Anna Woods

By the sound of your accent, I’m guessing that Margate isn’t your original home. Ha ha. No, I’m from North Manchester – Oldham in fact, I’m a Mancunian. I moved to London 20 odd years ago. I finished my degree in Business Studies and three weeks later, I started at Topshop in London as a buyer’s admin and was like, wow, this is amazing. And what was life like for you growing up in Manchester? It was good, my mum was a probation officer and my dad was an industrial chemist, so I think I got quite a good insight into both public and private sectors – human behaviour versus the corporate world, all of which has definitely fed through to my career. Do your parents still live in Manchester? Yeah, but at the moment they’re actually in Fuerteventura having a great time, according to the messages I’m getting! Do you get to see them often? A few times a year. I go home a couple of times, they come down here and I meet my mum in London for exhibitions too. And if I met your mum today and asked her to describe your character as a young girl in one word, what do you think she would say? Probably tenacious.

Did you enjoy school? Yes, I’ve always liked studying – I was actually head girl in my final year, but I was also quite frustrated at the same time, I wanted to be doing other things. So, after your education, you left your home town and set off for London – whereabouts were you located when you were working for Topshop? I was at the head office, which was in between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street. It was brilliant in those days, but that’s entirely different to what it’s like now, it’s become ultra-fast fashion. Were you always into fashion? Yeah. I did a business degree but I’d been employed in retail since I was 15. Over the last 26 years or so, I’ve always worked in retail. I started as a Saturday assistant at River Island in Oldham and I loved it. Then, when I was at Uni, I worked in various shops such as Selfridges – I’ve just always been employed in retail. By the time I moved to London, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, which was buying. I knew that I wanted to create the product that I’d been selling on the shop floor. It was so exciting to be able to do that and also to be able to use the business knowledge I’d gained from my degree – I got to be super creative but the job was also about negotiating, making deals, getting the right products in at the right time, working with the marketing team – the whole operation.

Is that the way your brain works – is that what you’re best at? What is my brain…? I think I very much suit having my own business and growing that, I’m lucky that my brain has the capacity to deal with a lot of things at the same time. Would you say you’re entrepreneurial, or does your strength lay more on the operational side of the business? I think I would probably say both.

People have referred to you as a corporate high flyer during the time you were working in London. You were obviously enjoying the success that you had worked hard to achieve at that time, but then you suddenly decided to take a different direction – what caused that? For the first ten years of my career, I absolutely loved it. I was working for Topshop where there were very high standards – high standards of leadership but also in the quality of the product. To put that into context, when I began my career, we only had sales in January and July because they were the sale periods. If it was June, you would just have to wait – you would have to wait for something like a 10% discount code from Net-a-Porter and if you got that, it was like getting the golden ticket. At that point, I was working on the shoe department. We were buying everything from Europe, so the quality was amazing. Our targets were 55-58% profit margin and the level of stock which was sold at full price, which is referred to as the full price sell-through, was about 65-70%. By the time I left my career, my target profit margin was up to 80% and our full price sell-through was down to just 15%. During that period of time, all we had done was train our customers to expect constant discounting and as a result, everything eroded – it was just like a race to the bottom, and I wasn’t even working in bad places.

The other major disruptor at that time was the impact of the internet. When I started my career, the internet was a girl called Tabitha who sat at a small desk next to the technical department – that was ‘the internet’. And did you have to ask Tabitha what ‘the internet’ was all about? Yeah, that’s right. I’d give her my samples as I had been told to do, but had no idea what she was doing with them. It’s funny isn’t it, but that was the context of those days. At that time, it was all about bricks and mortar stores, the high street, human connections and creating a buzz, you know?

…we’ve only got one life so let’s get it right, enjoy it and be at peace with it.

