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Chapter 1: Why did Paperchase become a beloved stationery brand?
Hello and welcome to Toast, the BBC Radio 4 series which celebrates incredible brands, incredible products that reach dizzy heights, only somehow to still end up toast. I'm the BBC business journalist Sean Farrington, with me is entrepreneur Sam White, who honestly doesn't know what we're about to discuss. It means her response is... are the real deal.
Her conclusions at the end are based on what she's just heard. And this time, we're checking out the place where Britain bought its notepads, its gift wrap, its birthday cards. Hello, Sam. Are you one of those that goes to the high street for a bit of a stationary purchase, a bit of a treat for somebody's birthday?
No, that is not my sort of Saturday afternoon activity, but I do understand that some people fondly do that.
Well, our topic today is paper chase. Design-led darling of the high street, known for its original and extensive range of greeting cards. But of course, there was all that stationery, the wrapping paper, the gifts, the art materials as well. The retail chain story began in 1968 when the first shop was opened in London by two former art students, Judith Cash and Edward or Eddie Pond.
Eddie died in 2012, but we can hear from two of his children, Chris and Rebecca Pond. Join us now. Welcome to Toast You, Per. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Rebecca, I mean, he'd already launched a business, is that right, called Polypops Products?
Yeah, he'd worked for the Reed Group. He was like the design director. And he started this work of creating big cardboard toys and table chairs for kids and like pop art prints, wrapping papers. And I think Paper Chase was a vehicle for, for that product. And that was where this Polypops product was all going to be sold. And he went into partnership with Judith Cash.
She was a great buyer and she had a fantastic eye for product from Denmark, from Italy, from all over and just put this whole thing together, the two of them. Yeah.
So back then, Chris, Paper Chase had three shops, all of them in London, and you worked in them as teenagers. What were they like, those stores?
I started working in the Tottenham Court Road one when I was 14 in 1974, doing summer holidays and weekends. And it was a great place to work. It was full of art students. It was just like an Aladdin's cave of art, really.
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Chapter 2: What led to the decline of Paperchase's success?
Great to be here.
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.
So in 1996, we had WH Smith reporting its first loss in a couple of hundred years. It had begun selling some of its specialist divisions, including paper chase. And so at this point, you led a management buyout. So effectively, you and your colleagues bought it.
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.
So you became the chief executive? I became the chief executive at that point, yeah. And what did you then do with the greeting card side of the business that actually maybe made Paper Chase a little bit different to everything else that was out there?
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.
So Paper Chase employed its own in-house designers as well. We did. But you also bought cards from other suppliers. We did. And one of those other suppliers was a small business called Jelly Armchair. Liz Faulkner runs the business with her sister Kat, who designs the cards. Liz, how did you end up supplying Paper Chase?
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Chapter 3: How did Paperchase adapt under new ownership?
So we would have to wait two months having been paid a fraction of what we were owed, resupplying and then waiting to find out whether we were going to get paid for that new order. So we decided not to carry on stocking them at that point.
So just to be clear on this, you were owed money. Were they still selling your cards?
Yes. And this is the case for a lot of small publishers. There's a group of us who've gone through this all together. So basically, we were never paid for the product and it was sold to the new company. And it was still on sale in the shops. And for a lot of us, that was causing extreme financial hardship. With tiny companies, it has an immediate knock-on on your day-to-day life.
And so that was incredibly difficult. It felt like them selling stolen product.
Yeah.
You can dress it up however you want, but that's certainly how it feels when you're a small publisher in that situation.
People might be surprised to know it is standard practice for a purchaser to acquire assets, including the stock, but not be liable for the company's historic debts.
So I would ask how they can claim that those assets are theirs if they've never been paid for. It's very hard to understand as a small publisher that suddenly that's legal and allowed that they can sell product to the new company that's never been paid for.
And what proportion of your business are we talking here that was impacted?
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