The Success Nuggets

The Success Nuggets #61 - The Windows that Sold From Bonkers to Bankable by Chris Browne

• David Abel • Season 3 • Episode 18

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Today we celebrate Chris Browne, Ted Baker’s first hire, and the method in the madness: aliens in the window that stopped a city, fish-in-a-bag, and condoms that sold shirts—all routed by systems that turn theatre into sales.

 We unpack Pattern-Break → Attention → Footfall → Conversion, plus the Gold/Silver/Bronze kill/keep and The Dogs one-pager that aligned stores.

 If you want retail stories that feel alive and prove out, this is your masterclass. 

Nugget of the day:  Show me the funny - then route it. 

With thanks to One Golden Nugget and Maxwell Preece for editing, support and artwork

SPEAKER_01:

You can learn how to strategy the most incredible people from around the world. Get ready to dive into a world of insight and inspiration. With the founder of the Digital Light Bulb and your host, David Abel.

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Today we're rewinding the spark that helps shape a movement brand. Chris Brown was Tabato's burst hire and the first guest to sit in the Success Nuggets chair. He's a pioneer of theatre meat systems, kind of mind that makes windows move, turns a shopping trip into a story, and backs every wow with a how. If you're a marketer who craves both goosebumps and guardrails, this is your episode. Thank you, David. Nice to see you. Brilliant to have you back on third episode of The Success Nuggets. And we've talked about Chews Happy, we've talked about life after as well. But today we're going to talk about the theatre in business. And let's kick us off with Ted Baker in one sentence. The most outrageous Ted Baker move that you actually did that you thought moved the numbers. I s you know what, David, I struggled with that only because there's the over the time there were so many. And obviously life's changed and the world's moved all a bit and something you wouldn't do today. So I thought of a I haven't just thought of a safe one for for that reason, but I thought of a safe one because it was what I loved. Basically, we had an alien, an alien, an actual alien, come into um the store in Nottingham one day. And I was like, well what is that? What is that person? You look like a person. What is that person doing? Because it's not acting like a human being. I said that to somebody. And it turned out he was sponsored by the East Midlands Art Collective to live in the community as an alien for three months. And he was being an he was an alien and you couldn't interact with him, you couldn't get a conversation with him. And it was fascinating. Okay, it was but interactive with us. Anyway, I had an idea then. What about if we had aliens, not an alien, two aliens, in our window as soon as we possibly could, that in three or four of our stores over the weekends, there'd be live mannequin stroke aliens living in our window. That sounds ridiculous, and it kind of came out of a ridiculous moment in the store. But we did it, and the one I particularly remember was the Nottingham store one. We put these two guys, the the other guy here, the guy and you and another friend who could join the pretend to be an alien too. And they dressed up in these strange outfits, they looked like aliens, and they acted as aliens in the window all day long. But we stopped the traffic in in Nottingham, and I mean the for pedestrian traffic, but also the traffic trying to go round the square. We were on the on the square in those days, and it was just the most amount of guy I got arrested by the police for causing a disturbance. But the the chaos it caused, and of course everybody came into the shop. So that day the Nottingham shop, it was Nottingham, Manchester, four shops were absolutely mob. The main guy was the main other guy we had in Nottingham, where he got friends to do them in the other shops too. And it was just such a I wouldn't quite say it was a success. It was more like the chaos it caused, the outrageous madness of doing it. You can imagine every other shop would be like, Yeah, Ted Baker's got aliens in the window. They haven't got marriages. So doing that, it's just a fond memory of doing something utterly bonkers. I just did it. There was no authorizing with anybody. I just came up with this idea. I didn't tell the CEO, I didn't tell the board as it was then, didn't tell. I just thought, no, we're doing this this weekend. We're gonna give that a go and see if that works. And it was repeating it a couple of times in different ways. That's a favourite fond memory of something I did bonkers, a bit outrageous that we did. Right, driving fun for you taking everything away from the competition. When did you sort of first realise that retail needed theatre and not just calling? Back in the early 80s, I was working on the King's Road in London. And we used to get um celebrities like every single day, from Princess Diana to George Best to whoever was a celebrity of the day came came there. Actually, King's Road was the centre of British fashion man. And the sort of