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Richard's quest to find out what success is and how to achieve it. Is it about good ideas, great leadership, luck, or something altogether different?
Nayna McIntosh: For so many women of a certain age, your confidence starts to wane anyway. And then at that point it feels like your purpose in life is done. You know, society doesn't see you in the same way and you feel like you're regressing into the background. It's tough. There's a real opportunity to reignite that competence in so many women.
Raising money as a woman is notoriously difficult, the UK VC funding that is available in the market, about 1% goes to female-led businesses. Led by black women, it kind of gets down to about 0.2%. So this isn't an easy gig for a woman and even less so for a black woman.
Richard Miron: Welcome to the Success and Ideas podcast. I'm Richard Miron.
We're now in our second series and in reflection of how things have moved on, we're recording today's edition on location and in person, in contrast to the COVID-imposed restrictions, which meant we were forced to previously record from home. So this is the podcast where I try to understand success. Is it about good ideas, great leadership, luck, or is it something altogether different?
On the last series, we spoke to people from the worlds of journalism, PR, advertising, finance, and elsewhere. Now we're spreading the net even wider. To kick off season two, I'm delighted to be joined by a woman who's been at the forefront of British fashion retail for many years – Nayna McIntosh. Nayna, hello.
Nayna: Hello
Richard: Nayna has years of experience at globally recognized brands like Marks & Spencers, and Next. She was formative in helping launch the George brand at Asda, which introduced affordable fashion to supermarkets. She also set up the Per Una range for M&S – Marks & Spencers – which has been cited as putting the company out of the fashion doldrums.
But in 2013, having achieved so much with the big name brands, Nayna left M&S and created her own company, Hope, which has a mission to provide stylish, comfortable clothing for women who are over 50 years of age and of different shapes and sizes, and who don't fit the industry's target group for what is considered ‘fashionable’.
Nayna, thanks so much for meeting up with me. And once again, it's a joy to be sitting opposite you. And in what I might say appropriately, these very stylish and fashionable surroundings in central London.
Nayna: Thank you very much for having me.
Richard: You left a very secure job.
Nayna: That's true, yeah.
Richard: At the age of – how old were you?
Nayna: I was 52.
Richard: 52. I would just say that I had a similar, not quite similar kind of experience in leaving large organizations and setting up on my own, but that's a very scary thing to do, isn't it? Why did you do?
Nayna: All I can honestly say, Richard, was that there was something in my head that said, this has to be done differently.
I've had a joyous career for over 30 years. For many years, it never felt like work. It was a lot of fun, a lot of hard work and a degree of success, but I was simply not enjoying it any longer. And therefore I had to listen to that insight within myself and do something different.
Richard: What joy went out of it? What changed?
Nayna: I passionately believe in the importance of working with the right culture, working with the right people. And there were a number of changes in the organization that I was at both personnel and ways of working and it just didn't work for me. I put it as simply as that – getting the 652 every morning into Paddington was becoming very laborious. I wasn't looking forward to my day.
Richard: Weren’t you scared?
Nayna: Uh, absolutely terrified. You know, you don't walk out of those big jobs easily. Um, I think a lot of people assumed I had got a plan or that I’d probably got a big job lined up. But all I can say is that when I made the decision, you know, we were literally on our last night of our, uh, we were on a break in Jamaica and having very large gin and tonics, watching the sun come down and I just turned to Harvey and I said, I've got to do this differently. I can't keep doing this.
Richard: So it was an epiphany?
Nayna: It was… Yeah, that's a really interesting point. I'd been going to Jamaica since I was 10 years old and I call it my happy place, because whenever I go, it's one of the few times in my life where I know I can chill out, relax, and actually sometimes just have some thinking time.
And I just, I think in the course of the week we were there. For the first time, the thought of having to go back into that rhythm and routine filled me with dread. And I had an uncle who I was very close to when I was growing up, who had a huge career, you know, flying all over the world and he had a life-changing stroke at the age of 56. And I just thought to myself, “do you know what? If you're not careful, girl, that's gonna be you.” And that was my moment. I just thought, I don't know what it looks like, but it ain't this and it needs to be different.
Richard: So after that, you didn't just launch and set up your brand, did you?
Nayna: No
Richard: You sort of took time.
Nayna: I did. Um, first of all, I negotiated my exit, came out of that business in September 2013. No idea what I was going to do.
And there were a number of things that were going on in my life at that particular moment, completely unbeknown to us back in April when the conversation started. Not least of all, my in-laws moving in with us temporarily. And the only thing I got clear was that I wanted to take some time out.
