Hail Mary Portas, Queen of Shops
Makeover queen Mary Portas is taking on Britain's independent shops in a new series broadcast next month.
"We need you, Mary!" they wail. Thousands of failing shopkeepers beg to be put through Mary Portas's mincing machine. They don't mind looking stupid on prime time television in front of this terrifyingly clever woman. They're prepared to be slapped about a bit. They'll open up their tragic spreadsheets, expose their lack of business acumen, admit they've lost their way… anything to have her walk through the door in her delicious little peep-toe boots and tell them where they're going wrong.
"It's a real shame this shop is so awful," she observes, as the television cameras pan around a doleful once-bohemian furniture shop in Kingston-upon-Thames. "It's like a dirty old swingers' party, isn't it? I don't mean to be cruel but it's pathetically bad. The wacky Seventies world is all they know."
The gentle owners, Denny and Dazzle, look like the bewildered survivors of a plane crash. "We don't want to lose our quirkiness," they plead. But they lost £45,000 last year. Something's got to give and usually with Portas's supplicants, it's their pride.
Mary Queen of Shops marches up to a middle-aged hairdresser in Rochdale, John Peers, who is rebuked for never having heard of fashion icons such as Lily Cole or Alexa Chung and whose practice is to give his dwindling band of customers the cut they haven't asked for. He hasn't made a profit for five years, can't pay the rent and owes the bank £40,000. "He's a great, lovely character," Portas decides. "A nice bully. But ignoring the client is commercial suicide."
Portas, obsessive about her trademark Belisha-beacon bob, won't let him near her with scissors but agrees to let him give her a blow dry. He tells her she has green eyes when they are actually the colour of chocolate buttons. "It's not a great start. Not only is John colour blind, he appears to be deaf as well."
For her new series, Portas is applying her scorching makeover skills to the nation's independent shopkeepers: a village store, a greengrocer, a homeware store, an ironmongers, a hairdresser and – oh, so memorably – a bakery. These desperate six have been chosen from an astonishing 6,500 applicants, all frightened of what the supermarkets and the recession are doing to their businesses, all eager to be put through the Portas purging fires. "Weird," she says. "They know it will be tough. There's this element: will they come across as fools? But they are that scared."
Any lingering idea that Mary Portas is just a slick retail guru, hard as nails, can be left at the shop door. These encounters have shaken her with their muddy, poignant backdrop to business failure: husbands and wives who don't see eye to eye, dysfunctional families, damaged egos, wounded pride. She's found herself caught up in the web of their lives. "It got to me quite badly," she admits. "Human interaction is what I like but it's not as straightforward as you might think. You have no idea what goes on behind the scenes. You have to go deeper, deeper, deeper…"
With Angela (pictured overleaf), the proprietress of a dated little bakery in Raynes Park, southwest London, deep becomes dangerous. Her business is going down the tube but it turns out she doesn't like to be lectured by a woman wearing monster rings and sharp clothes on how to rescue it.
"You don't know anything about this trade," she snaps. Portas casts a withering eye over the old-fashioned jam tarts and fondant fancies. She looks balefully at the smiley-faced biscuits. "I haven't eaten anything like that since I was six." Despite the lack of customers she sees how vibrant this little place could be if it were filled with wholesome artisan breads, a concept Angela dismisses as "all this focaccia stuff".
Portas had started by thinking there was something "fabulously matriarchal" about Angela but by the end of the programme she is threatening to put her head in the baker's oven "after hers". Relations deteriorated to the point where Portas says she called up a psychotherapist friend for advice.
"I was puzzled. I can normally get through to people. With this lady, I could not get anywhere. Part of me was scared about ending up like that, where you don't see there are doors that can open. It frightened me. I think not changing is probably one of the most frightening things in life."
It gets grislier. As Portas and her television crew arrive for a clinching meeting, Angela barricades herself above the shop and refuses to come out. Eventually, she orders them off the premises. "I was waiting downstairs for hours," Portas says. "I thought: 'this is just ugly and I am not going to carry on'."
Portas confesses "at the risk of sounding like a mad woman" that before the encounter she sought help. "There was this real hostility. I am not a spiritual person, but I rang a pal of mine, Yasmin, and she gave me a little chant to say before I went in, to put an energy field around me because it was so emotionally draining."
What was the chant, Mary? "I reclaim my energy. I am strong in your presence."
Who says this is just about retail? "It just got to me," Portas says. "I felt I'd failed. I felt I'd failed her as well. It upset me because I felt I was giving my all. But it also upset me for her family. You meet all of them. You start to understand these people's lives. You know you have an effect on those lives and you don't take it lightly."
By normal Queen of Shops' standards – she mostly saves businesses and puts them back in the black – the exercise is a disaster. There is no transformation, no grateful shopkeeper, no happy ending. But it is all horribly watchable, like seeing a hot-air balloon come down with its basket on fire, and BBC Two has decided to start the series with it. With a slight frisson of unease, Portas predicts it will be the water cooler talk of the day.
"I am keen not to humiliate anyone," she says earnestly. "That is the most ugly thing ever. I don't do it with my children or anybody in business. I like people. I never want to make them feel small. But you still have to have a laugh. People find I am not scary. I am not an Anne Robinson or an Esther Rantzen. I am quite playful and I have got to have a bit of fun. But there's that fine line between fun and ridicule."
She teased Peers, the hairdresser, about the "mullet quality" of some of his cuts and how he didn't listen to his customers. Then she revamped his salon, motivated his staff and – pow, six weeks later, the business was making an extra £1,000 on a Saturday. "You've got to be knocked about a bit," he concluded.
