TODAY is Beverley Aspinall’s birthday. When we met last week, she was already getting anxious.
“You know, when journalists write about women, the age seems to come as part of the name,” she says, making a face. “So it’s always Aspinall...”
Not today. We’ll keep readers guessing for a bit.
Anyway,” she continues, “so long as people say ‘you don't look it’, it’s fine.”
She doesn’t look it.
“Thanks,” she says, enjoying the obvious toadying.
Aspinall, managing director of Fortnum & Mason since February, seems to handle most things with a light touch. It was the leitmotif of her 24 years at the John Lewis partnership, where she topped her career by organising the stunning rebuild of the flagship Peter Jones store in Sloane Square, west London, while keeping it trading.
Now she has announced a £24m revamp at Fortnum, the venerable foodie favourite in Piccadilly, which should be finished in time for the department store’s 300th birthday celebrations in October 2007.
And then, you can be sure, Fortnum won’t look its age either — its three restaurants are being overhauled by David Collins, designer of the fabulously trendy Wolseley, just down the road; two new restaurants are being added; and the famous food hall is being revamped with more ready prepared dishes on sale.
Fortnum’s internet and mail-order arm will also be pumped up, and more joint ventures will be launched in Asia and elsewhere. Most strikingly, a light-filled atrium will be punched through three floors in the centre of the Piccadilly store.
Aspinall, who oversaw the building of a vast atrium at Peter Jones, clearly likes her light-wells.
“I am absolutely not trying to do a Peter Jones here,” she says, “but one of the misconceptions about Fortnum is that we don’t sell anything but food. We need to make our other floors more visible.”
But first things first — what is she doing here? She seems too charming and chatty to head an exclusive store that many see as a fusty tourist trap. Just look at where we meet: Fortnum’s fifth-floor boardroom has its wooden panelling, ancient oil paintings, ranks of tapestry chairs dotted along an impossibly long table. Two framed black-and-white photos of the late Gary and Garfield Weston, Fortnum’s owners, sit propped incongruously on a sideboard — looking like the old buffers in the Eddie Murphy film Trading Places.
Fortnum is part of the privately-owned Weston retail empire — Gary’s daughter Jana Khayat is Aspinall’s chairman. Suffice to say, Fortnum’s executive offices feel more like someone else’s stately home than the top of a department store.
Aspinall, sleekly dressed in a Max Mara trouser suit, takes it all in her stride. Tall, good-looking, with her hair cut short and streaky, she is a habitual organiser who has been married twice and brought up two kids — single-handedly at times — while also holding down a career in management.
Fortnum, she says, was a challenge she couldn’t resist. A fantastic heritage, a beautiful store, and a great proposition, but it had slumped into the red — making a £1.5m loss on a stagnant £39m turnover. Yet the fundamentals are right for a sustained recovery.
“Fortnum is positioned at the top end of the food market and if you look at where strengths in food retailing now are, there is a big movement towards things that are different, where provenance can be proved, where things are special and not produced in quantity. Fortnum does all of that and always will.”
The flipside is that people like me think Fortnum is fusty and out of date. But that also masks a tougher truth: that Aspinall will have to move carefully if she is not to alienate devotees with her efforts to draw in new shoppers. Already there has been comment that overhauling the restaurants with a trendy designer looks too much like a short-term fix. Many like Fortnum just the way it is.
“Making Fortnum fashionable and trendy is not on the agenda,” she says quickly. “What we want to do is make it more relevant to people today. We think we can do that in a quietly fashionable way, in the way that gourmet food is quietly fashionable and everybody is interested in it, not in the fashion sense that it is here today and gone tomorrow.”
But does she have the food experience? Her career at John Lewis was spent almost exclusively on the department-store side, working her way up from graduate trainee to buyer then manager. She never reached John Lewis’s board. And she spent little time at the food specialist Waitrose, which the partnership also owns. What does she know about food?
“Well, like everyone else, I prepare it and eat it every day. And maybe I haven’t been in food retailing but John Lewis worked hard at integrating Waitrose and John Lewis management, so they don’t seem like foreign businesses. And one of the challenges for me here is to learn more about food — which I am doing with great enjoyment.”
What she does know is how to manage multiple tasks. Outsiders who worked on the £100m Peter Jones revamp, which she project-managed while also running trading, were impressed by her inclusive style.
“Very open, no ‘them and us’, and where others saw problems, she always saw opportunities,” says Scott Lawrie, the project architect from the design firm PRP.