I'd had two children and a hysterectomy within three years of each other and had taken very little time off for any of those events. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to have what I think I called at the time, my “me-ternity”. And what I said was I wanted to use the period to read, research and reflect, and did a bit of traveling, and just gave myself the option of just going with the flow.
On a personal note, um, my father-in-law who moved in with us in October, um, sadly died the following March, at home, with us. That's when I knew that was my reason for being at home. I needed to be there, to hold my family together. And ironically, we'd gone away on a skiing trip in February, and that was the first time I started to write things down around what the future might look like.
I had a little notebook with me. I don't ski, uh, hate skiing, but
Richard: But you get dragged on the trips?
Nayna: Yeah, I do the après-ski. And so during the day, I'd be writing furiously, various notes. Anyway, long story short – got back, didn't even tell Harvey about it. And my father-in-law who was ill in bed, literally dying, um, used to have his own graphic design business. And I just said to him, do you think you could possibly take on one more job?
Richard: Really?
Nayna: Honestly, in fact, I asked Pauline, my mum-in-law first – do you think it'd be okay to ask Tony to do this? And I swear to you, it gave Tony another 10 days. So my father-in-law designed my Hope logo.
Richard: I've got goosebumps, hearing you tell this story.
Nayna: Honestly, this is exactly how it happened. He was obviously in bed and I would go up for what we called the board meeting. We had to wait until the carers had gone, so he was clean-shaved, and he’d got a clean t-shirt on and all that stuff. And then I would go in and have a meeting. And the day I went in for him to show me his two proposals and, um, and he chatted it all through, as if it were a pitch, it was amazing.
And he, then he literally turned over two pieces of paper and he said, this is what I think, X for this Y for that. And I just looked at the first one and I said, Tony, I hate it. I said, you know, not for me, but this one, I said, if this brand is a success, that is the logo that will be on the fascia of the first store we opened.
Richard: That’s what happened, you’ve taken that logo.
Nayna: Yeah. Yeah. That's it, honestly, it is his design in the Dorothea font. So it's a real tribute to him. It was quite a moment.
Richard: Unbelievable. I mean, because also Hope in other ways, as you've told me, it's also reflective of your family and your own background.
Nayna: It is! I also remember when we had our first press pack that went out, some journalists who I can't remember, doesn't matter now, said, you know “what ridiculous name, it sounds desperate.” And I just said, actually I think hope is one of the most positive expressions of optimism. I said, furthermore, it's my mother's name. So I'm really cool with it, thanks.
Richard: And your daughter’s name – is it your daughter’s name?
Nayna: Yes, and Florence, Florence Hope. Yeah. So both. So two of the most important women in my life have that name.
Richard: That's lovely. And doesn't it go to the heart of how you see business and how you see life right? As family being the central element
Nayna: And I think Richard, when I came out of the business I was working at, you described it as an epiphany and maybe that's what it was, I don't know. But there was a part of me that wanted to understand what was it that I was fighting against, you know, what was it that was so deeply uncomfortable, in the culture, for me. And I’d done a piece of work with my exec coach, probably five years earlier, which is still in my office at home where we'd done something on what we called, what personal values.
So what really, you know, we started off with something like 500 values and narrowed it down. And then eventually you had to get it down to your top 10. And when I went back to those values, my first five were family, friends, love, trust and integrity. And that's what I then knew it had to be about. Whatever I did going forward, it had to tick those boxes. Because for me, that's what was lacking where I was. And therefore I knew that would happen to be the pillars of anything that I would do in the future, not necessarily for myself, but even the business that I might choose to work with or someone I might choose to collaborate with.
This whole thing about values for me was incredibly important, which I know sounds emotional. And some people say, well, that sounds like a load of old baloney. But there is something about getting to that point in your life, when you start to understand yourself and realize there are some boxes that just have to be ticked, otherwise it's not worth doing.
Richard: You know, I feel myself nodding, having come from a culture of very large organizations and then feeling like whatever I want to set up, knowing that what some of the things I'd seen, I was going to do the absolute polar opposite, because it was opposite to what I believed in and the way that I should act or other people should be treated. So I get that.
One of the things I’m also curious about, is about Hope itself and the business. Now, maybe no surprise there that the business is in the fashion sector and retail fashion, but also about where it was. It strikes me that, you know, as a woman of approximately 50 years of age, when you set this up, there was something personal going on there. You were looking around you presumably and seeing things in the marketplace and a community of people that weren't being served.
