George Davies

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2006

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the retail legend George Davies. In the 1980s he changed the shape of our high streets with his chain Next. In the 1990s he made supermarket clothes fashionable with his George range for Asda and in 2001 he launched his Per Una collection in Marks and Spencer - it's credited with helping the store find renewed financial success. He was brought up in Liverpool and showed early promise as a footballer - he was talent-spotted by the legendary Bill Shankly, but wasn't good enough to play at the highest level. Then he nearly became a dentist but, after dropping out of university, found a job with Littlewoods as stock controller in charge of children's ankle socks. From the day he started he says he never looked back - he knew his future lay in retail.

His trick is knowing his market, and he does that by carefully studying the details of how his clothes sell. Each week he analyses sales figures for every garment, in every store up and down the country - the result, he says, is that he not only knows what women like, he knows what they think.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a retailer at various times over the past 30 years he's barn stormed through Britain's high street, encouraging shoppers to embrace his latest look in smart affordable clothing.
0:40.0	He might have been a footballer. He could have been a dentist, but a stint in the short socks department at Littlewoods convinced him that retail was his calling.
0:48.0	In the 1980s he invented the next empire, rolling out 70 shops in 12 weeks.
0:54.0	Austed from there in a coup amid claims that he was arrogant and dictatorial, he moved to
0:58.8	Azda, where he created the George line of clothing.
1:02.4	His latest venture is the P Una brand for Marx and Spencer,
1:06.0	credited as one of the main reasons for the company's recent turnaround.
1:09.0	If you get it wrong in retailing, you know it, he says says you're always sitting an exam which the
1:14.7	customer is always marking I'm scared of it still you never conquer that he is
1:19.4	George Davis so it's the old exam dream is it George you're always sort of
1:23.4	swatting up but you may not have swatted the right topics.
1:27.3	Yes, it's very much you're on edge. You're nervous and it never stops because even when you're having a good time which is at the moment
1:38.6	You're producing another collection and the fear is that collection won't work. I mean every season even though
1:46.1	you have a good season you'll have certain fashions that don't work that you thought
1:50.5	you'd work or you wouldn't have put them in. So what we try to do is to have more
1:55.1	winners than losers, but I still have losers and the losers actually probably teach me more
2:00.4	than the winners. But tell me about the thrill of that.
2:03.0	I mean, when you launched Peruna into Mark's Suspenses, what, four and a half years ago, you did on that day
2:08.2	I've launched, didn't you?
2:09.2	Because you had to go into lots of stores all around the country.
	...

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