What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (37 page)

'But, Arthur, the tree doesn't look dead to me.'

'Trust me, sir. With respect, this tree
will
die. The tree will die, sir.'

'Well, I don't think it will. It looks very healthy, so give me a pair of secateurs and I'll cut the string. You put one of your expandable straps on there and let's leave it for a while.'

'Sir, you are questioning my horticultural knowledge.'

'Shut up, Arthur. Just leave it for another six months and see what happens. If you're right, we'll replace it. If not, we'll leave it.'

'Righto, sir. With respect, you're the boss. I'll do as you say, but don't blame me when the lovely lady of the house looks out of the window and sees this thing wilting. With respect, sir, just remember my words.'

On this particular occasion, Arthur was wrong. The tree is still there today. It's scarred, but it has grown to over fifteen feet.

*

While I was working on the details of Amstrad's flotation, our newest product, the tower system, was flying off the shelves. The idea for the tower system had come to me the year before, partly as a result of the success of the executive series. These gleaming-fronted hi-fi separates looked superb when mounted in a complementary wooden rack. Originally, the Japanese had taken the lead on this concept of providing a wooden rack to stack the hi-fi
on. The fashion for wooden racks fell straight into our lap - they were easy to make and we supplied them in a fiat-pack format for end-users to assemble themselves. The rack had three shelves on which to place an amplifier, tuner and cassette deck. On top you'd place a record deck, while at the bottom was a storage area for cassette tapes and LPs. The rack was fronted by a smart tinted-glass door and the whole system was complemented by a pair of speakers.

The whole package was quite expensive by Amstrad standards, but still half the price of its Japanese competitors. It sold very well, particularly in France. In the UK, this equipment sold predominantly in hi-fi stores such as Laskys, G. W. Smiths and Henry's Radio. However, it was still too expensive for the mass retailers such as Dixons, Currys and Rumbelows to stock. They tended to concentrate on more consumer-oriented products such as TVs, music centres and portable radio cassettes.

Cogel was exhibiting my stuff at the Festival du Son in Paris in February 1979, so I flew over there to visit the stand. There's a lot of spare time at these exhibitions when you sit around waiting for customers and, while talking with Pierre during one of these spare moments, I had a brainwave.

We were discussing what scope there was for reducing the price of the racked hi-fi system to make it a mass-market item. Through this stimulating debate, it dawned on me that each of the items on the rack - the amplifier, the tuner and the cassette deck - had its own power supply, transformer, power cable and plug. There was also a whole mass of spaghetti behind the rack, where the separate components were connected to one another - a real jungle of cables. These alone were very expensive. On top of that, there were a lot of other duplicated electronics residing in the separate units. If I were able to make an item in a simple wooden cabinet which, from the front, looked as if it had a separate amplifier, separate tuner and separate cassette deck, but was in fact one lump containing all the electronic guts, with one power cord coming out of the back, this would save a tremendous amount of money.

On the back of some scrap paper, I started to sketch the profile of a proposed front panel with deliberate gaps between the amplifier, tuner and cassette deck sections. The gaps would be cleverly designed to give the illusion of separate items.

Pierre was excited and very helpful - it's fair to say that part of the idea was down to him. People in my position often find it hard to give credit to others - I guess it's the male ego. For most famous businessmen, it's true to say that
somebody
helped them on their way, but many are a bit frugal in
dishing out praise to others.
I
am happy to say that Pierre Sebaoun is one of the people who deserves some of the credit here.

I couldn't get back on that plane quick enough. When I got home that evening, I called Bob Watkins and asked him to come into the office early the next day, as I wanted to tell him about this great idea. We met at 8.30 and sat sketching at his drawing-board. By the end of the day, Bob had drawn up a brilliant-looking front panel and our engineer Mike Forsey had already thought about the elimination of redundant components. We worked out that we would need just one main PCB for the amplifier, tuner and power supply sections and another small PCB for the cassette section.