stuff we would do is we'd have we'd have surfing hour. So we we had a turntable. We never we didn't have a tape player, we had a turntable in the back of the shop. But I bought a 60 surfing album, and we used to have surfing middle of the afternoon, pretty much every day of the week, mostly to entertain the staff, but customers couldn't fail to come in and join in, mucking about, yeah, surfing USA, and they'd be surfing away. So we did surfing hour. We did, this is slightly more contentious and probably a forerunner of stuff I did at Ted Baker. We had stripper hour as well. So there's a famous the the the music, the music's actually called the stripper, famous strip tease music. We would put stripper music on and just encourage customers, male and female, to get us their best stripper strut down the middle of the store. And you just created a buzz in the store. So that was probably the moment when I really thought, you need to do more to entertain than just have product on shelves and nice customer service. What else can you do? So, you know, over the next whatever it was, 30 odd years at TED, I had that mindset of what can I come up with? Or uh weekly, daily, monthly. It became a bit more controlled into a calendar, but for many times it's like, well, it's a Tuesday, what should we do on Wednesday? So Wednesday we come up with a crazy idea. You know, triple six questions wins you a discount, or whatever, whatever it might be, just something to entertain. And, you know, I I'm you know from me from of old. I'm passionate about the fact that this freedom for has got a bit squashed down by marketing and, you know, global businesses. I loved passionate ordinary day-to-day retailer, retail creating your activity in life. I I hate the word experiential, which everyone's using now. Retail theatre, retail fun, retail entertainment, retail excitement, all those things. That's what you need to bring back. And that the high streak just needs to learn some of those old lessons. And you sounded like you're solving more than just data problems. It's feelings. You know, when you feel something, do it. As opposed to feeling it and then testing it and analyzing it, and what's the result if I do this? You know, do it and worry about the result lead to a lot of stuff. I mean, we have a phrase colour we used internally, which is a football phrase, uh have a shot, and if it goes in rose, it goes in row Z. So sometimes have a shot. Yeah, I mean, for every single football fan watches football, have every sport probably, have a go, you know, have a go. I mean that sounds so simplistic, but it's missing from today's world, you know. And I I know I'm in working with various companies, and we talk about Roas and ROI. We need we need to go back to like, why don't we do something really, really big and outrageous and then get attention on the brand, you know? But the the boss used to have a phrase of me, get arrested, you know? And I managed it all three occasions. I did get arrested. I love those look. So with that ledge, weather window started to move, and yeah, you had to make it a bit more systemized with a content calendar. I've briefed teams and they've done it wrong. They've done it wrong three times. They didn't do it wrong, they just said to me, We didn't know what you want, right? How how did you get that exact brief to the team? Did it often come out right or did did often you go, oops, no one understood me, yeah? I would say very rarely did it come out wrong because despite all the sort of like ab ago, you know, loosen up whatever, my team would tell you I was also very, very, very controlling and anal about it being how I wanted it. You know, I used to drive the visual merchandising leader, slowly bonkers with show me the funny. If we come up with a window or a marketing campaign or a freebie or a point of sale, whatever it was, I was showing me the funny. They said, well, that's not making me smile. Yeah, that's not making me laugh. And so I would be big on coming up with the ideas for how we can make you funny, how we make you smile and make you laugh. But also it wasn't just funny, it was also how can you make it look unexpected and a little bit outrageous? You know, we did a whole video series in the window window once called uh the unexpected, and there was a video sequence that played in the window, and it was if you watched the video properly, you'll you'll have seen never visually that obviously an ABC, naked person walked through the store. That was on the video. You know, probably you'd get arrested for that, actually looking back on it, now think about it. But that was just uh why would it start in the window that no one's ever done before? So we thought it's just a massive video of strange stuff happening in the store. And that that's how cheerling's going to be. A good example of your question. I don't think it worked very well because people didn't stand and watch the TV enough. But the idea was great, and we had great fun filming the videos. A unicorn walking through the store and then maybe a seven-foot-tall giant would appear at the door dressed as a beef eater. So it was surreal kind of like