Profile: Laura Tenison, Jojo Maman Bebe

Leadership styles / 01 August 2010

Head of the luxury baby and maternity wear retailer JoJo Maman Bebe, Laura Tenison is a bundle of energy and vitality. Careful and steady growth, and an ethical stance, have seen the company go from strength to strength. Helen Mayson reports

Laura Tenison is having a good year. The shrewd and confident business woman will have overseen the opening of eight new retail stores by the end of 2010, bringing the total number of Jojo Maman Bebe outlets on the high street to 29, including new locations in Winchester, Kingston and Edinburgh. Earlier  in the year, she also won Veuve Clicquot‘s coveted Business Woman of the Year title for her company‘s commitment to social and ethical initiatives as well as its commercial success. 2010 is certainly shaping up to be a good one for Tenison and her multi-channel baby, nursery and maternity retailer.

Jojo Maman Bebe, which employees affectionately call ‘Jojo‘, began life as a tiny one woman start-up in 1993. It‘s a well known story – after a car accident in France, Tenison overheard the woman in the neighbouring bed bemoaning the lack of stylish children‘s clothing available over mail order. Something about the woman‘s complaints struck a chord, and Tenison started designing a range of children‘s clothing inspired by the Breton nautical style.

“I did some market research to make sure my idea was viable,” says Tenison, “and a lot of new mums said that maternity wear in the UK was drab, dowdy, downmarket. Though the children‘s clothing business was certainly plausible, there was a bigger gap in the market for stylish maternity wear.”

Never one to pass up on an opportunity, she expanded her idea to include maternity wear and set about designing the first mail order catalogue, which launched with 30 styles, 20 maternity and 10 children‘s wear. Since then, the company has grown year on year, though Tenison describes the first few years as “very hand to mouth”. Last year, Jojo had a turnover of £19.5m and now employs around 300 staff – not bad for a business with humble beginnings.

Despite being just in her mid-twenties when she launched Jojo, Tenison had plenty of experience running a company. After an early start designing upmarket menswear failed to attract more than a limited market, she ran a property renovation company in France. “It was a perfectly good business, but I found it very boring dealing with people‘s building problems,” she recalls. It also kept her apart from her new husband, who lived in the UK, meaning a long commute back to see him when work allowed. When the idea for Jojo came along, it seemed a perfect time to move back and start something new.

Early beginnings

While Tenison has an obvious flair for the entrepreneurial, she comes from a family who were always more academically minded. The youngest of five children, she was the least successful at school due to a low boredom threshold. “Unless I was stimulated constantly my attention would wander. Quite often I‘d be writing letters during lessons or reading a novel under the desk.”

Her interest was better captured outside of the classroom, and from the age of nine she kept busy with a series of small businesses she ran from her front garden. “My parents always had excess strawberries during the season, so I set up a stall on our drive at the end of a busy road. On a warm day I found that strawberries sold quite well, so I diversified into selling ice cold orange squash. Then I started making and selling cakes.”

This keen business sense was encouraged by her parents, who insisted she learnt a valuable financial lesson early on – to pay for her overheads. “If I was selling squash, they‘d make me give them the cost price of the squash. But the mark up was mine to keep.”

Those early days ignited a passion for business that‘s never gone away, leading Tenison to become something of a serial entrepreneur. “I think entrepreneurial spirit is something you‘re either born with, or you‘re not. You can train someone to be a good business person from a financial point of view, you can train them to have the ability to manage a company, but can you train someone to be creative in an entrepreneurial way? I don‘t know. I‘d be sceptical.”

If you want a work life balance, then go into an industry that respects the work life balance, whether you‘re a man or woman.

Laura Tenison, CEO, Jojo Maman Bebe

Local trader

The vibrant and somewhat chaotic office in Battersea, which houses the creative end of the company – clothing design, graphics, marketing – is clearly a place that means a lot to Tenison. “The thing about working in this street in Battersea is that we‘re very much part of the community,” she says. She describes her early beginnings as a one woman business operating near the local market traders in Northcote Road, and still counts many of the traders among her friends. “I can still walk up the street and ask how business is today and they‘ll ask me how business is today, and it‘s great.”

Tenison still feels very much like a small business owner and gets involved with all aspects of the company. She visits every store at least once a year, though with other commitments, it can be hard. “I have a very hands-on attitude to Jojo. I love my company, I love my brand, and I love being part of it. I don‘t want to be isolated in a glass box away from my teams.”

The location of the head office, where the operations, accounts and distribution teams are based, is also close to Tenison‘s heart. “I have a very strong affiliation with our head office in South Wales. My family are from Wales, I grew up there, my first warehouse was a shed which I rented from a family member, our first staff are still with us.”

This family attitude carries across to the running of the stores, which Tenison still views with the perspective of an independent retailer. “We may have 29 stores across the country, but each store is run very much like an independent store. I don‘t believe in treating them as if we‘re a mass market retailer.”