Nayna: I often use an expression – there is nothing like being this woman to understand this woman. And I, at this point, was 52, as I said. I was just going through the menopause and having spent most of my life as a size 8/10, I'd already worked out what works for me and my body shape and how to dress very comfortably. It was getting harder because my body shape was changing with the onset of the menopause. Things that just used to work so easily didn't work any longer.
And I guess I came to the conclusion, well it's because you’re physically changing. And what I find is that, you know, as a woman, there are three major milestones in your physical development. Puberty, pregnancy and the menopause. We talk so little about the latter. Today, to be fair, it certainly is a little more out there, but I'm going back only a matter of what eight years. It felt harder.
So I suppose in my head, Richard, what I was thinking was, “well, hang on a second, if I'm feeling like this, and I've got a reasonable amount of confidence in terms of fashion and dressing, how are women who haven't been in the industry, how are they coping? Is it just me?” I sat in so many customer insight sessions over the years, I always knew, I wouldn’t say the gripes, but how 50+ women will often complain about the collection not actually being thought through for them.
Richard: So what wasn’t being though through?
Nayna: Well, things, you know, the common things you would always get is sleeve lengths, for instance, hemlines being too short, and just things being made of fabrics that aren’t suitable for a woman who may be having the worst, hot flashes of her lifetime. Um, so therefore quite often women are really averse to wearing synthetic fabrics at that particular moment in time. So just thinking those things through was top of my mindset.
And I guess part of it for me was also, and I use this word really cautiously externally, although we talk about it all the time in the office, comfortable, you know? Makes me giggle when people say, oh, you know, elasticated waist trousers are so old and unflattering. Most top designers have elasticated waist trousers. It's actually about the cut of the pant that matters. All of our trousers have hyper elasticated waist and they’re pull on. And they're comfortable.
When we ask customers of Hope, what are the words that come to mind when they think of Hope? You know, the things they talk about is style, quality, and comfort. I’ll take those three qualities any day of the week, because that's what we set out to do. So I unashamedly say Hope is about creating the best quality clothes that we can, in the best quality yarns and fabrics, that are comfortable to wear and ultimately make women feel beautifully confident, because if a woman is confident, Richard, then she moves differently, she behaves differently. And whilst we can think that fashion is frivolous, actually my view, it isn't, it's a really important statement that we make about how we look and how we go into the world.
Richard: Can you just expand on that thought a little bit about how fashion isn't frivolous, because you know, a lot of people patronize the notion of fashion and it's disposable and it's a frivolity and it's an extra and so on. But what you're saying is, it helps either suppress someone's self-confidence or elevate it. Is that what you’re saying?
Nayna: I think so! We did a dress about three winters ago, one style of dress that went from a size eight to a size 20. And we did a shoot just for this dress. And we got women of all ages, sizes, as our mantra – all shapes, ages and sizes – to actually model this dress. And we said to them, style it how you would wear it. So, you know, some work with flats, some wore it with heels, et cetera. And there was, uh, a lady who was a customer of ours to this day, and they were a mix of family friends and customers, the models, they weren't professional models.
And as we went over to the screen, when Elaine came off set, I was watching her face looking at herself on the screen and I realized that she was distressed and I just thought, oh my God, what have we done to upset her? And I just said, Elaine, you’re okay? And she just looked at me with tears, genuinely rolling down her cheeks, in early sixties and said, Nayna I forgot that I can look that good.
Richard: Oh great, so important
Nayna: So don't tell me it's not about confidence.
Richard: Yeah, absolutely.
Nayna: It is. For so many women of a certain age, your confidence starts to wane anyway, for all the reasons I've just said. And then at that point, it feels like your purpose in life is done. You know, society doesn't see you in the same way and you feel like you're regressing into the background. It's tough. It’s tough. And I think there's a real opportunity to reignite that confidence in so many women.
Richard: When you think about it, there's this whole thing about actresses who were in there, once famous in their twenties and thirties and forties, who then just disappear, because they're no longer regarded as sexually appealing or attractive or whatever. Now obviously that's, you know, maybe that's male directors and so on, studio bosses who
Nayna: It’s not maybe
Richard: I defer. So, what you're saying is, in a way it's not about, it's maintaining that sense that women can be sexual beings or attractive beings, you know, in their fifties and sixties, which maybe has been something that wasn't thought of previously.
Nayna: I'm not saying it's about women being sexual beings or attractive beings. I'm saying it's about women being confident about themselves.
Richard: Right. But it includes that, I think.
Nayna: Yeah, but I think it's different for different individuals.
Richard: Fair enough.
