Angus has his Hotel Chocolat but no plans to rest there

Jul 14 2008 by Andrew Hebden, The Journal

AS the son of Prontaprint founder Edwin Thirlwell and the grandson (on his mother’s side) of Ted Vardy, younger brother of Reg, you could say enterprise was in the blood of Angus Thirlwell. He tells Andrew Hebden how his own business, the premium chocolate brand Hotel Chocolat, is continuing a family tradition

IN April 1988, North East entrepreneur Edwin Thirlwell spoke to The Journal, a week after selling his chain of Prontaprint high street printing shops for £10m.

The Seaham-born businessman, aged 52 at the time, said he planned to “do a little bit of nothing” at his farmhouse in Jersey after an eventful time at the helm of Prontaprint.

He had founded the company in Collingwood Street, Newcastle, in 1971 and it grew rapidly using the US franchise model, soon mushrooming to 500 stores across several continents, with a head office in Darlington.

“I have had my nose to the grindstone for as long as I can remember, and now I have cracked the half century, I think I deserve a break,” he told The Journal, before adding a caveat. “My wife says I’ll be bored within three weeks,” he said.

She was right. Two decades on, Thirlwell is still very much in business and executive chairman of the Barbados Ice Cream Company in the West Indies after swapping the Channel Islands for even sunnier climes.

It is his second spell in the region; he spent five years as a director there during the 1960s after first becoming a millionaire when he sold the Mr Whippy ice cream franchise business he had built up in the North East to Lord Forte.

Today, though, he also has a second job – as chairman of the cocoa plantation owned by his son’s rather successful chocolate company.

If it was inevitable that an entrepreneur such as Edwin Thirlwell would still be active in business into his seventies, it was even more predictable that his son, Angus, would follow in his footsteps.

Angus is co-founder and managing director of Hotel Chocolat, the £38m premium chocolate business which has caused something of a stir in the industry. The company is unique in the market for it not only makes its own chocolate and sells it through its 27-strong chain of shops as well as online, it also grows its own cocoa on the Rabot Estate it owns in St Lucia.

Its real USP (aside from its carefully crafted brand image and innovative tasting club, of which more later) is that it makes damned good chocolate, using higher levels of cocoa than its rivals. This was a fact not lost on delegates at the Entrepreneurs’ Forum conference in Newcastle in May where Angus was one of the keynote speakers. He had left a little sample on every seat.

It was fitting that Angus should return to the North East to address such an entrepreneurial crowd. The first indication that Angus, born in West Boldon, was to continue the family tradition of enterprise was to be found at Barnard Castle School in County Durham where he sold hot buttered toast and rented out hot water bottles in the dorms.

Although Angus now admits he always harboured ambitions of running his own business, he found himself heading to university in Sheffield to study French and Economics.

As part of his degree he was expected to spend some time in France and he headed to work for a small software company in Lille. The company had forgotten he was coming so, with no tasks arranged for him, he designed himself a market research role and began building a successful export business for the firm.

“It went really well and when it came to the time that I was due to go back to university they said ‘please don’t go’,” recalled Angus. “I said that I didn’t want to go back either, but if they wanted me to stay then they had better give me a proper job and title.”

He ended up spending two years as director of export with the business – complete with company car and complimentary flights so his girlfriend could visit him at weekends.

“I found out very quickly that I liked doing business and building things. But my father was really furious with me because I was set to be the first in the family to get a degree but at the very last hurdle I didn’t quite make it,” said Angus, who is hoping his own daughter is now about to achieve that particular distinction.

It was a happy two years in France, but Angus does recall one bust up with the firm’s flamboyant managing director which ended with his boss declaring: “Angus, you will either end up going bust or running your own business!” He seems to have taken the comment to heart and, after returning to the UK with a computer business in Cambridge, he decided to found a company with his friend Peter Harris. The only challenge was ascertaining just what it would do.

After scouring the market for some time, the solution came in the shape of a company which produced boxes of mints for corporate gifts – a forerunner to the tasty chocolate samples left on the seats at the Entrepreneurs’ Forum event.

“We thought that mints were clean, refreshing and upbeat and a very nice way to promote your business,” explained Angus. “No-one else was doing it and we built up the business before moving into chocolate.”

It was that decision to diversify which was to provide the big opportunity for the company. Known as Chocexpress, it quickly grew into a significant player in the corporate gifts and then mainstream retail markets, but feedback began to emerge which suggested the brand name was wrong. This prompted the decision to launch the Hotel Chocolat name in 2003.

“We realised that the brand wasn’t right for us; we wanted to be a proper luxury player,” said Angus. “It was a tough decision – some people said that we were crazy because the business was doing very well.

