George Davies
Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010
BBC
4.4 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2006
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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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| 0:10.7 | The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that. |
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| 0:41.8 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:44.9 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. |
| 0:50.2 | Music My castaway this week is a retailer. At various times over the past past 30 years, he's barnstormed through Britain's |
| 1:11.8 | High Street, encouraging shoppers to embrace his latest look in smart, affordable clothing. He might |
| 1:17.4 | have been a footballer. He could have been a dentist, but a stint in the short socks department |
| 1:21.7 | at Littlewoods convinced him that retail was his calling. In the 1980s, he invented the next empire, rolling out 70 shops in 12 weeks. |
| 1:30.8 | Ousted from there in a coup amid claims that he was arrogant and dictatorial, he moved to |
| 1:35.6 | ASDA, where he created the George line of clothing. His latest venture is the Peruna brand for |
| 1:41.4 | Marks and Spencer, credited as one of the main reasons for the company's recent turnaround. |
| 1:46.0 | If you get it wrong in retailing, you know it, he says. |
| 1:49.6 | You're always sitting an exam, which the customer is always marking. |
| 1:53.3 | I'm scared of it still. You never conquer that. |
| 1:55.9 | He is George Davis. |
| 1:57.6 | So it's the old exam dream, is it, George? |
| 1:59.8 | You're always sort of swatting up, but you may not have swatted the right topics. |
... |
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