ambience down. So you know, we we we didn't overthink the things that didn't work. But I used to kind of go, fine, you know, well I well didn't quite blow like that the previous one, but we we had a go. I never kind of gave him a tough time for it. But there was me, there was it wasn't just me, it was three or four other guys in the whole uh windows of marketing meetings. Really just riffing on what could we put in the window, and the theme could be anything. I was asked by the founder one time, can you make the cheapest window ever? And that's when I came up with pretentious. Pretentious load of nonsense written on the glass. It was a whole silly joke about retailing. And that one, Design Week's window of the year. I came up with that on the train on the way down to the windows meeting when I realised I'd forgotten to plan what I was going to say in the windows meeting. The phrase adversity is the mother of invention. You come up with stuff when your back's to the wall. Fish in the bag, where did that idea spark from? Uh I think the origins of it are a little bit in the mists of time, but it was a conversation between two or three of us in the, I don't know, first few months of the business. Stores were quiet, things weren't really going how we how we we hoped. We said, we need something so that people talk about us around the towns that we're in. We're in eight stores at the time. So we said, well, what about if you got a goldfish that like you want in the fairground? And there was a bit like, well, why? They're like, yeah, that's it. Why? Let's leave them puzzled, let's make them completely puzzled. Why have Ted Bacon given me a goldfish in a bag? Now we quickly worked out. We couldn't put a real goldfish in a bag, probably indeed. So we probably could have done actually back in the 90s, but we thought, well no, we can't do that. So we came up, we're cutting a carrot, and the stores had to do it. They had to cut carrots into the shape of a goldfish, hanging on a line that suspended above some water that we dyed blue in a big bag. And then years later, like 20 years later, we did this, which is a soap, uh goldfish in a little plastic goldfish in some soap that you couldn't use if you want to. That was done for the barber shops and celebration, but like a heritage of Ted Baker thing. But that is virtually what you got when you came to the line. It was bigger, the one we did back in the early days. And the store, the stores didn't even blink. They'd be out of the back with buckets of water, carrots, a pile of carrots, carving them on a Saturday morning into goldfish shapes and suspending them. And then we'd hand it to the customer and say nothing. And then when they go, well, what's this? Why have we given you my shirt? Why have you given me that? Then you normally get a goldfish, but didn't you buy a shirt and just walk away? And then just went around in each town. That definitely had an impact. We had people going, you the shop that gives a goldfish away. Come and just have one. I said, Yeah, if you buy a shirt, you can have one. And it was just I suppose that's the way my mind works, something a bit more surreal. And again, I would just encourage anyone watching this or listening to this and marketeers out there, let the brakes off, you know, come up with some strange stuff. You know? We shared offices, and this is a big piece of our history you might not know. We shared offices for a while with Child Decott, coming rather Louis Henry, who did the tango adverts, right? I know, and I won't say which ones, but I know that in some conversations with those guys, amper eight times and popping through to their offices, because right next door to our office, we shared their office. We'd have ideas that they would then use for adverts that became famous. And I won't say which ones, but that definitely happened. They'd probably go, oh no, no, all our genius ideas. No, no, no. They stole them from Ted. Or they borrowed them from Ted. So we had ideas kind of like almost like machine going on. What crazy stuff could we do? Amazed me that nobody's really tried to copy what we did. Nobody did. Me too. And I just love the way the staff just got involved and how viral that probably would have become and how Instagrammable in in today's wow. What about what one of the things we discussed the other day was you talked about how you can put the energy into stores in the team's line? And and you know, I know you got some ideas on it, but that was without even thinking, I don't think I was thinking particularly I was doing that for them. Later on I probably realised we were. But by doing those things, you engaged the teams, you got them excited, you gave them a difference, something that was different about coming to our store to work today. Tell you one that I don't think we've ever told anybody this before. Why turn the whole shop into a board game? So the customer wouldn't know we were playing the board game. And in the board game, you each had an object. You could do a pair of socks or a hat or a scarf or a bath. And I told them it was a sale, and I had your name tacked onto it, like a little ticket on it. And