So, would you say that the internet is largely responsible for what has happened to the high street? It’s certainly been a big part of it, of course, because then came along businesses like ASOS and things quickly started to change. I remember we used to have discussions about what else was going on in the high street during meetings and one of our bosses said, ‘Anna, there’s a new shop that’s opened down the road and I think they’re selling plimsolls a bit cheaper than us’. That shop was Primark and I can remember thinking, uh oh, we’ve now got to compete on price. We had never had to do that before and it just became quite sad. For the first ten years, I was really happy because none of that was happening and I was also getting regular promotions, so it was a really exciting time for me. We were in a prime location, so the Topshop crew went out a lot in the evenings and there was a great culture. It sounds as though it was a culture of work-hard, play-hard but also an exciting corporate journey at the same time. Yeah, it was really good. It was a proper corporate journey, which I loved. Following that, I went to a well-known British shoe retailer and there was a moment when I was in a strategy meeting with my technician. That was the person who would oversee things like quality control and help you fit all the shoes, because we were designing everything from scratch. Another massive part of their job was being responsible for vetting the factories that we were using and working with our suppliers to maintain, and often raise, standards. There was one supplier that we thought we shouldn’t be working with, they weren’t at the right level and we didn’t feel we could get them there but when we reported our concerns, the Merchandising Director just said, I don’t care Anna, as long as you bring me that 82% margin. I was like, oh god. That company was owned by a private equity firm at that time and you’ve either got to be part of that system, or you start to feel really uneasy. I was made redundant not long after that moment, but it was mainly because my voice wasn’t wanted – I would stick up for the staff and you know, I was just a nuisance to them when all they wanted was a big fat healthy profit margin. I wasn’t right in that place but at the time it was like crap, I’ve just lost my job and I was earning really good money. That was a hard period of time for me but I look back now and think thank God it happened. I started working for a supplier for a while but quickly returned to Whistles to create product, because I missed physical retail so much. Following that, I got a role as Head of Buying at LK Bennett and was eventually promoted to Buying and Design Director. I left there three and a half years ago to start this.

During that period when you were wondering if you were still in the right industry, or perhaps if the industry was still right for you, were you starting to think about other options and the possibility of starting your own business? My eyes had definitely been opened. I didn’t think I could still be part of that industry and the direction it was going in, so I started training to become a psychotherapist. You need to undertake a two year counselling course in order to be a psychotherapist, so I did that whilst I was at Whistles and became a qualified counsellor. Ultimately though, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to be in a room with people one-to-one every day, especially as I knew that I still loved business. So, I decided to take a Master’s in Leadership and Organisational Dynamics, which is basically about looking at businesses and how they’re run from a psychoanalytic perspective. It was a very niche degree but it kind of kept me sane through the boardroom experience. The title of that course sounds quite intense – was it as challenging as it sounds?! It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done by far, but the learning was amazing and it has definitely set me up well for running my own business in all kinds of ways.

So, you found yourself in a situation where you missed fashion retail but it was no longer an industry that you felt comfortable being part of. What was the actual trigger that made you think that you could use your love of business alongside your new academic knowledge, in order to make a positive difference to the fashion industry? It was the day that Topshop went into administration, I was in shock. I couldn’t understand how that could happen to a place that used to be so vibrant and had created so much opportunity for me. How long ago was that now? That was about three and a half years ago, I think it was around November 2020. That was the day that I set on this business because I just thought, this is wrong, there needs to be another way and I need to put my idea for how we should be shopping into action. And how long did that overall concept take to fully form? Well, I left LK Bennett that December and opened my first pop-up the following May. At that time, the route that I had in place to enable me to leave the industry was to be an executive coach – I did all my qualifications and I still do that one day a week, but this has just taken on a life of its own and I’m just following it. There’s so much potential – we’ve just been included in the Telegraph’s ‘50 Greatest Boutiques’ for 2024 and were also voted Vogue Businesses High Street Disruptor last week, which is amazing. Being called a disruptor in a positive way must be a great feeling. Yeah, it is but we genuinely are doing things really differently. Absolutely, and to be honest, our high streets need people like you – people who are challenging the way we think about them and how we can ensure their survival. Is it possible to quickly summarise what Positive Retail is all about? It’s basically a resale business. Everything that comes into the store has had a life before. Did you know that there are already six generations worth of clothing on this planet – so, if we were to stop producing any more clothes today, we would already have enough stock to last us for the next six generations. Wow, that’s quite a frightening statistic. Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff isn’t it.

