You can climb Everest in my shop’s clothes – but most customers are dog walkers

MARK Neale, the founder of Mountain Warehouse, is emitting strange sounds. Every few minutes he rings like a cash register. As I wonder whether I’m suffering auditory hallucinations, he spots my quizzical look.

He has, he explains, installed an app on his smartphone that makes a noise like a till every time a customer buys something in one of his two new women’s sportswear shops.

His new Zakti Active stores, in the London districts of Islington and Chiswick, aim at the yummy-mummy and gym bunny market. They sell yoga and running gear similar to premium brands Sweaty Betty or Lululemon, but cheaper.

‘In Mountain Warehouse, we sell a lot of running and cycling stuff, but people don’t know we do it. I just thought: why do yoga pants have to be that expensive? They don’t,’ he says.

The name Zakti, which means positive energy in Sanskrit, ‘was made up by Michelle,’ he adds. It is a reference to his wife, Michelle Feeney, a businesswoman in her own right, having been chief executive of the St Tropez self-tanning brand and the beauty division of consumer goods group PZ Cussons.

So what is it like being one half of a business power couple? What do they talk about at the dinner table, and does Michelle tell him he’s doing it all wrong?

‘Probably she does, yes. We don’t sit down at dinner and talk about tax or depreciation, but of course we do discuss business. Our daughter Emma gets involved too.

‘But lots of couples both have big jobs. We are just making it up as we go along.’

The story of the couple’s meeting sounds like an episode in a romcom.

‘It was on a plane, in 2001. I was travelling to a wedding in Florida as a guest of the groom. Michelle, who was living in New York, was a guest of the bride. We didn’t live together before we got married, in 2003, and we didn’t live together after we got married, because she didn’t move back to Britain straight away.’

Michelle, who has a son at Nottingham University, is looking after a café and delicatessen business the couple set up called Fig and Favour in Worcestershire, where they have a weekend house.

BEING entrepreneurs, Neale says, ‘gives us a lot of privileges, I have never missed a parents’ evening or a school play because I am not at anyone else’s beck and call.’ The family has just acquired a puppy, a goldendoodle. ‘It is keeping us awake, it’s like a little baby,’ Neale says.

Mountain Warehouse is a 225-strong chain with sales of nearly £60m in the most recent half-year and 1,600 employees, but it began in 1997 with a store in Swindon. Not exactly the most mountainous location.

‘Frankly, it was where there was store space available,’ Neale says. ‘I knew I wanted to turn it into a national chain, so to some extent it didn’t matter.’

Having taken a physics degree at Oxford, then worked as a management consultant in the City for five years Neale, from a family of steelworkers in Ebbw Vale, South Wales, always wanted his own business.

Mountain Warehouse is his fourth attempt. In 1994, he set up a rollerblade shop and sold a pair to Mick Jagger. He didn’t manage to lure the late Princess Diana as a customer, despite her enthusiasm for rollerblading. ‘I don’t know why not,’ he says.

When the craze died down, he put money into a toy shop, ‘which was an absolute disaster’.

Then came a greeting card venture. ‘It never got beyond one shop. I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was wasting my life. All my friends had proper jobs and were doing really well.

‘I carried on because I didn’t have much choice, I had employees, leases, and so forth. It is quite hard to unwind all that.’

‘Michelle says it is 10 years’ work for overnight success. You spend all this time banging your head against a brick wall and then suddenly it worked. Then everyone said: ‘Oh look at him, he has come from nowhere.’

The company, he says, became ‘properly, sensibly profitable’ in 2007, a few years after Neale launched own-brand garments in 2003. It recently reported record half year profits of £4.3m, an increase of 31pc.

Mountain Warehouse is a quintessential British middle class shops – it is also, though he doesn’t say so, aimed firmly at the middle-aged.

Perhaps it should be called Walk the Dog Warehouse, because he depicts the typical customer as someone heading off on a weekend country hike rather than tackling the heights of Kilimanjaro or K2.

‘They live in the country and want a jacket to watch the kids play sport, or go for a hike.It is a very accessible range, prices are reasonable, staff are non-threatening.

‘I tell them I want my 74-year-old mum to be comfortable. She doesn’t know what Gore-Tex is – it’s a technical waterproof fabric – and she is never going to climb Everest. So she doesn’t want to spend £300.’

Indeed not, and nor do lots of other people – so just why is hiking and outdoor gear so expensive?

SOME is over- engineered Neale says. ‘ You could climb Mount Everest in some of the kit, when that is not what most people want or need. Then there is a big marketing spend by the big brands.’

In the past, the business has been backed by four sets of private equity investors: Italian, Greek, Icelandic and finally the UK taxpayer in the shape of Lloyds Banking Group’s venture capital arm.

‘We bought them out in 2013 with the help of RBS so I am married to RBS now.’ Neale now owns 85pc of the business and colleagues hold the remaining 15pc.

‘It was fine working with private equity,’ says Neale. ‘ But the thing about them is they are obsessed with the exit all the time, and I find that a bit frustrating.

‘They all seem incredibly bright, nice people, I just wish they would do something a bit more constructive that would be of more benefit to the overall economy.’

Mountain Warehouse is now exporting, with ten shops in Poland and one in Germany, with plans for four more. It sells in China through online marketplace Alibaba.

Though Neale could cash in tomorrow, he has no plans to hang up his hiking boots.

‘I am only 47 and I don’t know what I would do if not this. And I definitely not thinking of floating on the stock market now... I want more stores overseas and I would like to make a success of Zakti.

‘My advice to someone starting out is: Just start. So many people have ideas and the desire, yet don’t do it. I started before I had a wife and a daughter and a Volvo and a mortgage and a cat and a dog.

‘I only had me so I could take a risk.’