we played a board game. Well, when you sold stuff or you did something good, or you, you know, whatever you did, you'd win points according to our in-store board game, and your little hat or your socks, whatever, if your neighbor moved around the shop, got like a race to get round the shop, and whoever was in the need at the end of the day won a won a prize. So some sometimes it was money, sometimes it was, you know, cakes, sometimes it was a day off, whatever it might be. And that silly game, like the team would always come to come and play the board game. No customer would ever even know we were playing it. And that was just an internal funny thing that I came up with. So I thought, how can I inspire this team? That went on that went on for about five years. Love that bringing together. Any like funny phrases like movie bingo or who can say the most lines from or whatever. Oh yeah, yeah. We we had to work in stupid words into so well, you might say, and you say perspicacious in a conversation with a customer, and it had to make sense. So you'd say, Oh, you're your your thoughts on that shirt are extremely perspicacious, whatever it might be. And there'd be a game to insert the words, and you might have a word of the day that you've got to like put in. So that's yeah, that'd be another one. Now that was actually more about, I think we played then Kong Garden, particularly. That was uh uh uh Kong Garden game. And the thing is, Dave, that some of these things didn't translate, but you might think, like, you know, uh in Japan, what did they think? I would say the Japanese teams were the most on ball with the stranger stuff that we did. You might say something about the culture there, I don't know. But certainly they were like, they always can we do this the year we did last week, Chris, or last last time you visited. Can we do this this time? Yeah, we're even more bumpers than what I came up with. Yeah, we could absolutely do that. We had a nodding dog outside the shop in um Tokyo. Well, really beautiful animatronic dog. And he used to sort of nod and kids would come and bet it. We'd go and feed it every night. I said go and feed him, probably give him some food. Make him look like he's eating. And show the people the empty tin, like in the dog's actually eating it. They'd be like, oh. Oh my god, I never think could considered the local impact. Oh yeah, oh yeah. The condoms is a wonderful story why we did them, and there's a sort of thing like you couldn't do it today. Yes, you could, even never more vital than doing it today, and sticking it to the woke crowd. Condoms are not contentious in any way, shape, or form. They're part of adult life and people should use them. What's fascinating about the condom sort of free issues, it came from the most brilliant place, it wasn't it? It wasn't like an idea that I came up with. Someone said, Could you do the red ribbons? And then I said, well, yeah, possibly. And then they moved on to could we well I said, could we do more than the red ribbon? Could we give them a condom? And I think everybody said, No, you can't give out condoms in a shot. We did it in 15 years. You know, I think I told you, they're all here, look. That's a bag of condoms. He was holding up a bag of condoms for the Every single one is seen. There's a start father Christmas one, did Jiggy with it. It was a Oscars Awards joke well, yeah, and the winner is best newcomer. I mean, all of this. You know, if you wanna they wanna think he's filthy, you can, but that's your mind. You know, fresh that was based on the fresh summer product. I love giving Ted. You can make of that as you will. And he scored for the World Cup. I mean the story goes on, and there's literally about a hundred in a year. Well, I regretted the day they stopped because it was a most fabulous, fun idea. I'd swear, again, what something was talked about is what did you do that really moves the dial and got sales? That did, a hundred percent. I know the people came in sometimes to buy a shirt to get the free condom. They wanted to see the next condom, they wanted to have it. It would have gone viral in the evening, talking to each other about, oh, I got a condom in to base and showing each other. But then it's full of jokes. If you open the condom up, it's full of stupid jokes. My childish humour, a lot of it, but you know, so what? Oh wow. So with all those grey ideas, there must have been some average one. Do you have a system to kind of kill the average ideas? That's sometimes an average idea slip through because of time pressures. I mean, if you take a year and we did six or seven windows in a year, every now and then you might have misfired one. Like we have some favourites at Christmas, well, and we revisited doing Merry Christmas three times with Elvis Presley. Huge Elvis Presley, you know, in a you know, Sandra outfit. People love the whole Elvis thing. And then we well, we can't keep doing Elvis, so we'd arrest it. And there was definitely a couple of the Christmas windows that fell a bit flatter than I would have liked. Um but my system for killing me. It was actually more of a system with the retail team