![]() In 2000, Ann Summers acquired the Knickerbox brand, which now has a concession in every store.Īlong the way this purveyor of sex toys, bondage gear, racy underwear and vibrators was made a CBE in 2016 and introduced to the Queen at a Buckingham Palace reception. She became chief executive of the company in 1987. She was determined to take it away ‘from the raincoat brigade and turn it into a female institution’. The savvy plan allowed Ann Summers to get around laws that prevented sex toys being put on public display. It was quite simply the most successful party plan operation in the country, transporting sex out of sex shops and into living rooms from which men were banished. The board, however, agreed and the rest is history.įrom a handful of organisers – housewives earning money on commission – she reached 500 within a matter of months, and soon there were thousands. Ms Gold later recalled: ‘I thought, “That says more about your sex life than the real world”.’ One of the directors hurled his glasses on the table and told her: ‘This is never going to work. By 21 and with a plan in mind, she made her pitch to her father’s board of directors, a group of men running a business completely targeted at men. ‘I saw an opportunity to empower women, the exact opposite to what had happened to me as a child,’ she said. ‘They said to me, “We want to buy sexy underwear and sex toys to spice up our marriages, but we don’t want to have to go into a sex shop”.’ ‘Some of the girls there knew I was working at Ann Summers,’ she recalled. She was getting paid less than the tea lady on £45 a week when she had a flash of inspiration after spending an evening at a Tupperware-style party. In those days they were the seedy destinations for men in dirty raincoats, a world away from the glitzy High Street emporiums they were to become. In 1979, just out of school, she did work experience at an Ann Summers store – her father had bought its four outlets after they had gone bust a few years earlier. In the event Jacqueline revolutionised it by taking Britain’s raunchiest company mainstream. It was said that when Jacqueline was born he cried because she wasn’t a boy who could inherit the business. His pornographic publishing empire included such titles as Hardcore Housewives, Rustler, Butt Babes and Derriere. Her father made his money largely out of top shelf magazines. One was the businesswoman who made the sleazy sex toys and kinky lingerie industry respectable, the other was a young girl sexually abused as a teenager by her stepfather Hers was a tale of two very different lives.
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