MICHELLE MONE is talking balls. "I don't know if it will be this year, but we are definitely launching Ultimo for Men. It will have strong fabric where you need it - to, you know, hold you up." The 37-year-old mother of three stifles a giggle. We are in Mone's smart, glass-panelled office in the East Kilbride headquarters of her multi-million pound lingerie business, MJM International, a company as famous for its glamorous, straight-talking boss as it is for its most successful product, its gel-filled, cleavage-enhancing Ultimo bra.
As a man, I am acutely aware that I am principally here to discuss ladies' underwear. During the course of my meeting with Mone, bra straps will be fiddled with and cleavages examined. And why not? Men ogle women's underwear every day, surreptitiously, on the street, in the office, in the tabloids and online. We are, in some ways, the ultimate consumers of Mone's products. "Did you notice how the front of the building is shaped like a breast?" her assistant asked me with a knowing smile as she led me up to the stairs to Mone's room. "Erm, no," I reply hesitantly.
Perhaps on a subconscious level, I did notice it. Mone is, after all, a very accomplished operator when it comes to marketing her brand. Ultimo has made her a very wealthy woman, with recent reports suggesting the business is worth more than £50 million.
Mone herself is guarded about her finances. "This company is cash rich. We now have no overdraft. This company now has its own building - this place - which we own. This company now has bought all our shareholders out. But no-one knows what I take out or what I do with it." What we do know is that MJM is preparing to launch a major new product range for girls in May - Miss Ultimo.
Before we get into that, a pressing question. Will Mr Ultimo or whatever it's going to be called, have any gel in it? "Of course not!" She laughs. "Everyone thinks that all we do is gel. We don't. We have eight brands now and only one of our inventions has gel in it."
Like, I suspect, many men reading this, I can feel myself relax as it becomes clear that the lingerie queen is not out to challenge my manhood with any silicone enhancements. "Ultimo for men will just have lovely fabric. My technical teams here and in Hong Kong are working on it right now."
They had better get a move on, because their boss is bursting to get to grips with the finished article. "I just can't wait to have male models coming in for their fitting sessions because I have had 13 years of female models and celebrity women coming in, and seeing my husband staring at them and going, Oh that wire's not quite right.' Now I can go up to these men and go, Oh that's not quite right on your left ball.' So it's payback time!" Men please note: the lingerie queen gives trunks the thumbs-up, but boxer shorts are a no-no.
Mone and her husband, Michael, are at the head of the family business, which Mone set up with tycoon Tom Hunter's help in 1996. Michael's job is to "look after all the boring stuff in the business that I don't want to do". Also contributing is Mone's mother. "That's my mum out there." She points through a glass door to the shop floor. "She helps out with returns. She loves it. But my dad is very sick at the moment. He's in a wheelchair and not doing so well." When Mone was 15, and the family lived in Glasgow's east end, her father awoke one morning to find himself paralysed by a rare spinal condition. A few years before that her brother, who suffered from spina bifida, died. That Mone experienced such profound tragedies at a formative age seems to go a long way towards explaining her temperament, which has a definite hard edge. One woman I know suggested Mone is not unlike a good bra herself: smart, sexy and feminine - but cutting if rubbed up the wrong way. Anyone who saw her infamous performance in The Apprentice: You're Fired! last year, in which she locked horns with unsuccessful contestant Katie Hopkins, has seen Mone's rage at first hand. "She really angered me. That clip is one of the most-watched on You Tube, apparently."
Miss Ultimo was designed with the help of Mone's eldest child, 16-year-old Rebecca. The idea behind getting her daughter on board was simple: to find out what teenagers want from a bra. "My design team are a lot older than Rebecca, so it was decided that she would get involved. I've been training her since she was eight." Mone shows me samples of the new product, which will be launched at £16 to target brand-conscious youngsters for whom the main Ultimo range is too expensive. Miss Ultimo has a lot of the kind of detailing which, Mone's daughter tells her girls of that age really like. On the inside of the cups is the embossed image of a sexy lady. The pink packaging, which advertises the bra's properties, uses words like "fun" and "flirty".
|
Miss Ultimo is an attractive product. But that's exactly why it might worry some parents. According to the Just 17 principle, although Miss Ultimo is aimed at girls of 16 and upwards, in reality many of its aspiring customers are likely to be considerably younger. In a world where children are becoming sexually active at an ever-younger age, doesn't Mone worry that Miss Ultimo might send out the wrong message? "I don't feel I should be criticised for launching a younger range," she says. "It's not as if I'm bringing out crotchless knickers or bras where you can see the nipples through them. Miss Ultimo bras are plain and fun, and made from good-quality Italian and French fabrics that you just wouldn't normally get at that price point.
"From the age of about 12 or 13 a girl will need a bra," she continues. "It is harmful if they don't wear one. It's bad for their breasts, which have to be supported. Miss Ultimo is targeted at age 16, but if mothers want to buy it for girls that are younger then I'm not going to stop them. But please go for the non-wired version, because at 15 and under girls shouldn't be wearing a wired bra, for the good development of their breasts."