necessarily than with the creatives in the office in the windows. But I'd say gold, silver or bronze. So if it was a gold idea, of mine, or theirs, it meant no room for debate, that's going ahead, you know, totally that's the winner. If it was silver, it meant I'd like some chat about it, treat the idea a bit, and we'd go again. And then bronze meant I'm not sure if this even works. You can this really brainstorm it again. So the senior guys in my retail team would say to me, Chris, is this gold, silver or bronze? You know, this idea. Like, there's gold. I said, No, I don't want to hear it. This is going ahead. And it might be because I had pressure on me, or I had a time constraint on me, or I had financial constraint, whatever it was, or it had been pre-decided and I was told to go and do it. So I cut through that simple system, cut through a lot. We also had a thing which I think you're aware of in the retail teams. You had a thing called the dogs? Oh, I can't say, you know, the dog's bollocks. The dog's bollocks of communication, and that's why I said in the meeting, I didn't want to call it the dog's bollocks because it's too rude. And then off the dogs, other people called there's the puppies. What the dogs was, I said, Oh, the dog's bollocks of communication, a communication tool that is a one-pager that everyone gets, that everyone subscribes to, everyone writes what they want to say to the teams in the stores, goes on that piece of paper or that email, as it was, into that email, and you know that if you need information about this coming week, it's in the dogs. And every now and then we do a quarterly about the dogs, which is like everything you need to know for the next quarter, like ahead of time, planning-wise, it's in the dogs. So if you need to speak to my teams, put it in there. And that was the most amazing communication tool. I know there's loads of great commercial tools out there now. But this system worked, you got an idea, put it in the dogs. I had teams checking that when the dogs were approved. It didn't have any old idea that was in the dogs. Yes, we want to do this, we want the teams to do this, we want them to know this, we want that announcement to be made, wherever it might be, put it in the dogs. And we had versions, I can't remember the Japanese one, I wish I could. The Japanese one was some word that meant a similar kind of thing to them. And then we did that around the world. What I loved was we had lots and lots and lots of hidden things we did in Ted that the world didn't necessarily need to know, but they loved. When they came in, they'd get that energy from the stores team, they'd get that energy from the retail team. We'd give that energy to an office. But it was all kind of strange things that we were doing, that well I knew that other brands were doing. Going back to the shop floor, uh, Ted, wherever you weren't, whether it was in the warehouse, DC, or the head office, the HQ, or any store, you were encouraged to go around. And I was always interested when I saw the TV shows, the reality TV shows, where the CEO goes back to the floor and they're what should marketing just do like I'm working customer service for a week. I I honestly, the amount of meetings I've been in, my critics, obviously I've worked both sides of the fence, I've been very stores-based and wanted to be, and right through my whole career, spending my time in the shop, spending a lot of time in offices and meetings and and and theory meetings. But I love the fact that you get someone saying something in a meeting who's never sold a shirt, never sold a dress, never to customer. You know, if you haven't done those things, it's not you haven't got a right to speak, you may have done your way. But come and do that, and then maybe what I'm saying to you or what someone said to you about why that doesn't work in reality will make sense to you. Knowing how it works in a shop, knowing what will fly or won't fly. But that's what I've never heard of before. Don't like the sound of it, but we'll give it a shot. So go back to what I said about Rose Ed. Give that a shot. But it's incredible the benefit you got from all working marketers, merchandisers, finance, anybody, logistics, working with the teams in the stores and seeing how it really works in reality, you know? You know, you make changes to how packaged how goods arrived, because they go, Oh, I didn't realise we chucked different things in a box and it makes it twice as long to unbox it. Things like that. You know, you do you get it, you get it straight away. Or the marketing team goes, oh, that point is so you can't read it when you're in the shop, it's too small. I mean that was a bugbear throughout my career, you know, sometimes the script on things being done in an interesting font that you step back five feet and you couldn't read it. But then again, this is all the retail detail stuff that you you get into. Digital marketers these days have a budget, and a budget for initiatives and experimentation. Did you think about that? Well, no, because actually the whole thing I want to reverse right back to the very beginning. What why did our