Word: gold
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...overseas Ann Summers shop, in Sydney, Australia. Earlier this month it opened a new two-story, 5,000-sq.-ft. store--complete with a coffee bar--on Dublin's fashionable O'Connell Street. And the firm plans to open outlets early next year in Tokyo and even Saudi Arabia. Gold is also keen to take her sex wares to America. She's had preliminary discussions with potential franchisees in New York and Florida. "We want to be in every major city in the world," Gold insists. The company is basing its expansion program on the shops, then hopes to introduce...
...Summers shops were opened in London in 1970 by Swinging '60s man-about-town Kim Caborn-Waterfield, an actor who squired the now deceased blond bombshell Diana Dors. Caborn-Waterfield envisioned a chain of sex supermarkets patterned after Beate Uhse's. The shops were bought a year later by Gold Group International, whose holdings include a number of British soft-porn magazines and which is owned by managing director Gold's father and uncle. It was the woman of the family who came up with the innovative sales strategy. After joining the family business in 1979, Gold, 39, attended...
Women are a lucrative, if previously ignored, market for sex merchants. And Ann Summers--"a company run by women for women"--has successfully homed in using traditional grass-roots marketing techniques, mainly home-party sales. "We're exactly like Tupperware, but a bit more fun," explains Gold. Ann Summers hauled in $22.5 million for the year ending June 30, 1998. Seventy percent came from home-party sales (which include Internet and catalog purchases); the shops account for the rest. But that equation may soon change...
...success didn't come easy. The stores languished until 1984, when Gold's efforts finally began to pay off, in large measure because of the introduction of more wholesome goods. "[Gold] took the shops away from their run-down, seedy image," notes Kim Rawlings, editor of Contours, a lingerie trade magazine. "They sell a lot more basic lingerie...
Transplanting a homegrown sex business onto distant shores will doubtless prove risky. Gold hopes to avoid offending local sensibilities by going the franchise route. "It helps us to have someone who understands the local culture," she says. So far, Ann Summers' Dublin store is the only one that has drawn opposition. Downtown merchants--saying a sex shop, no matter how posh, doesn't belong on a main shopping avenue--tried to get it moved to a side street. But the opposing retailers could not find any legal reason to keep the shop off O'Connell Street, and the company turned...