The and rise fall of Baroness Bra’s empire
sTANDING in the ladies’ loos in a smart Glasgow hotel, Michelle Mone regarded her reflection. It was 1996 and the 25-year-old blonde had recently been laid off as head of sales for a brewery firm.
Michael Attending she a had dinner worn dance a cleavage-enhancing with her husband bra to complement her long dress.
‘It was so uncomfortable,’ she recalled years later. ‘The wires were digging into my chest, so I took it off in the ladies’ loo – and that’s when I had a “Eureka!” moment.’
It was to be a fateful decision. Back at the table, her husband laughed as she told him she had decided to use her redundancy payoff to design a more comfortable bra. ‘What do you know about bras?’ he asked. It was not an unreasonable question for the former part-time model and sales executive. But lack of knowledge has charging never a moment set lingerie china her stopped empire heart on, ahead shop. the on fluffed like Mone Glaswegian From creating a bull up from that by in a celebrity fuelled upon her by scandal, own endorsements, relentlessly and built forceful personality.
Almost 21 years after Mone founded Ultimo, the brand announced this week it is to cease trading. Staff have been informed, concessions in retailers have already shut and firm, Mone, the professed website who is no herself will longer close ‘very tomorrow. involved sad’ to with see the the
brand Ultimo In a post closing into on a Instagram down. global success she wrote: story and ‘I turned I am immensely note that I proud sold Ultimo of what and we left achieved. the company Please four years ago. I may comment further shortly, when the time is right.’
Seasoned observers aren’t holding their breath. Mone has long since moved on from the brand she created and sold, somewhat perplexingly, to a Sri Lanka-based lingerie firm in 2014.
NOW in a relationship with self-professed billionaire Doug Barrowman and living in a lavish mansion on the Isle of Man, her life is a dizzying cocktail of private jets, inspirational speeches and television appearances on home shopping channel QVC, where she flogs a cheap jewellery range.
She has launched an interiors consultancy and a business involving her own cryptocurrency, Equi Tokens. She was also created a life peer by David Cameron in 2015 and became Baroness Mone of Mayfair, a controversial appointment that has seen her come under fire for her lack of speeches in the House of Lords.
It’s all a long way from Glasgow’s Govan, where Mone built Ultimo from the ground up.
Back then it was Tom Hunter, the Sports Division entrepreneur and philanthropist, who gave Mone her first break. Having met briefly, she turned up on his doorstep one day with a prototype of the Ultimo bra which featured a gel-filled pocket within the fabric instead of the usual padding, to mimic the natural movement of the breast.
‘My wife, Marion, nipped upstairs with it,’ Hunter recalled. ‘Minutes later she shouted down the stairs, “Tom, this is the answer!”. Michelle’s pretty dynamic. I made her an offer there and then.’
It was that dynamism, a gritty glamour tinged with a hard Glaswegian veneer, which made Mone both an anomaly and a natural in the business world. People quite simply didn’t know what to make of her, and before they could make their minds up, she’d dazzled them with a dizzying miasma of stories, gossip and a 100-watt smile.
In the early days she sold silicone implants to push inside bras – known universally in women’s changing rooms as ‘chicken fillets’ – by a US firm named Monique, while developing her own product, and would tout them to lingerie shops around town. When she received funding for Ultimo – a 25 per cent stake from Hunter and seed capital from the Prince’s Trust – she went to London herself to persuade department store Selfridges to take her on. It did.
Whatever else Mone lacked, it certainly wasn’t chutzpah. The war cry of her original advertising campaign was ‘Gentle on you. Tough on plastic surgeons’, and on the day Ultimo launched at Selfridges she arranged for protesters in white coats with placards reading ‘surgeons’ to stand outside the London store. The media stunt worked. Six months’ worth of stock sold out in just three hours. That she did all this with three children under seven (she was back at her desk within two weeks of giving birth to her youngest, Bethany), only served to add to her appeal.
The glitz of Mone’s product was somewhat at odds with its origins. She would take meetings in her Govan office – decked out in an eye-watering amount of pink and snazzy, zebra pattern-covered sofas – over a Big Mac and fries, and would break off from phone calls to shout out of her office windows at the kids daubing graffiti on the building across the street.
Her husband Michael, a former stockbroker, had joined the firm the year before Ultimo launched, and she described his presence as ‘a mixed blessing’, explaining that if they wanted to see each other, they would have their respective PAs make appointments.
It was, perhaps, a portent for the cracks that would later emerge in their relationship. But whatever the tensions, the business grew quickly. Mone describes sitting in her Govan office one day when she received a call from the president of New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue.
‘Yeah and my gran’s the Queen,’ replied Mone before hanging up the phone, thinking it was a friend winding her up. It wasn’t. Saks, impressed by the Ultimo launch at Selfridges, wanted to launch the bra in the United States.
IT was around this time that a story emerged that Julia Roberts had worn an Ultimo in the Oscar-winning film Erin Brockovich. Given what it had done for Roberts’ assets, women were unsurprisingly keen to get their hands on one themselves.
Sure enough, upon Ultimo’s launch in New York, shoppers queued round the block to buy the bra that ‘gave Julia Roberts a cleavage’. It wasn’t until 16 years later that the movie’s costume designer, Jeffrey Kurland, broke cover to declare that the bra Roberts wore wasn’t an Ultimo.
