’t understand the money side of things and that was where he came in.

I was working all the hours God sent, but I was still taking Declan with me into the office. Mum would sometimes take him away for a few hours to give me a bit of respite. I’d then pick Rebecca up from nursery. I was basically multi-tasking to get whatever I needed done so I could also be a good mum and wife. It was really difficult but what kept me going were my dreams. I believed if you think big, then big things will happen. I kept dreaming about being the most successful businesswoman in the country. I kept dreaming about having a multi-million-pound company. I kept dreaming and dreaming. Every night, I would lie awake, notepad beside the bed. I’d wake up and make more notes.