Rare is the interview that concludes with the subject pinging one’s bra strap. But Michelle Mone – Ultimo lingerie tycoon, serial entrepreneur, international speaker – is unique in many aspects. Not many young women emerge from an impoverished upbringing in Glasgow’s east end to command a £50m undergarments empire. Nor do they wind up advising the prime minister on his strategy for saving the union. Established business-folk don’t tend to publish eye-wateringly honest autobiographies, as Mone has just done. And I wouldn’t ask anyone else I’d just met to guess my cup-size. But it is Mone’s favourite party trick, hence the strap-pinging, and she is – as with her business decisions – seldom wrong.
My Fight to the Top, which entered the Amazon charts at No 1, is a straight-talking account of Mone’s objectively awesome trajectory from teenage mother who left school with no qualifications to one of the country’s most successful female entrepreneurs. It covers her business battles to build the company from scratch with her husband Michael, as well as her own emotional struggles, including balancing the upbringing of her three children with the demands of work, binge-eating and heavy drinking. There is also the very bitter and public divorce from her husband, after he began a relationship with one of their designers that threatened the future of Ultimo as she fought to buy him out.
The book includes such unedifying moments as the time that Mone poured a bucket of cold water over Michael’s side of the bed. Now that the book is published, does she regret such naked honesty? “I did sit down and think about it long and hard,” Mone explains, perched in the immaculate living area of her family home in one of the grandest parts of Glasgow’s west end. “Do I just do a business book or do I tell my whole story? Because there are certain business decisions that are so entwined with what happened in my personal life. A lot of business people have said you didn’t have to be so open, but at speaking events I always tell people you should be honest.”
In person, Mone, 43, is far gentler than her well-branded public persona would suggest. The current environment for entrepreneurs in the UK is tough, she says. “The government are encouraging businesses to start up but what I see is that after six months they are petrified of their taxes or managing cash flow. They need a sounding board.” Mone mentors more than 100 new businessmen and women – “not that I have all the answers” – and hopes to see Westminster establishing more programmes like hers. “It’s about keeping businesses going rather than having a start-up, some soft grants then within six months everything’s gone.”
I tell Mone that her women-can-do-anything epilogue reminded me of Nicola Sturgeon’s rousing speech in the Scottish parliament when she was elected the first female first minister last November (although the epilogue, and indeed the entire book, is rather more sweary than the Holyrood debating chamber is used to). She glides over any mention of Sturgeon, but commends Scotland’s female role models generally and says: “I’m all for helping women with their confidence, and once they get that, nothing can stop them.”
However, it is clear that positive discrimination is not in her vocabulary. “If you sit back and make every single excuse – I’m a woman, I’m from the east end, I left school at 16 – you never get anywhere. Of course it’s been hard being a female in business but I’ve never let it get to me: ‘that’s where I’m going, nothing’s going to stop me, get out my way’. You can sit there all day, but is it actually going to earn you any money?”
She welcomes the new requirement for larger companies to publicise their gender pay gaps as “absolutely fantastic”, but baulks at Scotland’s 50/50 representation campaign: “You should get your place on that board because of your skill, not because of gender.” Most of all, she insists, in business “you’ve got to be built for taking that risk. You’ve got to have balls of steel and you’ll always find a way.”
But Mone has also always exhibited an intuitive understanding of what the market, and the media, want. It is well documented that her eureka moment for founding Ultimo came at a rugby club dinner dance, when she found herself disrobing in the ladies’ because her cleavage-enhancing bra was so uncomfortable. “When I started, a lot of the lingerie companies were run by men, and I came out with these inventions they’d never thought of because they don’t wear bras... Like the backless bra, the frontless bra, designs that I only came up with because I got so frustrated that I couldn’t see anything out there already.”
Likewise, Mone’s genius for publicity was evidenced by her simple calculation the media will always love photographs of celebrities in their underwear. Hiring a new “face and body” every year, from Helena Christensen to Peaches Geldof, garnered screeds of free advertising. But it also challenged the norm, with Ultimo using former Spice Girl Melanie Brown at a time when non-white models were (and remain) the exception.
“It was because I had never seen a lingerie brand that had a black model,” Mone explains simply, “and I was getting angry about it and I thought: ‘I’m going to do it.’ I just wanted to say: ‘We are an international brand, we have international customers, and I don’t care what colour of skin you have.’ It was a big statement. There have been many things I’ve done like that, which have been big statements.”
Most recently, that statement referred to her position on last September’s Scottish independence referendum. Mone, who made no secret of her concerns about the impact of a yes vote on business, writes with winning directness in her book about being invited to Downing Street along with other Scottish grandees to discuss the referendum campaign with David Cameron. “I was listening to them all thinking: ‘You arse lickers. Tell him how it really is.’” So she did – “Your Better Together campaign is rubbish” – and promptly found herself with Douglas Alexander and Ramsay Jones, the prime minister’s special advisor for Scotland, sitting in her front room, prepping her for a series of television debates.
“I was totally out of my comfort zone and absolutely shit scared,” she says, “but I was thriving on learning something new. When it comes to being an MP I have learned that you don’t need to come out of Oxford university, if you’re passionate and you’ve got a view you can have your say.”
She glows at the memory. “It was the first time I felt proud of myself outside Ultimo because it was something that I managed to change and to learn.”
She catalogues the subsequent onslaught of abuse she received on Twitter in the book, but today is surprisingly sanguine about the experience. “Things got a bit out of hand, but that’s not to put blame on people, they were just doing it because they were passionate. I don’t hold any grudges.”
For the first time in a number of years, Mone says, she is looking forward to the future. No longer day-to-day boss of Ultimo, although she still sits on board and owns 20% of the company, she is soon to launch her Utan fake-tanning range in 500 Boots stores, and continues with her international speaking schedule.
Writing the book, she concludes, has been a form of therapy. “I’d been crying myself to sleep, feeling so lonely after my divorce, even though I had the kids.” She adds dryly: “I thought: ‘I’m going to be 65 and alone with cats, and I don’t particularly like cats.’” Now she feels a new freedom, although – significantly – she still wakes up every morning “with that fear of failure in my stomach”.
“I like to do as much in a day as I possibly can. I don’t ever like to sit still. I think I’ll always have that.”
Michelle Mone: My Fight to The Top (£18.99, Blink Publishing) is available now. Order a copy for £15.19
