Timothy Melgund

And here's the thing.

We do.

How was the business doing when you became general manager at WH Smith?

At that point, they developed it to about 27 shops within the UK and it was losing money.

But they made it pretty clear to me to select a team and that we should turn it around and try to align it much more carefully, synergistically with the rest of the WH Smith group.

Why did you do that?

We'd succeeded in turning it round.

It was then making about a million pounds.

We'd reduced it to about nine stores, but we'd still been able to keep that sort of magic of a small business.

So thinking of something in the morning and doing it in the afternoon and also driving through the creativity and design, something that was very different to anything else on the high street.

Well, what we did differently with greeting cards is we bought, we were the only multiple that bought by design rather than by range.

So we specifically source from about between 40 and 50 suppliers within the UK and overseas.

Explain that.

When you say buy by design and not range, what do you mean by that?

I mean up to 70 options for one single supplier.

Right.

But what we did was to buy individual cards across a whole range of different suppliers that fitted what we wanted to do with the overall range, which can cover special occasions or general things like birthdays or just blank greeting cards.

And our smaller shops carried about 500 cards.

Our larger shops carried about 5,000 cards.

No, stationery was the biggest category seller in the store, followed by greeting cards, followed by gifts, followed by gift wrap.