got this full-size nappy pin holding it together.
At the end of the night, I said to her, ‘What’s with that safety pin?’ And she said,‘Oh, nobody ever sees it.’ And she was a fashionable girl. That was the moment that really focused me on lingerie. I thought, that’s going to change. Bras back then were basic beige and boring. That’s what they were. I just thought, ‘They are going to be colourful. Fabrics are going to change. Women are going to care about their lingerie the same way as they care about their shoes or handbags.’
Then, three months later, I found myself looking for the next business opportunity. So I went and decided that it was lingerie. I thought that would be worth looking into. Essentially, that’s what I started. I bought a franchise store of The Bra Shop in Victoria. I asked my sister and my girlfriend at the time to work it, because back then it was entirely taboo for a guy to be in a store like that, so I couldn’t work the store. Then we started slowly to see if I could stay ahead of the trend of what lingerie was going to do. That wasn’t easy because everything was branded. A rep came in to see you and you placed an order. It was very slow and cumbersome, but it was the way it was.
‘I just thought, “Women are going to care about their lingerie the same way as they care about their shoes or handbags.”’
This is a true story. I figured we needed to sell G-strings. I was so nervous. Back then, you only bought G-strings if you were either a stripper, a dealer or a hooker or something. I remember ringing up my mother and saying, ‘Can you take me into one of these stores? Will you come with me?’ I’m a country boy. I couldn’t go into a store like that on my own and I owned a lingerie store! Anyway, she went with me and it was hilarious. When I think about how the world has changed …
I thought girls would really like G-strings, but I couldn’t get anyone to make them. Leotards were big, then and I was manufacturing the G-string leotards that the girls seemed to wear, but that was with the leggings. The bit that was cut out in the bum was wastage. So I said to the guy, ‘You’re just throwing that out.If I gave you a pattern, would you make me a G-string out of this stretch lycra?’
He made up fifteen of them. I’m not exaggerating, he made me up fifteen and I took them into the Chirnside store to see how they would go. I knew they were going to be good, because back then the fashion was tight and pant lines were not a good look. I knew that that would also appeal from other angles as well, you know, looking good for boyfriends and so on. So I rang up at the end of the day and said, ‘How did we go with those G-strings?’ and they said, ‘Sold out.’
BK: Cool.
BB: Gone. I was like, ‘What do you mean, sold out?’ I expected a couple to be sold but they all went in the day. It didn’t take long to figure that’s what our customers want. So we started manufacturing our own. That was very hard to do as I had one store, then I had another and then I had three. It probably took us five or seven years before the mainstream brands brought out a matching G-string and matching briefs. So I’m counting it as a long part of the story, but it gives you a sense of being aware of what’s going to happen and trying to anticipate that.Also, you’re going to break down barriers of what exists.
BK: When you had those three stores, were they all franchise group stores?
BB: They were. Then what happened was, Bryan Luca was his name, he had about twenty stores. He said, ‘Brett, you’re annoying me. You’re worrying me. You’re too ambitious.’ I was starting to get a bit boisterous about what we ought to be doing. So he said, ‘I’ve got four stores in New South Wales called Bras N Things and they’re not going too well.’ He said, ‘Would you go up there and have a look?If you want them, you can have them.’
So I saw them and thought, ‘These stores are fantastic but they’re not being run well enough. We can do a better job.’ I said, ‘Right, we’ll take them.’ He said,‘You take my four. I’ll take your three. I’ll do it on one condition. You never come back to Victoria.’ And that was the deal.
Now, Brett, absolute truth, we didn’t sign a contract. We didn’t even think about the leases associated with it and we didn’t stocktake, nothing. I loaded up the truck and moved to Sydney. We swapped the stores, all done, not a problem.The first thing I knew of a problem was when AMP rang me up at Macquarie, which was one of the stores we took and said, ‘We’ve noticed that cheques are coming from somewhere else. You can’t do that.’ They’d twigged to the fact that it was a new owner.
Centre management called me in to discuss the fact that I hadn’t signed the lease – this was six months later. I was happy to sign the lease but they said, ‘We don’t know who you are. We don’t trust you. You’ve got no credit history.’ All that stuff. So I told him about Sanity and blah, blah, blah. He lectured me about the length of the lease and said, ‘Do you know that it’s not just seventy grand a year, it’s five years.’ I smiled at him and thought, ‘Of course, I know that, you idiot.’ But I didn’t say that, of course. He was trying to stomp his ground. I listened, of course, but to cut a long story short, all that finished and we left Victoria alone.We then started in South Australia then Queensland.
BK: you’ve done the whole country at this point but you haven’t touched Victoria. What happened with Victoria? How many stores did you have before you went back to Bryan in Victoria?
BB: We would have had about fifty or sixty stores when Bryan rang me up, we would speak from time to time. We even continued to buy some things together, so there was a healthy relationship. He said, ‘Brett, I don’t know what you’re doing or how you’re doing it, but everyone’s talking about you. You’re clearly successful.You’re doing something right. I’ve got six stores. Would you like to buy them?’And I said, ‘Sure.’
So we worked out a deal on those six stores. He had about twenty or twenty-four stores at the time, I can’t remember exactly. It doesn’t matter. So I said, ‘Bryan, there’s only one problem. I promised you I’d never come back, but I’m going to come back and I don’t want to have just six stores.’ Then he said, ‘I’ll cut you another deal. You can go to any centre that we’re not in.’
I thought I would get up to a dozen stores or something, that was OK. So we did that, we started to open a few more stores in Victoria. A year later, he said, ‘I’ve got another six for you.’ So I bought them. And then, a year later, he’s got another.And so over time, essentially, we bought all the stores from Bryan. I can tell you again, we never did a contract.
BK: But you did sign the leases this time?
BB: We did learn a few things. By then, I had a bit of a structure so we wrote to people. It didn’t matter then, because by that time I had the credibility. The landlords were all in favour of us taking over. There weren’t any issues. So, that was essentially the Bras N Things story. Tracking back from that, somewhere in-between all that, was Jeff, who took control of the music stores–
BK: Eight at that time?
BB: About eight, but they got into trouble. I remember this number because it was a great number. When I sold that business it was valued at a million dollars.So, I got essentially $600 000 because I had 60% at that time. Then, three years later, we bought it back from the bank.
