Page 101 - James Caan - The Real Deal

9 · Open for Business

With the money from the house and my income from Reid
Trevena, the boutique didn’t need to make a profit for us to eat,
but we were definitely not running the shop as some kind of hobby
for Aisha. She had been asked to start lecturing two days a week
at her old college, the London College of Fashion, which was quite
a pat on the back for a former student, so we hired a manageress
to work full time in the boutique. Lecturing allowed Aisha to
immerse herself in the fashion world and keep up to date on
trends, colours and seasons, which would ultimately be good for
the business.
Inevitably, though, in the first few months we made our
mistakes, the biggest of which was buying a range that just didn’t
sell. Out of 100 pieces we managed to sell ten, and for weeks we
sat staring at these garments knowing that we were never going to
shift them. Marking them down was actually quite hard emotion-
ally, and when they got down to our cost price and we still
couldn’t shift them, we were really stumped. What were we
supposed to do with them now? Offloading bad stock to market
traders below cost price certainly wasn’t something we’d antici-
pated. There were even ranges that we just had to bin. And then
there was the weather to consider: if we had summer clothes on
display and the temperature dipped, we would struggle. But then
if a pop star wore something that we had in stock it would fly out
of the shop.
We learned quickly and, after three or four months, the
boutique had sales of a couple of grand a week. After a few more
months, we realised that we had actually underestimated the
market, underestimated the customer base and the opportunities in
Wood Green, and we started talking about expansion.
I still spent every Saturday in the shop, and Sunday was taken
up with trips to designers’ studios, to factories, and to check out
the competition. It was impossible not to be aware of history
repeating itself as I was doing exactly what my father had done,

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