‘I designed the movie, I’d know if they designed the bra,’ he said in 2016. I’ve heard of the name [Ultimo] but I didn’t use them. The bra was created by Bill Hardgate Costumes here in LA.
‘A draper there made and rigged the bra to fit Julia. It was all done in-house. How can anyone take credit for something they didn’t do?’
How indeed. But by then Mone was a pro at courting controversy. Having secured the services of model Penny Lancaster, then girlfriend and now wife of Rod Stewart, to front her brand, a year later she dumped her in favour of Rachel Hunter, Stewart’s ex-wife.
The headlines the move prompted – Stewart called Mone a ‘manipulative cow’ – were priceless to the business. Once again she proved herself a genius at PR, even if she didn’t always play inside the lines.
But behind closed doors there
were financial concerns. In 2002 Mone racked up debt to the tune of £600,000 after what was described as a distributor rip-off, and given a bank deadline of two weeks to clear the overdraft. Fearing the firm would collapse, Mone turned once again to Hunter.
‘She was innovative enough to come up with models and celebrities that would grab the headlines,’ Hunter said of the situation.
‘So when the cash-flow problems came along I was only too happy to help them out again.’
He did, and the company righted itself. And after that initial wobble, Ultimo continued to grow, with launches including swimwear, shapewear, D-G cup bras and beauty and tan brands all fronted by famous names from Kelly Brook to Girls Aloud’s Sarah Harding.
Meanwhile, Mone continued to place herself front and centre of the company, giving interviews, appearing with the models at photoshoots, and doing stints on TV shows such as The Apprentice, where she marketed herself as the chic, high-flying businesswoman.
It was somewhat at odds with how she appeared to run her own business. In 2004 it emerged that Mone’s company, among a number of others, used a Chinese factory where young women were making Ultimo bras for as little as £30 to £33 a month. And in 2006 one employee, Claire Woods, successfully took her case to tribunal after Mone gave her the ‘cold shoulder’ after learning she was pregnant. Mone complained publicly at the amount of employment tribunals in Scotland, saying it had gone ‘way over the score’.
The union Unison sassily retorted that Mone appeared ‘to be a little out of touch with the current state of employment protection in the UK, maybe because she outsourced production of her bras to China’.
In 2010 Mone embarked on a rigorous weight loss regime, shedding six stone and going from a size 20 to a size 10. Her weight had been a lifelong struggle and in the early years of the business she had succumbed to binge eating, at her worst putting away four McDonald’s a day, washed down with 15 cans of fizzy drink. In typical Mone fashion she celebrated her new figure by modelling the firm’s latest lingerie advertising campaign herself. Her husband was furious. ‘He was appalled I’d posed in my underwear,’ she said the following year. ‘He didn’t speak to me for days.’ Whatever the problems in the marriage, the couple announced their split in December 2011, and it emerged that Michael had subsequently started a relationship with Samantha Bunn, an Ultimo employee and friend of Mone’s, who was fired.
Michael has always insisted in the strongest terms that the relationship did not start until months after the break up of his marriage, despite protestations from Mone to the contrary.
She even claimed to have hired a private investigator to follow them, and said she trashed his Porsche with a key after she found out that he had spent the night with Bunn.
In a tear-stained interview not long after the split, Mone bewailed the fact that she had become ‘too strong’ for her marriage.
THE businesswoman said: ‘Why did I want to be Michelle Mone? Why did I want to start all these businesses? Why can I never be satisfied with what I’ve got? Why can’t I just chill, become a wife? Be at home? I’m not dissing housewives, but why couldn’t that be me? Then maybe I wouldn’t have gone through all this heartache.’
Around the same time the business appeared to be in trouble. In the 18 months up to October 2012, the company lost nearly £550,000.
In the subsequent three months, it made what the accounts report described as ‘significant losses’, and there were further ‘significant losses’ in the remaining 11 months of 2013, with the directors predicting further losses for 2014.
At the end of 2009, the firm’s directors owed the company £680,000. Two years later, they owed £862,993. The company also made use of a tax avoidance scheme, condemned as ‘morally repugnant’ by the British Government, for three years up to 2012.
There was another problem. In February 2013, not long after Michael Mone had left the firm and set up a rival, the Sri Lankan firm MAS Holdings, which would eventually take over the company, bought into MJM International, Ultimo’s parent company.
At the same time the firm’s operations director Scott Kilday discovered a bugging device hidden in a plant pot in his office. Mone was allegedly concerned he might leave and go and work for her ex husband. On finding the device Kilday walked out and made a claim to an industrial tribunal, which he won. He described Mone as a ‘very difficult person to work with’.
Mone is believed to have made as much as £20million from the sale of the company to MAS Holdings, although some experts believe it was much less. In 2015 she left its board and posted an emotional message to Twitter.
‘To my beloved Ultimo I gave birth to you in 1999, comforted you whilst you were teething, helped you through your pains and protected you from the bullies… but now I have made my decision and it is time for you to flourish and start your next chapter with the biggest and best intimate apparel manufacturer in the world. I will always love you, Mummy x.’
Ultimo’s closure this week suggests that the love was not, ultimately, reciprocated. Just as well, then, that ‘Mummy’ has long since moved on.