Interview: Clare Thommen, owner of Boudiche lingerie firm

Published on Saturday 6 February 2010 15:44

FOR Clare Thommen, it's pretty much a simple matter of payback. It's been nearly five years since she and business partner Fiona McLean opened their first Boudiche luxury lingerie shop in Edinburgh, but the demands on their time haven't eased since the first frantic months after plunging into the world of retail with no experience of merchandising, marketing or many of the other skills associated with the trade.

• Clare Thommen

Thommen says they survived by seeking advice via any credible line of enquiry. "We were completely green," she recalls. "I didn't realise how much we didn't know about retailing when we got started. That probably remained the case for about the first year."

Thommen says the company has benefited immeasurably from the advice and guidance of others. That is why she now takes time out to share her experiences, even though spare moments remain in short supply.

"I have realised over the past five years of having a business that so many people have helped us, and they have never asked for anything back," she says. "It's like a good karma kind of thing. It keeps the balance for me."

Maintaining that equilibrium leads Thommen into answering requests from students carrying out university research, including filling in surveys and giving one-to-one interviews. She also accepts invitations to speak at organised events such as the forthcoming Everywoman conference in Glasgow, now in its third year in Scotland.

Founded in 1999, Everywoman provides training and support services to females in business across the UK. It aims to raise the number and increase the status of women in the UK economy, and provides online resources to an estimated 35,000 members.

Thommen will form part of a panel at the 2 March event discussing 'Winning ideas through innovation and creativity'. She says she doesn't yet know what might come from that symposium, though Everywoman co-founder Karen Gill predicts it will provide key pointers on how women can push forward with their business ambitions.

Gill says: "The panel discussion is a great chance for women to get real advice straight from the horses' mouth, so delegates should really take advantage of this opportunity."

Although Thommen is a woman in a market serving a female clientele, some of Boudiche's key external support has come from the opposite side of the gender divide.

She and McLean were both working in Edinburgh as accountants when they came up with the idea for Boudiche while sipping on cocktails after work one evening. They put in 15,000 of their own money to get started, and because Thommen was 25 at the time, they got additional help from the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust (PSYBT), which provided them with a mentor and additional financial assistance.

Their adviser was Chris Tiso, head of the Tiso chain of outdoor clothing specialists. He eventually took a personal stake in the fledgling Boudiche in 2007, making him the company's only outside investor.

Building on that support, Boudiche prospered to the point of opening a second outlet on Ingram Street – which has been dubbed "Glasgow's Bond Street" – in 2008, and collecting a clutch of industry accolades along the way.

The company has also launched a rapidly growing online shop, shipping upmarket smalls to customers across the UK and further afield in countries such as Australia, Dubai, the USA and Japan.

It has been a great deal of hard work, says Thommen. She and McLean make a point of testing samples of all undergarments before adding new lines to their stock, including wearing and washing all items to see how they hold up. Thommen also admits she is quite addicted to monitoring Boudiche's website traffic into the early hours of the morning.

Though now thriving, the online business also got off to a rocky start. During the run-up to Tiso's investment, Thommen and McLean ran into difficulties raising the funding they needed to launch their e-commerce strategy. Despite being named one of two finalists in the PSYBT awards, sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland, RBS knocked back Boudiche's funding request just weeks before the winners were announced in September 2006.

Thommen, however, is now impervious to those events: "I don't think it was anything untypical of what any young business faces out there."

Boudiche's emergence in the lingerie market has been compared to another Scottish success story, Michelle Mone's MJM International, which last week unveiled record profits of 960,000. But Thommen says the two companies have very different business models, as MJM is essentially a wholesale operation, whereas Boudiche is a retail enterprise.

However, Thommen does credit Mone for breaking into the UK underwear market. "She has got a brilliant brand, and she has done a great job of building up that profile and putting Scotland on the map," she says.

Although reluctant to reveal exact figures, Thommen says Boudiche has so far withstood the worst of the recession that has felled numerous high street retailers. Trading at the Glasgow store in Ingram Street is "slightly" up on last year, she says, while the online business has surged by 50 per cent. The only downbeat note comes from the Edinburgh shop in Frederick Street, which Thommen believes has suffered mainly as a result of the upheaval from construction work on the Edinburgh trams in nearby Princes Street.

Given the ongoing disruption in Edinburgh, plus the lingering effects of the economic downturn, Boudiche may put back plans to introduce its own branded range of lingerie until next year.

Thommen says she would have preferred to launch a Boudiche label later this year, but circumstances could well dictate that the company opts to conserve cash until the end of 2010. Though keen on the project, she also stresses that it would have been imprudent to introduce a Boudiche line before now.

"It would have been too much too soon. Why would you want to buy a Boudiche bra if you have never heard of Boudiche?"