Morning:
8°c
Round my way, shops are closing by the day. In the centre of Kingston, on Saturday afternoon, there was strange sport to be had in spotting the ones that had gone since I last paid a visit.
There were plenty of people around, don't get me wrong, but what they weren't doing was buying anything. The pavements and the coffee bars were busy but not the tills. Even in the Bentall Centre it was the same. Except in one store. Mothercare was heaving.
"I know, we're the best-performing retail stock in the last 12 months," says Ben Gordon, the chain's chief executive, when I tell him. In Locanda Locatelli, Gordon is easy to spot: he's the only one in a suit in the restaurant who is smiling.
It's like that with his shops. While others stand empty, his are positively buzzing. He's used to the jokes about people staying in more, but you do have to wonder. Here we are in the middle of a worldwide recession, yet Mothercare has just posted rising sales for the third quarter, taking its growth for the financial year so far to 7.2%. Overseas, its stores were up almost 50%.
It seems people are carrying on producing babies, regardless of the ills of the world. Around 130 million are born annually, which translates into an industry worth billions. In this country, 90% of expectant mothers head to a Mothercare at least once during their pregnancy. As a father of five, I can vouch for just how expensive - and doubtless, lucrative for Gordon and co - those trips can be. Later, when we visit his Oxford Street store, I only half-joke with Gordon that I could have had a whole wing named in my honour, or at least that of my credit card.
There is more to Mothercare's success, though, than merely providing baby clothes and nappies and assuming they will come. Two of its main rivals, Adams and Woolworths, have collapsed while Mothercare was powering ahead. And Gordon's company is itself a turn-around: it was losing £24 million a year when he took over in 2002 and was about to breach its banking covenants.
When I say it makes a pleasant change to be meeting someone doing well (and who isn't an insolvency practitioner), Gordon nods and beams. If you didn't know his background you could be forgiven for thinking he's a military man. He's well-turned-out and his manner is slightly clipped - the result, perhaps, of spending his early years in the expatriate community in the Far East and later attending Epsom College as a boarder.
He was born in 1959, the son of a civil-engineer father. He too studied civil engineering at Bristol University. Gordon worked in Oman and Saudi for Costain. When I say that's a hell of a long way from selling buggies in Mothercare, he laughs. "I did an MBA at Insead and then went to L'Oreal," he says.
That was followed by 10 years at WH Smith, working in, and then running, its North American operations. After that came the newsagent's wholesale divisions. Part of his brief included the integration of part of John Menzies.
He'd got the retail bug and he joined The Walt Disney Company as head of the Disney Store in Europe and Asia Pacific. "Walt Disney was like how I'd like Mothercare to be. It's a great company that is built on knowing the brand and customer service. It's also extremely commercial."
Finally, there came Mothercare. The results were poor and, rather like Chelsea managers, the group was on its third chief executive in five years. Gordon was an unknown and the City gave him little chance of executing a recovery. The pressure was intensified by talk of a bid from the well-known Terry Green, who went on to run Allders and is now at Tesco. Why do it? He wanted a challenge, he says simply. He knew the company - he has three children of his own, now aged 14 to nine (he lives in High Wycombe) - and had a fair idea of how low it had sunk.
Even so, he received a knock on his first day, when he had to empty the tills for cash to keep the company going. "We had £500,000 sitting in the tills. It was all in 2ps and 5ps." The flipside of that, of course, was that if he required proof of just what a chaotic state the business was in, here it was. Once some order and discipline had been restored, he set about delivering growth.
"It was a four-point strategy. One, we improved the stores and products." So, he says, on Oxford Street, the company's flagship branch was a hefty 17,000 square feet but, despite its size, barely profitable. Gordon took it down to 7000 square feet 18 months ago. "It lost 15% of its sales and 40% of its space but it's now highly profitable, making the best part of £1 million a year."
Mothercare had been taken downmarket, in completely the wrong direction. The stores were shabby and the IT system was poor. All that has changed.
With that, too, has come a boost in customer care. "Babies don't come with a service manual," Gordon intones. "Mothers get little training. The job of our sales team is to provide it. Ninety per cent of pregnant women visit a Mothercare and on their first visit many of them don't actually buy anything. They just want to look around - they're pregnant for the first time and they're entering a brand-new world and want to look around, at everything that is available, in one place."
Two, he boosted the internet operation. "Around 20% of our sales now come from the website." In the stores, he's set up internet terminals so customers can browse and choose from a much greater product range. "Our biggest store has 70 varieties of pushchair, but online we've got 500."
The third strand was adding Early Learning Centre. In a bold move, he paid £85 million for the toy retailer. It was a clever bolt-on, taking Mothercare into a new area but one that naturally followed its own. Early Learning products are now sold in Mothercare stores.
Fourth, the group has continued to expand overseas. Today, it has 1000 shops worldwide, of which 600 (450 Mothercare and 150 Early Learning) are abroad. In the UK the breakdown is 230 Mothercare and 170 Early Learning. Gordon opened the 1000th in Dubai in December. It's in 50 countries, with 80 branches in Saudi Arabia, 30 in Russia, 25 in India and two in China.
Given the lamentable track record of other British chains in foreign lands, this is an impressive achievement. What's the secret? "Babies are the same the world over," he says. "There's very little difference from one country to another in what we sell."
That's not strictly true, he checks himself. In Greece, the colour purple is regarded as funereal and pigs may look cute on outfits in some countries but can cause offence in others. Generally, though, he's right, babies are the same, people keep on having them and wanting to provide for them.
When he took charge, a disbelieving City sent the shares as low as 85p. Today, they're 407p. I haven't been able to write that about anyone in quite a while.