Nayna: So whatever ticks your box for confidence, you know, it may be about hair, it may be, you know, anything, but I actually think it's a really important moment in our life stage that we don't let go of that confidence, that we rightly own the space that we're in.
You know, in some cultures and societies, you know, the older woman, the maternal woman is seen as the heart of the home and where we go to for advice or to be fed or whatever, but definitely it's the linchpin of the family. And I think in many ways that is still the case within our own society, but I think externally, I don't think that's how people see her.
Richard: You've talked about things in a very personal way about, you know, your approach to Hope and your approach to business. And it strikes me that what you're expressing is, is sort of emotion as it were in business. And some people say, oh, you know, emotion doesn't have a place in business. You've got to be hard-headed. How do you see it?
Nayna: I think you have to have a balance of both. So, you know, I've given a very personal account of my journey, as you say. So, you know, this is how I personally felt, but to be clear, I didn't set up Hope just because I wanted some nice, comfortable clothes to wear.
I wanted to understand what was the size of the market. So the women's wear apparel market in the UK, last time I looked, is worth about 19 billion. If you look at it by demographic, by age group, again, the last time I looked, you know, the 40+ woman is worth just under 50% of the market. So this isn't something that's small and tiny and niche. So this was for me, number one, a great commercial opportunity.
Number two, something I personally felt very passionate about. And number three felt I had a solution.
Richard: What are the barriers that you experienced to setting up a business, you know, as a woman? And do you think that – maybe asking the obvious – or how much more difficult is it for a woman to set up a business such as you've done than it is for a man?
Nayna: I think it just, it depends how you want to structure the business. So we knew from the get go that we wanted to raise funds for the business. And I went along and had a chat with Stuart Rose who
Richard: Of Marks & Spencers
Nayna: Yeah, ex executive chair of M&S, who I kept in touch with after he'd left. And just said, “look, I’d just like to tell you that I'm thinking of doing this. I suspect I'm going to go out and try and raise money. So if anybody comes to you for a reference, would you please, um, speak for me?” There were two things that came out of that conversation, Richard. One was, his idea was, before you go out and start talking to external, um, places Nayna, why don't you just get your black book out and see who you know, because you're well-connected and just talk to people. He said, you may be surprised at people's response, if you ask them to back you, number one.
And secondly, he just said, as I was leaving, when you've done your business plan, come and see me. He said, you never know, I might invest myself. Which was completely unexpected. And that's exactly what I did. So thus far on our journey, Richard, we've been very fortunate that the people who have invested in us, um, have been people from that little black book and we'd done a crowdfunding source as well.
But raising money as a woman is notoriously difficult. Something I read quite recently, which I just found staggering, was that the UK VC funding that is available in the market, about 1% goes to female-led businesses. And if you really want to get down to it, led by black women, it kind of gets down to about 0.2%.
Richard: Two in a thousand
Nayna: Yeah, so this isn't an easy gig for a woman and even less so for a black woman.
Richard: That's quite shocking.
Nayna: I think it's staggering. I really think it's staggering on a number of levels apart from the bleeding obvious. But at this point for me, which I think was part of my reading, researching, reflecting time, there was a book that, actually it was Harvey who recommended it to me, called the Athena doctrine.
The whole philosophy of that book is: why women (or men who think like them) will go on to lead businesses of the future. And what it's basically about is feminine leadership values and the whole purpose of the book is kind of demonstrating that businesses across the world who put feminine leadership at the heart of their business, whether they're run by men or women is irrelevant, it's not about gender, it's about EQ, it's about feminine leadership, actually are more successful. And yet as a woman, it is very difficult to raise money.
Richard: What is the difference between in your mind, male leadership and female leadership as you've defined it then?
Nayna: Oh gosh. Right. Okay. Um, I'll give you a really small, silly example. But my day on Monday used to always kick off with a trading meeting. And 80% of the people in the room would be men. And the first conversation that would be kicked off with the football scores, the results that weekend, and everybody pitching them with their teams’ results.
I'm fairly agnostic about football. In our office, and we are all female, the conversation will generally kick off with: how was everybody's weekend? How was Poppy's teething going? What somebody might've cooked for Sunday lunch. It just, that for me is the difference. There is a real emotional connection with the people around the table, as opposed to over here, everybody just bursting with testosterone about the football results.
Does that make sense?
Richard: It makes perfect sense, because I don’t support a football team. So that's fine.
Nayna: And it's not about whether one does or what doesn't, it's about the fact that, oh, we can all talk about that because we have a connection. Well, not for the two birds in the room, you don't.