windows move? We were famous for having moving windows, and then I'd say moving stroke, interesting and unusual windows, because they weren't always moving, but sort of 80% of them were in the early years. The reason for that was we didn't have the budget to advertise. So we we like to say that Ted we didn't advertise because it was a decision. It wasn't really. It was almost like an afterthought, like, oh my bobby, we've got all this prepared the store design, the shirts, that how's it gonna be with staff arranged? So we had to start a uniform in the early years, an actual port suit. We hadn't got a budget for advertising. So they were like, well, how are we gonna make people interested in this new brand that's non-staller i street without any advertising? They weren't gonna went up with a laundry point. And you know, the internet didn't exist in those days, it existed, they'd not not weren't using it. So we had to make the windows move to get attention. That was the whole point of why the windows moved. How can you make people go, oh, that's the store with the moving windows? And actually, when you looked around, which is still amazing. Apart from former Mason who do incredible windows and the big department stalls of the day, and only at Christmas, really, nobody did moving windows. You know, there's we weren't completely unique in doing it. But we were doing it on a scale and with the humour and with a kind of craziness to it. So I know that people decide to love, they'd come in and go, oh my god, I love the new window. You get that kind of response from customers. And people wanted to tell me students studying Ted Baker's methodology and why we did what we did. I've not to admit to them that really behind the scenes it was like a bunch of people in a room coming up with crazy ideas. It wasn't it wasn't like this detailed marketing. We can't analyze everything. You have to go with feel on so many things. You know, the best designers in the world. You know, Alexander McQueen would be a great example. I imagine when he was working and he said he wanted, I don't know, double horns with a pink tutu and a rubber sleeves and twenty-five-inch spikes. Who I'll never sell. And yeah, who's considered a genius of retail, uh to fashion design? He is. And others like him. And and so I think that's the same's true with retail. So uh Dave, here's an interesting one for you. So you always say make it move in digital. What do you mean? Having been a to make a getting into from merchandising to buying and in e-commerce, I've always said to my teams, make it move. And uh Kinthetic is is five percent of people's popular sense as well. So things I've done in e-commerce, we know counters work, you know, the countdown clock and and those kind of things. So that's great for promotions. When I was doing art, I used to have things like paint 62% drying, you know, so people would get a little progress chart of of the pictures coming as well. Art is in the building and have live chat as well and take little gifts and stop motion shots of them painting where have the product images, and then you can fit the switch, and then it showed you what it was like in the dark. Try to engage people like that. I went for a watch brand where you could hit the side of the watch and the seconds went round as well, so you could really see how the product moved as well. So there was a wearables brand, the ghost of Christmas past, and actually just a bit of video and movement as well, just to try and get something going beyond clox encounters, because e-commerce is one of the hardest ones to get. You know what? I'd buy uh where where I'd be really that to just thinking bricks and mortar stores for a moment, but also applies to people's websites and and and social media too. When when it's too much of the same stillness, I suppose one thinking that he produces the same image. The way you present is the same all the time. When I'm working with a couple of brands, they'll say, show them something they haven't seen from the brand. Show them a different angle how that that can be presented. And that would be true in the store. I used to use the phrase tip a rail over. You know, this caused some chaos in the shop. So what was happening in there? Well, it's the same with digital and visual, uh with the world on social media. You've got to be, oh, what's happening there? What why why why why am I looking at that? Why is that interesting to me? Well, yeah, movement is life, isn't it? If you stop moving, you die. What did your best store teams do that? So we played a game once, right, which is very unfair with the retail team at a a meeting, we were having a meeting with all the retail team, all the area managers. The UK this was, but I did it, repeated it around the world. But then it started in the UK. And we voted for the very best person in each position, and we voted for the very worst person currently working all from history, or the history of the brand, the worst person in each position. Then we tell Stan in Guild Brutes to work, care what would the impact be of the very, very best team? What would the impact be of having the best