New stores open with a test format, then managers are encouraged to adapt their product lines to the demands of the local customer. “It does mean that those stores work harder for us and by managing them efficiently, by really analysing what‘s selling in which sizes and which part of our product range works in each destination, it means that they can perform in areas where other people could not run a viable business.”

While things might be coming up roses now, the business has had its share of hard times. In its third year, Tenison describes being confronted with a “life or death” situation when the Asian markets faced financial crisis in 1997. “We had made quite a big market for ourselves in Japanese catalogue shops, it was about 10% of our business. Then the Asian markets crashed, and overnight we lost that area of our business. I was 28 and I had to decide, did I call it a day or did I keep going?”

Tough times

After re-mortgaging the house and putting “every ounce” of energy she had into the company, Jojo finally turned a profit in its fourth year. Tenison sees the process as a valuable learning experience. “I‘ve learnt that very cautious cash management is the way to succeed in business. That lesson has probably seen us survive this last recession as it saw us survive our cash shortfalls in the past.”

This baptism of fire put Tenison in a strong position to ride out the recent recession, though they‘ve felt the pinch from competitor companies going into administration. “We have had the backlash of numerous competitors going out of business and slashing their prices.” Suppliers have also been hit by the closure of competitors, meaning lines of credit Jojo needs to expand haven‘t been freely available. “But in the long term, it pays off, because we survive as the company that‘s trusted by the consumer and also by the supplier.”

As well as running Jojo, Tenison volunteers as a Role Model for the Welsh Assembly’s Dynamo scheme, which encourages and nurtures self-sufficient, entrepreneurially aware young people across Wales. She spends time each year speaking to 15 and 16 year olds about their future careers and is a strong believer in helping girls decide extremely young what sort of quality of life they want as a woman. “I advise girls who haven‘t even begun to think about their career, let alone what they want as parents, as a mother or a partner.”

It‘s important to Tenison that women go into the workforce with eyes open and reasonable expectations. She advises girls to only consider a career once they‘ve thought about its impact on work life balance. “The reality is, if you go into a male dominated industry as a woman, you are expected to perform on the same level as your colleagues. If all your colleagues are men and you want to have a family and take your children to school, you‘re obviously not going to reach the top of your industry. “It‘s not sexism – if anything, it would be sexist to give a woman benefits that a man can‘t have. We need to have equality in the workplace. If you want a work life balance, then go into an industry that respects the work life balance, whether you‘re a man or woman.”

So how does this fit in with the team at Jojo? “What we try to do when our teams decide to have families or reach a stage in their life when they want a change in their work life balance, is to then see if there‘s a position in the company that is possible to do while having a young family.” This could mean working from home in the school holidays, or asking for shifts in the warehouse or stores that fit around a parent‘s schedule. However, she‘s practical about the options. “There are some roles which suit flexible working and some roles which don‘t. You cannot be a store manager and never work a weekend – that‘s the way retail is.”

Woman of principle

The same practical approach applies to Tenison‘s attitude to sustainability and ethical practices at Jojo. Ethics is an important part of the business strategy, she says, without dominating it to a relentless degree. ”We have sensible, sustainable business practices. That doesn‘t mean we‘re tree huggers.”

While clearly not anti-Fairtrade, she‘s pragmatic about the benchmarking process after her own experiences overseas. “I‘ve visited factories in India that have two production lines – one is a Fairtrade production line, the other is non-Fairtrade. Those on the Fairtrade line earn more than those across the alleyway. I know that to get a job in that factory you‘ll pay an agent a bigger bribe for a place on the Fairtrade production line. So there‘s a lot of questions to be asked about ethical trading.”

Instead, the business is run in a “moral and sustainable” manner. Tenison advocates a non-hierarchical business practice throughout the company, believing that managers should not be treated any differently to employees. She also expects her suppliers to have the same ethos – that they treat their workers well and don‘t exploit them. In return, Jojo promises to pay a fair price for goods supplied and offers a certain amount of loyalty. “If we work with a factory where, because of a necessity to increase the wages of their tailors, it means our prices will have to go up, we‘ll keep working with that factory. We will not shift production to another factory that doesn‘t have the same ethical credentials. We value loyalty and we don‘t put our work out to tender each season just to save a few pounds.”

Tenison is not a woman to choose profit over values. She won‘t allow the factories she works with to outsource any production as she can‘t be sure the home workers won‘t resort to child labour and has even changed popular products because of uncertainties over their production. “We used to have hand smocked dresses, but we couldn‘t be sure where the hand smocking was being done. So in the end, we stopped having them and switched to machine smocked dresses, which allowed us to monitor production of that garment from start to finish.”

More money-driven businesses are missing a trick by focusing on profits, not people, she says. “By looking at bottom line profit only, you write off so many other elements in business that add up to good business practice. All these elements add up to the fact that by doing good, you can do well.” While she admits she could probably squeeze “a few per cent” out of of the bottom line if she were more ruthless, it‘s not something that appeals to her. “Quite frankly, it‘s not worth it.”