She set about changing that, beginning by updating the thinking of the board of directors.
“Their attitude was, ‘Women aren’t interested in sex,’” Ms. Gold said. She proved them wrong, marketing sexy lingerie, swimwear, sex toys and novelty items to women, who, she discovered, were eager for them. According to news accounts of the period, by 1995 Ann Summers was selling 300,000 vibrators a year; in later years, she said in interviews, the figure climbed into the millions.
As she put it in the 1995 interview, “That’s saying a lot for what women want.”
Among her biggest initiatives, introduced in 1982, was the Ann Summers party, similar to a Tupperware party, where a host sells kitchen products in her home, except that the products being sold at an Ann Summers party were sex-related. She got the idea, she said, when she was invited to a Pippa Dee party, a British enterprise where clothing was sold by the party hosts. When the other guests learned that she worked at Ann Summers, the talk took a raunchy, and festive, turn; Ms. Gold realized that it was the perfect format for selling sexy products.
Soon there were hundreds of Ann Summers parties a week, then thousands. The company also built up its network of stores; there are now scores of them in Britain and beyond. In 1987 Ms. Gold was made chief executive.
Many of the countless newspaper articles about her in Britain over the decades made reference to the fact that she was strikingly glamorous herself, which fit nicely with the image the company was trying to project.
“Immaculately dressed in silk floral skirt, cotton twin set and strappy sandals that look as uncomfortable as the thigh-high patent leather boots the Ann Summers chain sells,” The Daily Telegraph wrote in 2002 in a typical description, “she is groomed to within an inch of her life.”
Neil Genzlinger
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