Over the next couple of days, Bob came up with a construction drawing of how the whole assembly would look from an engineering point of view. I told Harold Livesey to come down to Garman Road and join in on the brainstorming. By the end of that day, we had a complete construction drawing of what was to be known as the Amstrad 'tower system'. I was already scheduled to go on another trip to the Far East later in the month and this time I took Bob Watkins with me.

We had been purchasing some tuner modules from a company called Morse Electrophonics in Hong Kong, who were owned by Morse USA. Phil Morse was the boss and effectively the king of audio in America. They made large, silver-fronted music centres, but the market in America was down for that type of junk, so their Hong Kong factory was struggling for things to make. Their salesman was Moshe Mor, an Israeli whose job it was to solicit additional business.

We set up a meeting with Morse and showed them our design concept. They were very excited and started rambling on how they could sell them in America. I put a stop to that immediately - I told them that if they made this product for me, they'd have no right to sell it anywhere else, as the tooling and design would be 100 per cent owned by Amstrad. In the end we spent four days in Hong Kong negotiating with Morse, going through the bill of material on every single component, item by item, ending up with an agreement to pay them a labour and overhead cost, plus a 5 per cent margin.

One has to admire the industriousness and efficiency of the Chinese. They are unbelievable in their work ethic. The deal was struck at the end of February and my requirement was for them to ship the finished product by August, for it to arrive in September, so we could start supplying the market. It was a tight deadline and they started beavering away. A week later they'd produced a mock-up sample of the front panel. It looked a million dollars, with its shiny silver knobs, switches and meters.

As soon as the mock-up arrived, Harold built a cabinet around it and we photographed it. The target price for this product, fully assembled in a rack, with a record deck mounted on the top and supplied with a pair of speakers was PS199 retail. This would undercut the
Amstrad
separates version by PS150, let alone the Japanese competition.

Armed with photographs of the new tower system, we set about calling on all of our dealers and raised a lot of interest in the traditional channels we sold to.

In May there was a trade show held in Kensington. We took a room in the Kensington Palace Hotel and proudly displayed the mock-up of our tower system - model TS40 - in its cabinet. John Drazin, the buyer from Wool-worths, popped his head round the door. He was a funny-looking fellow, strange and very abrupt. He didn't know me from Adam, but I happened to be standing next to the TS40, so he asked me, 'How much is that?'

I told him that the trade price was around PS120, to which he immediately replied, 'When can I have some?'

I knew he was Woolworths' buyer, so my ears pricked up. I explained that they would be available in September.

'Have you got a sample for us to test?'

'Not yet, but possibly in a month or so,' I replied, not really knowing when we would get the first working sample.

'Right, well, subject to me testing the working sample, we'll take a thousand of them.'

I was taken aback, but tried to remain outwardly calm.

Throughout the course of that exhibition, we must have taken orders for 5,000 of these units, all based on a mock-up sample. Clearly we had a hit on our hands.

There were a lot of twists and turns along the way in the development of this product, but in early August, Bob Watkins went off to Hong Kong to start the production line running at Morse's factory. By the end of the month, the first thousand pieces had been produced and loaded onto a container, the fastest vessel we could get, which had a thirty-day transit time from Hong Kong.

Bob arranged for ten of these chassis to be airfreighted to the UK, so we could make up working samples and jigs at the Eastwood factory. Harold did a great job setting up the production line and as soon as the bulk cargo arrived, we flew into mass production and started to honour the Woolworths order.

Malcolm Miller, in conjunction with an advertising agency, took some
three-quarter-page advertisements in the national press, which sparked the attention of Comet. I'd mentioned the product to Nick Lightowler, but bearing in mind that his division of Comet specialised in true hi-fi, he'd given a lukewarm response, saying it wasn't suited to Comet.