Richard: Yeah. I want to just hark back to something about you. You know, you've got this incredible arch to your career, in our earlier conversation, you mentioned about, you know, how fashion in way got into your blood.
Tell me a little bit about that.
Nayna: Well, during my 12 months off, what I was blown away with was the number of people who would come to me and say: Nayna, why don’t you set up your own fashion brand? It's the obvious thing to do. And I was like, no, no, couldn't possibly do that because I'm not a designer. I'm not a buyer. I've never done product developments. So I gave myself all the reasons I couldn't do it, because that wasn't my absolute background, so to speak.
And then I went back actually to a moment when I was, I think, 13, 14, whatever, and was talking to my careers teacher at school who basically had said to me, oh, what was I going to do?
And I was under pressure from my father to consider becoming either a doctor, a lawyer, or, what was the other one, an accountant. I mean, all three of them were laughable, frankly. Um, but because that's what one had to do.
Richard: ‘Good’ professions, yes.
Nayna: Yeah, exactly.
Richard: I was told the same actually
Nayna: Whereas if somebody had actually said to me: Nayna, you love making your own clothes. You love knitting.
Richard: And you did love doing that?
Nayna: Yes! So, you know, sadly, I was making my own clothes at 16, 17, 18, knitting my own jumpers. I just never connected the dots, Richard, that that was something I should consider as a career. That was just a pastime. You know, my mum makes amazing clothes. My grandmother, when she came to this country was making clothes for a living, for people who would come to the house.
Richard: She was like a seamstress?
Nayna: Yeah! But she never used a pattern. I mean, God, when I used to get a pattern out to lay out on fabric, she just used to laugh at me and say, why are you doing that? Because she just cut everything blind. So ridiculously, I didn't recognize any of those inherent talents within me, just saw myself can't do that because I've not been trained to.
And the sad thing is, is that it can take us to our midlife to actually understand some of this thing about ourselves, you know, to be prepared, to strip everything back to the bone and say: okay, so what is it that kind of makes you tick? That was part of what came out of my reading, researching and reflecting – was actually: you do belong in this arena, you are creative, you can do this. But that was, you know, that took me 52 years to get there.
Richard: But you've obviously got there. I mean,
Finally, I mean, what to you, now, does success mean? How do you define it for yourself at this moment in time?
Nayna: Um, I think if I'm talking to my investors, I would say it's about getting to scale the business and to build this into a global brand, because that's obviously part of our objective. But actually, one of the things that's most important to me, Richard, is connecting with customers, you know, this human connection.
So when we went into lockdown in March 2020, we had some really tough decisions to make. And I wasn't sure we’d survive, frankly. And we very quickly put together what we called a hibernation plan. So what was the maximum revenue we could drive off of the minimum overheads? And that's what we did, you know, we furloughed the entire team.
My mum, who was living with us through COVID, 79, was coming into the office with me every day, picking and packing orders. And actually, it was the best time because the phone would ring in customer services. And I'd pick the phone up and we'd be chatting about something. And then you'd just hear this voice say: is that you Nayna? And I’d say: Yeah, yeah, it is, it’s me. And they’d say: Oh my goodness. Can't believe you're answering the phone. I'd be like: yeah, and I'm picking and packing and dispatching your order in a minute.
But what was really important with some of those wonderful conversations that came out of those calls and the emails and and and – by maintaining that human connection is what kept our business going for the next 10 months.
And therefore for me, the commercial success is obviously important because frankly that's what keeps the wheels turning. But the human connection with customers, particularly for an online business can be a real challenge, is as important for me.
Richard: Nayna McIntosh, thank you. Real pleasure to talk to you.
Nayna: Thank you so much for having me, I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
Richard: So that was Nayna McIntosh for what was a wonderful conversation, partly down to the fact that we actually got to meet each other. And Nayna is a person who is possessed, I think with enormous passion for what she does. And her drive is really interesting because it comes from somewhere, I think, which is very personal.
She spoke about the enjoyment of interacting with customers, the enjoyment of creating a business for people like her and for making people feel better about themselves. So as Nayna said, you can't have a business without its bottom line being successful, but equally Nayna defined success by something else, which seems to me, it's about drive. It's about fulfilment. It's about enjoyment and it's about giving something to herself, to her family and to, I think what, would be a wider community of her customers.
If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure you go and listen to the wonderful interviews in the first season. And please do subscribe on apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It would really help if you'd rate and review us.
This is the Success and Ideas podcast. I'm Richard Miron. The producer is Anouk Millet. And this has been an Earshot Strategies production. All the best.