As a mother herself, Mone insists she is very comfortable with the Miss Ultimo image. Rebecca is living proof that she knows what it is like bringing up a teenager. "Rebecca hit her dad with a bomb the other day," she reveals, "And he's not happy with her." The bombshell was her decision to quit school. Instead of going into sixth year and then on to university, which is her father's wish, the strong-willed youngster will leave school in April. "She takes after her dad," says Mone, who quit school herself at 15 and hasn't done too badly out of it. But it seems clear that Rebecca Mone does, in fact, take after someone other than her dad. "Well, she is into design. She sets the trend at the school and she's always been into fashion. I know I'm biased about this, but she's stunning, 5ft 11in, and intelligent. She wants to go into a pop group or something like that. She wants to go for it, and she's determined. We've got all these magazines like Cosmo and Hello and OK wanting to do shoots with her. But we are keeping her way back from that." This is an oblique reference to a recent tabloid newspaper story, which reported that Mone and her husband have banned Rebecca from modelling the undies she helped design.
Mone claims she gives her children a lot of leeway, and that she takes a relaxed approach to parenting. "I just hate pushy mums, you know."
However, she has admitted to suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which can make life challenging at her home in Thorntonhall, about five minutes away from Ultimo headquarters. She runs her family like a business, using "key performance indicators" to assess the weekly progress of her children, husband and household staff.
There is no doubt Mone has made a lot of sacrifices in trying to balance her role as a young mother of three with that of a successful businesswoman. She recently admitted that she returned to work just a few days after giving birth to her youngest child, Bethany - the other being her son, Declan - and that she cried in between meetings because of the guilt and the heartache.
Her guilt might explain her controversial stance on the question of paid maternity leave, the length of which has recently been increased by the government. "I think, to be honest, where it was before was very, very fair I just think maternity law has gone too far now." In 2006, Mone was ordered to pay compensation by an employment tribunal to a woman who claimed she was forced out of her job because she became pregnant. But Mone denies that she has done anything wrong, or that she discriminates against women who want to have children. "We've got a lot of staff on maternity leave at the moment and, if you see our team of women, there are only about four who are not within the ages where they could have a baby. All the women in here apart from those four could be pregnant by tomorrow, although hopefully not this afternoon in the toilets."
Mone's candour, humour and directness is refreshing. "If we just say nothing, and don't express an opinion, what does that makes us as people?" Her questioning attitude prompted some testing exchanges several years ago, when she converted from her Protestant faith to marry into Michael's Catholic family. When Michael said he wanted the couple's children to be brought up Catholic, Mone agreed, but with some reservations. "For a year, three nights a week I went to classes. And I used to sit down with the priests and the nuns, and challenge them. At the end, I said to my husband, I now know a lot more about this religion than I do about my own, and I enjoyed going to these classes. But I don't believe in everything that they stand for."
The Madonna that has had the greater influence on Mone is the material girl herself. "I totally respect her. She changed how women wore their lingerie. They started to wear corsets outside their clothes. Madonna is saying to women, Be yourself. Be sexy and enjoy it. And if you've got it, flaunt it.'"
Madonna's talent for reinvention is what impresses Mone the most. Mone is taking Miss Ultimo in a new direction, with an as-yet-unnamed girl band being signed to promote it. Previously, the main Ultimo range has been marketed with endorsement and modelling by individual celebrities like Penny Lancaster, Rod Stewart's girlfriend. "In the past we used one person as the face and body of Ultimo, but with Miss Ultimo we will have a group, which will be much more fun." Using the various members of a girl band, each with their own distinctive flavour, shrewdly taps in to teenagers' clique culture and gives the product a wider appeal.
"Some people will look at one member of a girl group wearing Miss Ultimo and see themselves in that person."
Mone has created an image of the person she wants to be, and strives hard to achieve it. Today she looks much slimmer and younger than a few years ago, when personal and business troubles caused her weight to spiral out of control. "My dad was probably the big influence in my weight loss. Because my weight had ballooned all the way out to six-and-a-half stone overweight, I was miserable. I felt I couldn't get out of it. That was until my dad wrote me a letter, which I still keep in a wee box with the kids' birth bellybutton tags, and it says, Michelle I really love you, but you're ruining your life. You're not happy. For your own health and your marriage and your kids, you need to lose this weight.'"
The next day, Mone went to see nutrition expert Jan de Vries in Troon. Using a herbal slimming remedy developed by de Vries, Mone regained control of her weight. Whether this was really down to de Vries's treatment or not is a matter of controversy, but Mone is so convinced that she bought into it and now jointly produces a slimming pill with de Vries called Trim Secrets.
Mone argues that positivity was never a more precious commodity than now, as recession grips the land. "We need to all get positive now because doom and gloom creates a vicious circle. I was made redundant 13 years ago and, yes, I was depressed for about a month. But I thought, well, I can keep going down and down, and get into trouble in my marriage, because I'm so depressed or I can do something about it. So I started a business and went from there to here. You've got to turn that negative into a positive."
Recession or not, there is no sign of Mone slowing down or running out of avenues for expansion. On top of Miss Ultimo, she reveals, tantalisingly: "We have just done our biggest-ever deal, for £60 million, which I hope to announce in April. And I want to launch Ultimo Perfume. I love perfume that goes well with lingerie. That makes you feel sweet and sexy. In fact, I've got so much to do, I don't feel like I've made it yet. I'm maybe half-way there."
No comments:
Post a Comment