For Anya Hindmarch, the transcendent object was her first
handbag. But she didn’t just enjoy the moment, and move on. Instead, she set
out on a journey to set up her own business – everyone in her family ran a
business - first selling bags brought from Florence (still a capital of luxury
leather), then building up a catalogue of original designs. The journey
involved learning how bags are made, tracking down suppliers, craftsmen, designers,
putting steam-bent wooden handles onto leather herself in the early days, building
up a team. She started with a £1K loan from her father (to be repaid with
interest, I said they were business people) and now presides over the ‘Anya
Hindmarch’ empire, with gorgeous shops, prices to match, and an annual turnover
of £26m.
All this makes it sound easy, but, as Anya spelled out in
her inspiring talk (title: Skip uni, and start a business), the entrepreneur’s journey
is anything but simple. The only real guarantees are lack of funding,
heartbreak moments, and bureaucracy doing its normal grim work of smothering creative
endeavour. So the precepts of someone who has made such a spectacular success
of it all are worth attending to, whether you’re in business or not. Here are
some that stuck in my head:
·
Believe in yourself. Corny, but true. Visualise
yourself as you would like to be, and work to become that vision.
·
Don’t be arrogant! No one is entitled to be a
success, and the obstacles are there to test you.
·
Take your opportunities. If a chance comes to do
something interesting, go for it. Interesting things lead to other interesting
things. (Also, she confided to a largely male audience, girls like boys who do
interesting things).
·
Think of a product you love and believe in,
where there’s a gap in the market.
But this talk was anything but a bullet-pointed sermon.
There was a self-effacing personal history, followed by a slide show following
the movements of the business through the last decades, with semi-subliminal
pics of models – and a lively Q&A (Anya had brought mags and sweets as
bribes, but I think there would have been plenty of questions without them). The
whole thing was delivered with great charm (hence my pally reference to ‘Anya’,
who by the way is from Essex not Russia). So charming was it that I could even
smile at the paean to the Thatcherite 80s: we right-thinking folk are supposed
to hate the eighties, the age of the
yuppies and sloanes, but clearly it was also a time in which some of our
brightest entrepreneurs could take root and flourish. Anya’s charm and passion
for the product were a long way from the snarly, testosterone-high world of The
Apprentice, or the scary dragons sitting in their weird warehouse den with piles of money
sitting pointlessly beside them. I wonder if these popular media images of the
business world really help the cause of attracting the next generation of makers and
doers.
As for the ‘skip uni’ part, it made me think about the funny
gap between the academic and the business worlds. Many schools are now
involving local businesses and enthusing young people with ideas about
enterprise, and many universities have business schools too. But there is still this notion around in some
quarters that learning and commerce occupy separate spheres. I once heard a
refined soul deploring Poetry Day on the grounds that it received funding from
a businessman. But our whole culture is funded by business. Shakespeare was a businessman, so was Dickens,
so were the workshops of the Renaissance artists. A Steinway piano is a
product. Q&A ended with thoughts on
how the business environment could be made easier (employment law, apprenticeships).
I wanted to ask if she was thinking of
making manbags, but didn’t for fear of laughter. So I didn’t get a mag or
sweets.