manager, best entity, best visual merchandising person in store, and then what would be the impact of that terrible team? And the difference from memory, Kong Garden got to about four million's best turnover. Well half maybe. I reckon that the best, best team, if we could have done it, and obviously we had a good team in there, would have sucked another million on the turnover. And the worst team though, this is very fascinating, would have cut that turnover in half. Not at least so the the impact was a swing from four and a half million down to two million, two point two five million, or a swing up to five point five million. And to understand what that means, so to ask the actual question you've asked me, Roll and ramble and that's something else. What did they do? What did the best people do? So the first thing was it didn't work for Ted Baker. They worked for themselves. I used to drive people mad. You're here, we're paying you, but work think about me, me. If I work hard and do well myself, I, me, will benefit whether I stay here and get promoted, or I get noticed and go elsewhere, or I feel I'm ready to go elsewhere. So get that mindset into your head. There's another day in your life, not the life of the company. Work hard for yourself. How hard you work when no one's looking is a phrase I used to use. So that's the first thing. Then you wanted people who wanted to be retailers. So I didn't want somebody who wants to go off and do something else in their career. Sometimes those people can be great, but more often than not, their head's over there doing that and it's not here doing retail. So I wanted people who love fashion, who like retail, who like serving customers, who like talking, who like having conversations. It's that. And then I tried to find people, or if I couldn't find them, imbue them with it, people who understood putting in a good, honest day's work and enjoying that. Not just doing it as I told them to. So you create over time, if you keep doing those things, we had training manuals to cover every single aspect of retail that were written in an amusing style. The centerpiece was the pink church for Mishmiere, the story of a show arriving in your store, and how you treat it. We inspired teens to enjoy working there, to enjoy serving customers, to see it was a bigger mission, whether it was their own personal mission or the mission of the company, you know, vision of where we were going to try and get the company to. And the very simple thing we did was speak to people. I mean, you walk into shops like Barranted before we came on there. Just going around a couple of stores in the week in London and just need the people to not be engaging with me. I used even in one store saying, I used to work here. This is someone I used to work in, I used to work to this very building. All I got was that little digit mate. So to ask your question, what do we do differently? Great hiring, great training, great development of people, great people, finding great people. I mean, you know, I had it since we're so what do you feed your people on? We we've we're inspiring them, we're treating them with you know with love and care and attention, so they enjoy working for our business. And they went on to become the future bosses. I mean, today, seven or eight years after I left the company, everywhere I go, I meet people who are running businesses, who are you know CEOs and retail directors all around the world, and it's wonderful. Tudos to all those people out there working hard, having the energy and the drive as well. We know your one golden nugget for life is choose happy. And you've talked about have a shot. What's your one golden nugget for business? Don't wait for yourself would be my number one. People stop themselves from making the changes that they need to make or investigating the things that they could be changing far too much. I mean, I've been on the supplier side now for seven or eight years, and I'm very proud of the fact that actually we had a system attended, we provide people in. Come and show us what you've got. Come and show us your new software, come and show us your new way of doing a window, come and show us your new shop fitting scheme that might work. Because we didn't know, I'd say. So I'm not clever enough in each of those aspects to know. So don't wait for yourself. You know, you hold yourself back with saying, I've got a roadmap. It means you've got a budget. It might be your budget. If you go and meet someone new, you discover, oh, they could do the thing I've got to do for half the price. So then you've saved your budget, haven't you? The most important thing for business and life. If you want to do something, you know, or change something, go and do it. Don't wait for permission. Chris, thanks for coming in the third time. You've been absolutely wonderful. For the audience, make your move. Be honest, hunt the risk, keep it fun. Take a shot. We will see you again.

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Join David and his incredible guests next time on the Success Nuggets Podcast. And to find out more, visit oneGoldenNugget.com. Thank you for listening.