At Fortnum she has already brought in two long-serving John Lewis colleagues and is reorganising what the store will sell. More food, fewer clothes: a proposition built around “entertaining and celebration” and including gift items such as accessories, leather goods and lingerie. “Fortnum has always been known to be strong on gifts. It’s not just about food.”
Organisation and motivation are Aspinall’s forte, talents she probably inherited. Her mother coped with five children and a career after Aspinall’s father died of cancer at 36. “I was four,” remembers Aspinall, “It was difficult. My mother went through teacher-training to get a career to look after us all. We didn’t have any money at all.”
Aspinall grew up in Bedfordshire, attending her local comprehensive, and agrees that her family’s modest means gave her the drive to succeed.
She jumped into John Lewis, after studying linguistics at university, because “like every girl, I just wanted to be a fashion buyer”. She was always a hard worker. Practice and preparation — she is an able oboeist and once considered becoming a professional musician — are other key characteristics.
But what people like about Aspinall is that she wears it all lightly. “There are moments when I sit on the board here,” she confides, gesturing at the Fortnum’s pomp, “and think, gosh, there’s 300 years of history in my hands. And it’s quite daunting.”
No man would ever be that honest. Likewise when she giggles about the food tasting organised for her visit to Fortnum’s Japanese joint-venture partners. “They laid on 136 dishes. I worked my way through 50, from scones to curries, before I started turning green.”
These days she skips breakfast, eats fruit for lunch and avoids meals until she gets home so she can cope. There she lives with her second husband, an accomplished organist, who also runs a finance-management business. They are in the process of moving from Suffolk to nearer London, with her teenage children in tow.
She will need somewhere with a big garden — that’s where she relaxes, preferably on her John Deere tractor-mower, tidying the lawn. Slumping on the sofa is not an option. “I just fall asleep straightaway. It’s why I can’t watch films.”
In short, she has to be busy, and she will have plenty of that at Fortnum. The builders move in next month, but, just like at Peter Jones, the doors will stay open for business — a nightmare of co-ordination.
Yet she remains positive, simply wanting to win Fortnum new fans. Before I leave, she presses a bottle of own-label Eiswein into my hands — something extraordinary to try, quintessentially Fortnum, she says.
I tell her that I will have to declare it, so readers will know she has bribed me. She laughs. “It’s very special, picked at Christmas, when the grapes were frozen. You’ll love it.”
Oh I’m totally compromised now. Happy 47th, Ms Aspinall.
BEVERLEY ASPINALL’S WORKING DAY
THE Fortnum & Mason managing director wakes at 6am. Beverley Aspinall lives in rented accommodation in Hertfordshire, trying different commuting routes into London before she decides whether to buy a home there.
She gets into Fortnum by 8am. “I often walk round to see what’s going on. Then I catch up on administration, and go into back-to-back meetings.” Much of it concerns the building work that starts next month. “Architects, designers, technical people, project managers, there’s a huge amount of work to do.”
She will have fruit for lunch or pop into St James’s, one of the Fortnum restaurants, for crab cakes. She works until 7pm, then heads for her commuter station. “I’ve been to three different ones this week. All I’ve discovered is that Hertfordshire is not a good place to commute from.”
Born: December 4, 1958
Marital status: married twice, with two children
School: Redbourne Comprehensive, Bedfordshire
University: York
First job: graduate trainee, John Lewis
Salary package: undisclosed
Home: renting in Hertfordshire
Car: black Lexus 4X4
Favourite book: Sons and Lovers, by DH Lawrence
Music: classical organ
Film: ‘I never watch films’
Gadget: John Deere tractor
Last holiday: Cyprus
Interests: music, gardening, shopping
WORKING SPACE
BEVERLEY ASPINALL works from a white-painted, panelled room, 20 feet square, just off the main boardroom on the fifth floor of Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly.
The room, dominated by two huge oil paintings of naval battles, and an ornate electric fire in the old fireplace, feels like the back room of a very male wine shipper or auctioneers. Aspinall has done little to personalise it since moving in, adding only a wedding photo of her and her husband and a snap taken at a John Lewis retirement party.
She sits behind a large desk. A stack of papers are separated into six files in a plastic tower system, while a clutch of early birthday cards cover some space. A meeting table fills part of the room; a bookcase with inherited business books runs along the wall opposite. Windows look out on to Piccadilly and the rooftops of the Royal Academy.
