Page 104 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

One of the best things about the leather boutique was that the
mark-up was huge. You can’t mass-produce leather – because each
animal skin is a different size – and that means each piece is
individual. With most clothing, shoppers can go and compare with
similar products, but with leather that’s not so easy, and there
were some garments for which we could almost name our price.
Anything a little out of the ordinary that wasn’t available
anywhere else might cost us £80, but we could sell it for anything
between £195 and £295.
With the second shop flying, it made sense to open a third, and
when a unit became available in the shopping centre we opened a
boutique specialising in cotton clothing. For the next year, I
immersed myself in the business, and as long as we were
expanding, I was learning, and that meant I was pretty content.
On the home front, we moved from the flat in Highgate to a
three-bedroom house in Mill Hill in anticipation of having kids.
As I’ve said, I was keen to start a family, but Aisha was less so.
With three boutiques and her lecturing commitments, she wasn’t
ready to take the time off to have a baby. I would have to be
patient.
In fact we were so busy that certain tasks just never got attended
to. Having previously lived in flats, I wasn’t quite prepared for the
amount of maintenance an entire house needed. For several
weekends in a row, I remember Aisha asking me to mow the lawn,
and eventually I found time to do it. I went out to the shed, got
the mower out and started giving the lawn a much-needed haircut.
When I was about a quarter of the way through, I had a bit of an
epiphany.
‘How much is this job worth?’ I said to myself. ‘About £5 an
hour. How much am I worth? A lot more.’
So I stopped, put the mower away and went back to my
paperwork. Of course, Aisha came home a few hours later and
saw the lawn and wondered why I was sitting on my backside. I

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