Ann Summers

Ann Summers is a British retailer of lingerie and sex toys that began as a single shop at Marble Arch, London, in 1970. Bought soon afterwards by the brothers David and Ralph Gold, it was turned by David's daughter Jacqueline Gold into a high-street chain and a home-party sales force that at its peak had more than 7,500 organizers. It now trades from about 80 stores in the UK, Ireland and the Channel Islands.

Named after a secretary

The name belongs to someone who barely worked there. The first shop was opened by the businessman Michael Caborn-Waterfield, known in the London papers as "Dandy Kim", and he named it after his secretary, Annice Summers. She was born Annice Goodwin in 1941 and took her stepfather's surname. She left the company soon after it opened, following a row with Caborn-Waterfield, moved to Umbria and died there in 2012. A chain that would sell millions of bras carried the name of a woman who had nothing to do with any of them.

The Marble Arch shop grew to a handful of branches. Then, in 1971 or 1972 (accounts differ), it was bought by Ralph and David Gold, whose publishing business had already put adult magazines on the British high street. David Gold later chaired Birmingham City and then, from 2010, West Ham United. Under the brothers, Ann Summers became what Jacqueline Gold later called an "upmarket clean" sex shop. It was cleaner than its competitors but still staffed and shopped mostly by men.

The 1981 Tupperware moment

Jacqueline Gold came in on work experience in May 1979 and did not like what she found. In 1981 she went to a Tupperware party, and the format gave her an idea. Women would buy lace lingerie and toys in a friend's living room, with no men allowed, from a fellow woman demonstrating the stock. It also got around the laws that limited how sex toys could be displayed in shops.

The Party Plan was the making of the company. Organizers were self-employed women who earned commission. At its height there were more than 7,500 of them, coordinated from the head office in Whyteleafe, Surrey, and in 2003 there were about 4,000 Ann Summers parties a week in Britain. Gold became chief executive in 1987, not 1993 as is often repeated, and later executive chair of Ann Summers, Knickerbox and the family holding company, Gold Group International.

What the shops sold

The stock in the shops changed as the customer changed. Over time the shops moved from sex shop toward lingerie boutique, selling underwear, swimwear and cosmetics alongside the toys. The lingerie leaned on the obvious best-sellers of the type: push-up bras, basques, suspender belts, thongs and costume sets. In 2000 the company bought Knickerbox, a softer, everyday underwear chain, which added five shops and a concession in every Ann Summers store. The Rampant Rabbit vibrator became the best-known product; the company said it sold about two million a year.

Fights with censors and the Palace

A chain like this was bound to collect complaints, and Ann Summers kept a long list of them. In 2002 Buckingham Palace wrote to complain about an advert that used the Queen. In 2003 the company won a legal fight to advertise jobs in Jobcentres. The Advertising Standards Authority upheld two complaints against its posters in 2004. Apple sent cease-and-desist letters over a music-player add-on called the iGasm in 2007, and Marks & Spencer threatened legal action over a 2011 pastiche of one of its adverts. Some towns did not want a shop at all; the Perth store in Scotland closed after local protests.

Not all the news was about advertising. An Ann Summers lingerie factory in Portsmouth closed in 2005 with more than 50 redundancies.

Size, sales and the Gold family

Turnover reached £117.3 million in 2007 to 2008 and was about £110 million in 2018. The estate peaked at 144 outlets in December 2010 across the UK, Ireland, the Channel Islands and Spain; today it is closer to 80. Jacqueline Gold was appointed CBE in 2016 for services to entrepreneurship and women in business. She died on 16 March 2023, aged 62, after seven years of treatment for breast cancer.

The business has stayed in the family. Her sister Vanessa Gold is chair, and the chief executive is Maria Hollins. Ann Summers sits in a different part of the market from Agent Provocateur, which opened in Soho 24 years later. It never pretended to be a luxury house. Its trade was the hen night, the Valentine's window and the party in the front room, and that market made the Gold family very rich.