Somebody bought Poundland’s £30m ($40m) loan for a pound ($1.30). Then, by most accounts, they wanted the full £30m back before anyone was allowed to rescue the business. That’s the short version of how Poundland, a chain with around 12,000…
In 1989 I went on Blind Date. It didn’t go to plan. For those who didn’t grow up in Britain, Blind Date was a Saturday night dating show on ITV, hosted by Cilla Black, and back then it felt like…
I came back from Shanghai with a phone full of WeChat contacts and a lesson in what exclusivity is worth. Very few people at the China Toy Expo wanted my business card. They ask for your WeChat instead. They scan…
I’m French, and this week I’m not particularly proud of it. The footage coming out of France has been on my phone between every meeting, and it’s grim viewing from a hotel in Shanghai. Here, people are working, building, selling…
Here’s my LA toy fair diary from September, from the day before the flight to the night before the showroom opened. The day before Flying tomorrow. On the 11th of September. My wife and family are not happy about the…
Forty years ago today, on 5 September 1986, I left Varennes-sur-Allier, my village in rural France, with two suitcases and a plan that was only ever meant to last six months. Learn English, then get a job on a cruise…
Two messages landed this week that couldn’t have been more different, and both taught me something. The first: a company got in touch on LinkedIn with genuinely serious IP. Grade one licences, the kind that gets buyers who usually take…
Got headhunted this week. First time in a long time anyone’s tried to pull me somewhere else, and I won’t pretend it wasn’t flattering. When you’ve spent years building your own thing, you stop expecting the phone to ring like…
The EU’s new packaging rules, PPWR, have just made selling to Europe a lot harder for my wife’s jewellery business. For the past few months, we’ve been working hard on a website for ako & sila, my wife Jovelyn’s jewellery…
I turned 65 this week. My present was Covid, four days on the sofa instead of celebrating. Someone else picked up an unplanned windfall this week too. Unlike mine, theirs is worth having. The US Supreme Court struck down the…