The gap that I spotted was to create, what could be described as, a premium curated resale experience. You could say that I’m an alternative to Vinted, because there’s some pre-loved clothing, and I’m also an alternative to TK Maxx, which has the same model of using surplus stock, but the brands that I partner with really care about their products and the collections that they have created. I know the amount of blood, sweat and tears that go into creating good quality collections and we’re aiming to prove that you can put value back into clothes that, for whatever reason, didn’t sell the first time round. Why should a coat be worth £200 in January, but then be reduced to £60 in June? I can bring that product back into its second life and will generally be looking to sell it at around £150-160, so I’ve proven that given an elevated environment, clothing can still hold its true value. That’s the problem, nothing is valued any more, everything is too quick. The joy of the business is that people come in and they’re like, what is this shop all about, so we tell them that it’s a new concept and I feel a real pride in being able to explain that to people. And where do you think you are on this concept’s journey? Really early, I guess. We have three stores now in Margate, St Leonards and Deal and will be opening in Faversham in late August but we will definitely be looking at other locations, maybe even something in the States. We also definitely need to grow online – that’s a massive thing for us to crack. The brand has so much potential but I’m not going to rush it and make the wrong decisions just for the sake of quick growth – I’ll get there but it will be organic. I will get the right people in at the right time. Do you think that decision is partly an age and experience thing as well – having that confidence not to rush things? It is, I couldn’t have done this ten years ago – as you get older you know that life’s not going to fly by. Take things all in good time – we’ve only got one life so let’s get it right, enjoy it and be at peace with it. Is it fair to say that you have few regrets about taking the leap of faith that you did? I’m the happiest I’ve felt in terms of my working life. It’s nice not working for somebody else and being able to drive the business in a way that I want to, things like working towards B Corp certification. I spotted that on your website – what does B Corp certification entail? It’s basically a promise to your customers, and your staff, to be a responsible business in the world. Sometimes, you go through the process thinking that a lot of it should just be the norm, but sadly it isn’t. I’ll be really proud when we achieve it because the certification means that you’re actually doing what you say you’re doing. It’s the gold standard of being a responsible business.

Did you know that there are already six generations worth of clothing on this planet – if we were to stop producing any more clothes today, we would already have enough stock to last us for the next six generations.

How big is your team now? There are six of us now across the stores and here at our Head Office in Margate. And how do you actually acquire your stock? Brands like Universal Works or WAX will send us lists of their surplus stock. We then select which items we want and ask for them to be sent here. So, you’re still creating collections but the process is different – instead of being part of a system that is producing more new clothes, you’re now selecting existing surplus stock to create a curated collection from a range of premium brands. Spot on and more brands are learning about what we are doing and starting to come to us now as well. That’s great, I guess they are looking at you and thinking you are a brilliant addition to the high street mix – an aspect that has been missing. Yeah, and one that is credible and shares the brand values of the labels we now work with – quality, creativity, ethics and also things like the shopping experience.

That’s something that I wanted to ask you about – what kind of shopping experience are you trying to cultivate? We just want people to feel welcome and for everybody to leave our stores feeling better than when they walked in. Not only that, because of the mission of our business, it’s an education piece as well. We will ask if they have been in one of our stores before and if they haven’t, we will explain what we’re doing and why. If they’re really interested in that side of things, we can tell them more about the damage that fast fashion is causing and what we are doing to try and improve that situation.

In terms of the in-store feel, I would say the stores are vibey, I want the experience to be fun, I want there to be music. It might sound mad, but I want to recreate the feeling that we all got when we walked into Topshop in Oxford Circus and were thinking, this is so great! I think it’s about creating something where people feel like you’ve cared about them, you’ve cared about the way the clothing looks, you’ve given time, love and energy into the store and you’re doing the same for the people that walk through the door. I also do a series of fashion truth-teller events. They usually take place away from our stores but they’re an equally important part of our brand because people don’t know enough about the fashion industry and I can help to educate them. Of course, it’s important to strike a balance at those events – it has to be about passing on knowledge and not being judgemental about anything or anyone. Ultimately, we are trying to make it all about having fun, a fun place to shop with great stock, where you’re doing the right thing and also connecting with people in your community that are of a like mind. Ultimately, that’s what shopping on the high street should be about.