Gordon Brown

It was very much a sort of gritty type place, you know, but just great value.

And they just loved that, you know, particularly the market segment that we were aiming at.

And I think the friendly staff made a difference.

I think all during that period, it grew profitably.

It had its little wobbles, but the general trend was always upwards.

And by the time I retired, we were looking at $1.5 billion in retail sales and an operational profit internally of about $49 million.

We had a proportion that we owned and JK, he reckoned we should own about 10% of the property.

So we always had that to fall back on.

A very conservative family business.

The distribution centres we owned.

We owned the land and we owned the buildings as well.

What did you think when they did that?

It was something which the board had discussed as far back as the 1970s.

But the family always objected to it.

I recall a conversation at a board meeting where the family stated, it's our name above the door and it should stay Wilkinson.

So we said, OK, fine, we're not going to argue over that.

But I think it was clear that there was a sort of mismatch between Wilco.

The Own Brand Products and Wilkinson.

I'm sure Sam will agree it's an issue for all businesses, and particularly in the business we were in, because we were affected by the impact of the minimum wage came in during that period of time.

We had inflation.