However, the day after our first advert appeared in Thursday's
Daily Mirror,
Nick phoned me to say that perhaps he
would
like to try some of these things. His branch managers had been calling him, knowing that Comet normally sold Amstrad products, asking whether these tower systems were on the way.

At the bottom of the advert, it said, Available at Woolworths,' as well as a few other smaller retailers' names. Nick asked me to add Comet's name on the next bunch of adverts.

We started supplying Comet, but I received a rather irate telephone call from Gerry Mason. He bellowed down the phone, 'If you supply Woolworths then you're not supplying us!'

I tried to reason with him that the tower system was more of a consumer electronics product rather than a specialist hi-fi item. I also reminded him that there were other electrical goods that both Woolworths and Comet sold, but Gerry was furious and wasn't going to give way. There I was, faced with the buying boss of Comet telling me that he was going to halt the purchasing of all Amstrad products unless I agreed to pull out of Woolworths.

I phoned Nick Lightowler after Gerry's call. Nick was rather relaxed and told me to forget it. He said, 'Gerry's just in a rage - this is his rant of the moment. It'll all die down in a week or so.'

I wasn't convinced, but Nick knew Gerry better than anyone else did, so I guessed it was best for me to keep quiet. Comet started to sell hundreds of tower systems per week, which was good news in the sense that they'd already been delivered, so even if Mason meant what he said, it was too late.

Around this time, Ashley Morris joined forces with Dennis Hart and Malcolm, amalgamating Audio Supplies with Global. The combined group continued to trade as Global Audio and they then expanded, opening several branches.

By now, Dennis Hart had changed his surname to Hadleigh, for reasons best known to himself. We all assumed it was to try to replicate the lifestyle of the TV character James Hadleigh, a dashing, handsome country toff. Dennis had illusions of being one of the gentry, with a farm and stables, going horse-riding, clay pigeon shooting and all that stuff.

However, he had one of those 'irreconcilable differences' with the board and decided he didn't like being relegated from kingpin to effectively Ashley's
lackey. They agreed to part company and Dennis started again on his own. He opened a shop in Edgware Road, right opposite Paddington Green Police Station, and another shop up north, near Leeds.

As before, the business model was flawed - it was simply selling stuff at low prices to get cash flow. By now, Ashley's Global Audio was offering Green Shield Stamps to try to boost sales. For every pound they took, they were losing ten pence.

One day, I received a phone call at home and heard Dennis's dopey drawl. Alan, if I ask you for some invoices for stuff, will you give them to me?'

'What did you say?' I replied. 'Why do you need invoices?'

'I'm going to have a robbery and I need you to give me some invoices to support my insurance claim.'

'What? Are you fucking mad, Dennis? Get lost and don't even talk to me about this.'

'No, really, Alan, if you give me some invoices, I can make a killing.'

'Dennis, I'm going to hang up the phone now. Don't ever talk to me about such things again. Don't be silly - don't do this.'

What happened next, you wouldn't believe. Picture the scenario. His shop is bang opposite Paddington Green Police Station - the biggest and most sophisticated police station in London. As the story goes, he got a young boy who worked for him to smash a hole in the shop ceiling. He then claimed there was a break-in and that all his stock had been stolen. The police took the fact that this robbery had occurred right under their noses as a slap in the face and swung into action. Straightaway they smelt a rat and within a day the young boy had confessed that Dennis had asked him to bash the hole in the ceiling.

The next call I got was to tell me that Dennis was in Brixton Prison, awaiting processing. What a bloody idiot. I felt sorry for him and went to visit him. I remember bringing him some apples, which were confiscated by the guards who said he could only have two, not the whole bag.

I was led through a maze of locked doors before getting to the visiting room, where I saw Dennis dressed in a grey prison jacket. His eyes were bloodshot as he cried to me, 'They locked me up and put me in a cell.' It was pathetic to see this stupid man, who had tried to run with the hares and hounds, now banged up behind bars and one could only feel sorry for him.