“We wanted something that was more than just a name; something that had an emotional attachment to it. Hotel Chocolat had a strong escapist edge, it was a state of mind rather than a physical place – somewhere in your mind where you go when you are eating a fantastic chocolate.”

He says that building the new brand – something which took a year before its launch – was “one of the most fulfilling things that I’ve ever done – it made the first 15 years seem like an apprenticeship. But you can’t start a business like Hotel Chocolat from scratch – the first 15 years gave us the capital, the momentum and the customer base.”

The brand is unarguably modern, edgy, sophisticated, exclusive and sexy, something that is reflected across its growing empire of shops – including a flagship store at the MetroCentre – which are designed to look like the lobby of an upmarket boutique hotel. The service – provided by staff who are well educated in all things chocolate – is famously good.

In almost everything it does, Hotel Chocolat is brave, bold and ambitious.

“It is part of our business culture,” says Angus. “It defines you and your way of doing things. We do look for challenges and not all of them work, but if they don’t then we always get back up again quickly and are looking for the next challenge straight away.”

Its growth plans are focused on the international market (a store is planned in Dubai for the next six months) while Angus also has a dream that one day he will be selling rooms in his own actual Hotel Chocolat.

That may be some time off yet, but the location – the plantation in St Lucia which is used to grow the cocoa for its most premium end products – is secured. The company is in the process of opening the plantation to the public so that they can see for themselves the company’s chocolate factory.

It is expected to attract 100,000 visitors a year and it will play a key part in reaffirming the company’s ethical credentials which form a fundamental part of the brand image. The St Lucia development almost occurred by chance.

Angus was setting out to visit his father in Barbados when he received in the post a book about chocolate making in the 1920s. It had been sent by a member of the Hotel Chocolat tasting club, the 100,000-member strong group of the firm’s most loyal customers who taste-test products before they are unleashed on the market.

“I started to read the book on the way to visit my dad and I couldn’t put it down,” recalled Angus. “It explained that the West Indies had been a really important player for cocoa growing in the 1920s before the region became focused on growing bananas. It also stated that the chocolatiers used to grow their own cocoa.”

This set his mind into action and, after his trip, he returned to Hotel Chocolat HQ armed with a plan.

“I had been expecting a pretty clear response along the lines of ‘let’s just make chocolate shall we?’, but instead they said ‘what are we waiting for?’”

The project has been an undoubted success, with Angus now spending a lot of time in the region working closely with the growers – and when he’s not there, his father is on hand to keep things in check.

Closer to home, Angus is bullish about the company’s prospects in a toughening market, although he admits that the downturn in customer confidence is having an impact.

“We are running our business in a responsible way so we have taken action to control our costs and are looking for opportunities for growth that are less risky than they might have been if consumer confidence was higher.”

And he stresses the key thing that will keep them progressing in the right direction is the special relationship with their customers.

“A lot of companies start off listening to their customers but then as they grow they start listening less and less and then they wonder why they are not doing so well,” he said.

“Our big challenge is keeping our culture on track. The thing that will keep us on the straight and narrow is our tasting club – when we get it wrong they do not hold back in letting you know.”

THE QUESTIONNAIRE

What car do you drive?

An old Porsche 911

What’s your favourite restaurant?

Nobu Next Door in Tribeca, New York

Who or what makes you laugh?

Seinfeld

What’s your favourite book?

The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

What’s your favourite film?

Subway

What was the last album you bought?

Joe Bonamassa

What’s your ideal job, other than your current one?

Film producer

If you had a talking parrot, what’s the first thing you’d teach it to say?

"Less sugar, more cocoa"

What’s your greatest fear?

Losing my taste buds

What’s the best piece of business advice you have ever received?

Get it in writing

Worst business advice?

You should take up golf

What’s your poison?

Classic Martini made with Stolichnaya Black vodka, shaken over ice with a twist of lemon

What newspaper do you read, other than The Journal?

The Independent

How much was your first pay packet and what was it for?

£80 for a week of back breaking grape picking in France

How do you keep fit?

Squash and carrying chocolate samples around

What’s your most irritating habit?

Spitting out samples of our chocolate in to little cups and leaving them around the office

What’s your biggest extravagance?

As above

Which historical or fictional character do you most identify with/admire?

When we are in St Lucia we call ourselves the Raiders of the Lost Cocoa

And which four famous people would you most like to dine with?

Audrey Hepburn, Prince Charles, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Lightning Hopkins

How would you like to be remembered?

Tombstone to read: My truffles have finally been squished!