Jacqueline Gold

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Jacqueline Gold (born 1959), is a British business woman, currently Chief Executive of Ann Summers and Knickerbox.

1 Biography
2 Personal life
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Biography

Jacqueline is the daughter of David Gold, the owner of Birmingham City F.C. and one of the driving forces behind the British high-street pornographic industry. David wept when Jacqueline was born to his first wife, because he wanted a son.^[1]

After school Jacqueline began working at Royal Doulton, but decided she did not want to go into management, and asked her father to gain extra work experience. After acquiring the four stores of the "Ann Summers" chain in 1972, her father gave Jacqueline at the age of 19 summer work experience in May 1979 - Jacqueline was paid £45 a week, less than the tea lady.^[2]

As her parents had separated when she was 12, Gold was not close to her father. Gold also didn't like the atmosphere at "Ann Summers", which was David Gold's "up market" clean sex shop. Gold says of her introduction: "It wasn't a very nice atmosphere to work in. It was all men, it was the sex industry as we all perceive it to be."

But a chance visit to a Tupperware-style fashion party in an east London flat in 1981 changed everything - Jacqueline saw the potential of selling sexy lingerie and sex toys to women in the privacy of their own homes. Jacqueline launched the Ann Summers Party Plan - a home marketing plan for sex toys, with a strict "no men allowed" policy. These parties were and remain immensely popular, providing women with an excuse to meet for a party and talk about sex, and have entered British popular culture. They also provided the company with a way of circumventing the law which limited their presentation space for sex toys.^[3]

Jacqueline was made Chief Executive of Ann Summers in 1987, and transformed it into a multi-million pound business, with a sales force today of over 7,500 women as party organisers; 136 high street stores in the UK, Ireland, Channel Islands and one each in Spain and Australia; with an annual turnover of £155 million. The takeover of Knickerbox in 2000 added another five stores, with Knickerbox concessions in every Ann Summers store.

Jacqueline has been the subject of several documentaries including Back to the Floor, Ann Summers Uncovered, So What Do You Do All Day, Break with the Boss, and co-presented the daytime business series Mind Your Own Business on BBC1. She has also appeared on the ITV 1 show Fortune - Million Pound Giveaway^[4] and in 2007, she was one of 12 well known individuals to serve as a jury in a fictional rape case in the BBC TV project The Verdict.

Jacqueline has been voted the second Most Powerful Woman in Retail by Retail Week, the Most Inspirational Businesswoman in the UK in a survey by Barclays Bank and handbag.com, one of Britain's Most Powerful Women by many publications including Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and Woman magazines, one of Britain's 100 Most Influential Women by the Daily Mail, Business Communicator of the Year 2004,^[5] and was made a new entry in Debrett's People of Today 2005 for her contribution to British society.

Her autobiography Good Vibrations was published in 1995 (Pavilion Books), and has a new book A Woman's Courage to be published April 2007 (Ebury). She is a columnist for Retail Week, New Business and Kent Business.

[edit] Personal life

After an early failed marriage, her partner was money market dealer, Dan Cunningham, still in his twenties^[6]. The couple split on New Years Day 2006, after three failed IVF attempts and his affair^[7].