Profile: Gordon Black

When Gordon Black CBE was looking for a title for his new book, a number of suggestions were put forward.

Black and Blue, referring to a long career with a few knocks along the way, was one suggestion. One of the more salubrious members of his family came up with 50 Shades of Black, which was also rejected. “I would have run the risk of seriously disappointing my readers,” says Black with a smile.

In the end, he settled on ‘From Bags to Blenders’ referring to the shopping bags his father manufactured in 1947 and the Nurtibullet blender, a ‘blockbuster game changer’ at High Street TV, the last company Black, 73, was actively involved in.

I’m meeting the Yorkshire businessman at Black Family Investments, the venture capitalist firm he runs with his brother, Thomas, in Keighley. It is part-office, part-museum, housing an impressive collection of 28 vintage cars.

In the past, Black has shied away from interviews, loathing what he calls ‘personality cult businesses’. But following his recent exit from High Street TV and the launch of his book this month, there are a few things he wants to get off his chest after more than 50 years in business.

The main one is his dismay at the practices of some retailers, such as former BHS boss Sir Philip Green. “I believe one of the main reasons many large UK retailers are struggling is that the balance of power between customer and supplier has changed dramatically for the worse. It’s now a state of war or at least armed neutrality,” he says.

Black, who ran major M&S supplier Peter Black Holdings for over 40 years, adds: “The contrast between the golden days of M&S and the Philip Green approach is the difference between day and night.”

He believes the desire among retailers to be the cheapest has gone too far. “The race to the bottom is dangerous,” he says. “The pendulum has over-swung.”

Peter Black Holdings was founded by his father in Keighley in 1947 following his emigration from Germany with his wife before the war.

The company, which started out manufacturing shopping bags out of Army webbing, secured M&S as its first and largest customer and soon moved into footwear, starting off with rubber-soled slippers.

By the time Black joined in 1965, Peter Black was a modest business with £2m of sales. With their father in deteriorating health, Gordon and Thomas took over the firm. “It was a passport into a fascinating way of life,” he says.

They decided early on that theirs wouldn’t be a traditional family business and they floated Peter Black Holdings on the stock market in 1972. “It gave us the currency to grow,” says Black.

The company grew to a turnover of over £250m, employing over 3,000 employees and operating from over 30 locations in the UK and overseas. “But we never went for an excessive lifestyle. We didn’t go off and buy planes and boats. I see arrogance as a cardinal sin,” says Black.

He describes his business journey as a process of reinvention. “If we’d stayed with our original products we would have gone out of existence,” he says. Instead, they diversified, launching the first chain of factory shops - the Original Factory Shop - and creating the UK’s first shopping outlet at Hornsea.

In 1975, they bought a sports company, renamed it Peter Black Leisurewear, and helped to launch Adidas in the UK by manufacturing all its bags. They went on to create a cosmetics and toiletries business and also made vitamins. They even moved into furniture and homeware.

The company was the first to import a product for M&S and it set up Peter Black Distribution, paving the way for Peter Black to open offices in Asia and Italy in the early 1980s.

Towards the end of the 1990s, amid rapidly rising inflation, the Blacks sold off their homeware and factory shop divisions to return to their core business and in 2000 the group was returned to private ownership.

“Conglomerates, as we were, went out of fashion,” Black says. “We always knew that one day we would sell and realised that the component parts were worth more than the whole.”

In 2006 there was a secondary buyout by Endless. By the time the business was sold to Hong Kong-based group Li & Fung for £48.1m in 2007, only the footwear, accessories and cosmetics businesses remained. “The deal was a blueprint for the future,” says Black. “We had the product, knowledge, sales and marketing connections; they had the low cost production.”

The following year, he took a 25 per cent stake in home shopping channel High Street TV and became chairman.

The Harrogate business grew into a multi-channel operator with sales of £70m. Its founders completed a secondary management buyout with Endless last year, three years after the private equity firm’s initial investment. “It had a winning formula,” Black says.

With Black, a father-of-three and a grandfather-of-nine, having reached what he calls the ‘early winter’ of his career, he has now taken a breather from active business life. However, his continuing interest in product development has seen him invent the soon-to-be-launched Elefoot, a disc which squashes down rubbish in a bin.

Black describes himself as enthusiastic, often impetuous, and someone who enjoys teamwork. When I ask if he’s easy to work with, he pauses. “I hope I’m a good listener,” he says eventually.

His background and 50 years of hard work in business have led to fortune for him and his family. However, he believes there’s nothing like the words of children to keep a person grounded. When Black told his grandson that he enjoyed studying history, the 14-year-old’s reply was “Well, it’s easy for you, you were around when it happened.”

Gordon Black Fact File

Title: Former chairman of Peter Black Holdings and High Street TV

Date of birth: March 2, 1943

Education: Bootham School in York; History degree at Cambridge University

First job: M&S trainee

Favourite holiday destination: The Alps

Favourite film: Blood Diamonds

Favourite song: Come on Everybody, by Eddie Cochran

Last book read: High Street Heroes, by John Timpson

Car driven: BMW i8

Most proud of: My family