Furniture shop owners Dazzle and Denny sent her one of their kitsch items, a high-heeled glass sandal that doubles as a perfume bottle – a keepsake in memory of how dire they were before she got to work on them. "The shop was a mishmash," admits Dazzle, an ageing hippy with a twinkle. "Some of the things she said knocked us sideways but you have to have a bit of pain before the gain. When you lose direction, you start arguing. As people, it's made us happier. We're focused on the same thing now."
Denny, apparently, didn't understand the designer zeitgeist. But how could she when she was looking after her mother and here zombie-like son (filmed turning up for work in his dressing gown) and most of their goods were coming from a closing down warehouse?
Portas understood that Dazzle was trying to protect Denny from the brunt of her criticism. But she also saw and exploited Denny's creative streak. "I had to manage so she wasn't embarrassed in front of him. I didn't want to break that respect he had for her." It gives a whole new meaning to the term retail therapy.
Their shop, Under the Moon, has been renamed 37 Old London Road, and is now breaking even It's full of what Portas calls "upcycled" pieces of highly individualistic furniture.
"Did you see the shop at the end?" Portas enthuses. "Just beautiful. It was one of my proudest moments."
Portas is expecting the backlash any day now. "This is the fourth series," she says. "So I'm up for a good old knocking soon. It happens." Only the other day, she says, a national newspaper doorstepped Denny and Dazzle, trying to get a "dirty story" on her. "But, bless them, they refused. I thought that was so honourable."
Another "knock" she is expecting is over her imminent civil partnership ceremony with her partner, Melanie Rickey, fashion features director of Grazia magazine. Mary Portas was married for 13 years to Graham, a chemical engineer, and they had two children, Milo, 16, and Verity, 14. The marriage ended in the late Nineties and she did not get together with Rickey until much later. But the headlines about her new relationship have stung her ("I did not leave Graham for a woman") and she worries about how to stop the event from becoming tabloid fodder.
"I try to respond to questions with honesty and integrity but there will always be someone wanting to have a knock. Always. Some painful things have been written but you have to move on otherwise it would wear you down."
Antonio Berardi, a designer much beloved by Victoria Beckham, who combines strict lines with lacy, feminine trims, is making their outfits. "We're both girlie girls. It will be very chic."
Mary Portas came to fame by revamping Harvey Nichols in the early Nineties. It's what earned her the sobriquet Mary Queen of Shops and a place in retailing history. She says it all happened by default. She had really wanted to be an actress but her parents died within two years of one another and suddenly she was out on the street, homeless, needing to earn money fast. She enrolled for a course in retail visual merchandising at Watford College of Art. "Hated every single minute. I was told I didn't have a future."
The fourth of five children in an Irish Catholic family, she was the most extrovert of the lot, naughty and boisterous. Her worst punishment was not being allowed to go shopping with her mother and elder sister, Tish. "I remember sitting on the wall waiting for them to come back with their goodies – clothes, make-up, real girlie things – and feeling tragic."
Their life in Hertfordshire was shattered when her mother died suddenly of meningitis when Portas was 16 and her father just two years later, of a heart attack, aged 53. He was a sales director for Brooke Bond.
"He left everything to his second wife. We were literally without a roof. My younger brother and I were put up by family friends, each in a different house. I can't remember grieving that much because of the shock of what happened. I have probably never dealt with it.
"For five years from the death of my mother, I was in the wilderness. I think my drive comes from being just scared. I worked a bit harder than the rest. I don't even know whether it was a greater talent. To this day, when I get girls saying they're going to take time out to rethink, I want to go: 'Whaaat?' I never had that option."
Instead of going on the stage, Portas got her first job in retail at John Lewis. After that her progression was assured: Harrods, Topshop at Oxford Circus, Harvey Nichols. "I chucked in a stable job to do Harvey Nichols completely on my own. It was madness really. But I knew I could do it." She now runs her own consultancy in Bloomsbury, Yellowdoor, which employs 50 people.
We meet in a cold, bare room dominated by a chipped, pink-topped conference table. Her talk is brisk, sharp as everything else about her. A fashion model might feel démodé beside her. Is she ever a mess? "There are times when I think: 'No, I am not going to dress up'. If I go down the road to get a newspaper from the little guy at the Underground – I refuse to go to Tesco's – I just walk out in a sweatshirt, no make-up, and I don't look great. I know I don't. And you do get spotted."
She got her television break thanks to The Richard & Judy Show where she contributed to an improbable discussion about "a sense of smell in retail". Was there one? She didn't think so, but no matter. Portas was cool. She was articulate. She was launched, aged 44, in a new medium. A year later came the first series of Mary Queen of Shops.
She turns down a lot of stuff in the media because she doesn't want to be a talking head, boring people. "All it would do is boost my ego." The idea of Portas needing an ego boost is faintly ridiculous.
"Well," she says. "We all need to feel recognised, loved and have a special place in the lives of people we respect. I am lucky I have created a business in a world where I do get recognised. But you become this persona and managing that is very difficult."
Each morning she takes her daughter to the school coach, then goes for a run with the dog before starting her own day. Her rule is not to take meetings after 4.30pm so she can be home for dinner. There is a clause in her contract to limit the days she is away filming. "My partner Melanie thinks this [being a good mother] is a slight obsession because I lost my mother so young. I want to do my best."
Her career, it seems, has rocketed away without a plan but with a lot of adrenalin-fuelled opportunism. "I make sure I do everything absolutely to my best and with a level of insight about it. I'm not random. I try to think about things. I have had years of horrible times, times out of my control. Death is one thing you cannot manage. But I see the world as quite a caring place and I find it difficult to deal with people who see the world against them."
Perhaps that's why it all fell apart in the bakery.
- Mary Portas's new series of Mary Queen of Shops will be broadcast on June 7 on BBC Two
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