She’s doing all white! Mum of four who’s made £6.5m selling goods in one colour
SELLING linen and tableware in only one colour may not sound like a millionpound idea.
But Chrissie Rucker went six times better than that – making a staggering £6.5million last year, £2million more than the year before.
The 46-year-old White Company founder is now one of Britain’s highest-paid businesswomen after sales of the firm’s white-only goods soared over the past 12 months.
The home furnishings and fashion chain sells everything from £70 candles to £200 cashmere jumpers in a range of ‘neutral’, ‘winter white’ and ‘biscuit marl’ tones.
Tapping into the trend for clean, fresh furnishings, it has become a
‘So excited I couldn’t sleep’
hit with middle-class families and now has 50 stores. The latest accounts show sales of £144million in the 12 months to March, up from £126million the year before.
Miss Rucker founded the business 20 years ago after she struggled to find high-quality, affordable white bed linen and tableware for her boyfriend Nicholas Wheeler’s new flat. They later married and are one of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurial couples, worth an estimated £295million.
Mr Wheeler runs the Charles Tyrwhitt shirt business and the couple were 326th in the 2014 Sunday Times rich list, up from 427th the year before. They live with their four children in a £12.5million grade I listed 17th Century manor in Buckinghamshire.
After the launch of its US website last year, profits at The White Company rose by 38 per cent, while the payment to its highest- paid director, understood to be Miss Rucker, grew by 44 per cent from £4.5million to £6.5million.
Miss Rucker came up with the idea of a company selling whiteonly furnishings after trying to find ‘lovely white linen, towels, bathrobes, china and napkins’ for Mr Wheeler’s new home.
She was disappointed by what she found on the High Street and shared her thoughts with her future sister-in-law Susie.
Miss Rucker recalled: ‘She had just been through exactly the same thing, and she said “wouldn’t it be brilliant if there was a company that just sold white things?” So that was it, and I couldn’t sleep for the next couple of weeks because I was so excited.’
She quit her job as a beauty journalist and set up a mail order catalogue, armed with a small government grant and £6,000 she had inherited from her grandmother.
Miss Rucker, who had no business experience and left school at 16 with a C in her maths O-Level, now employs more than 1,000 workers and was awarded an MBE in 2010 for services to retail.