Business Career
After school Jacqueline began working at Royal Doulton, but decided she did not want to go into management, and asked her father to gain extra work experience. Having acquired the four stores of the "Ann Summers" chain in 1972, her father gave Jacqueline, at the age of nineteen, summer work experience in May 1979 - Jacqueline was paid £45 a week, less than the tea lady.
Jacqueline also didn't like the atmosphere at "Ann Summers", which was David Gold's "up market" clean sex shop. Gold says of her introduction: "It wasn't a very nice atmosphere to work in. It was all men, it was the sex industry as we all perceive it to be." But a chance invitation and visit to a Tupperware party in an east London flat in 1981 changed everything - Jacqueline saw the potential of selling sexy lingerie and sex toys to women in the privacy of their own homes. Jacqueline launched the Ann Summers Party Plan - a home marketing plan for sex toys, with a strict "no men allowed" policy. These parties were and remain popular, providing women with an excuse to meet for a party and talk about sex, and have entered British popular culture. They also provided the company with a way of circumventing the law which limited their presentation space for sex toys.
Jacqueline Gold was made Chief Executive of Ann Summers in 1987, and transformed it into a multi-million pound business, with a sales force today of over 7,500 women as party organisers; 136 high street stores in the UK, Ireland, Channel Islands; with an annual turnover of £117 million in 2008 with large falls in sales and profits in recent years. The reported sales for the period 2006/7 were £110 million, which have fallen to 2002/3 levels levels. The takeover of Knickerbox in 2000 added another five stores, with Knickerbox concessions in every Ann Summers store.
Her autobiography Good Vibrations was published in 1995 (Pavilion Books), with a second book A Woman's Courage published in April 2007 (Ebury), which led to Jaqueline being sued by a former employee for libel. A Woman's Courage was withdrawn from sale in November 2008 having been republished by Ebury on 7 February 2008 with three pages removed and re-titled 'Please Make it Stop'. The High Court libel action was settled in August 2009 when the former employee was paid costs and substantial damages. She is a columnist for Retail Week, New Business, Kent Business, and Women Mean Business.
Read more about this topic: Jacqueline Gold
Famous quotes containing the words business and/or career:
“The business eternally passing thro’ my mind and occupying it exclusively, wipes out at once the recollection of things which have been presented to it but once, and on which it has had no occasion to recur.”
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