The forgotten founder of ghd

ROBERT Powls is the former hairdresser from Ilkley who helped develop the hairstyling phenomenon called ghd. He now lives in some luxury on a yacht in the South of France after walking away with £15m following a buyout of the Yorkshire firm in 2006. David Parkin reports.

Back in his native Yorkshire on a business trip recently, Powls reflected on his work creating the successful hair straightening irons brand.

A quietly spoken man, what has irked him since he left the business three years ago is how he feels his involvement has been overlooked by current ghd managing director and his one-time business partner Martin Penney who completed a further buyout of the business last year backed by private equity firm Montagu.

While that deal was said to value Silsden-based ghd owner Jemella Group at £160m, Powls appears unconcerned about the money and more focused on the apparent air-brushing out of his role in the launch of ghd.

The Halifax-born former hairdresser has advised brands including RedKen and Paul Mitchell and has acted as a consultant to Marks & Spencer on toiletries.

With worldwide contacts, he was always on the look out for new products in the hairdressing industry.

When an American friend visited his Ilkley home in 1999 he told him of a new hair straightening iron that he had developed which was different to anything previously sold.

“I got a prototype and did my wife Susan’s hair with it and the next morning she came downstairs and said ‘I’m having a really good hair day today’. That was

how we came up with the name, but because it wouldn’t fit on the box it became ghd,” remembers Powls.

“We used a huge transformer as it was on US voltage.

“It had a new type of heating element that boosts temperature to 180 degrees so the effect you got was quite dramatic,” he says. There was also the serious problem of price.

“The problem was that this would cost £80 and the irons on the market cost less than £20.”

But with hairstyles changing in the new millennium driven by the Hollywood look encapsulated by Friends star Jennifer Aniston and actress Gwyneth Paltrow, women were starting to look for ways to style their own hair in the way they had it done in a salon.

“At that time straight hair was the thing, with Jennifer Aniston etc.”

Powls found a supplier in Korea that could produce the styling irons and set up his business from home.

“It started in my kitchen in Ilkley, we had eight ladies from Addingham stuffing English instructions in the boxes that came from Korea. We had products all

over the house. The one room that didn’t have irons in was my bedroom!

Powls admits that ghd irons did not become an overnight success.

For him the point when things started to take off was after he took to the streets of London’s West End to show off his design to hairdresser friends and contacts

“I was in a salon and the beauty editor of the Evening Standard was there and I demonstrated the irons to her and she almost burst into tears and said: ‘I have never been able to do my hair like this’.

“She gave us a a half-page write-up two days later and from that point we didn’t have enough products to satisfy demand. In the first year our sales were half a million quid.”

Sales continued to grow, but Powls had decided not to do a deal with a high street retailer to sell his products – despite Boots clamouring for them.

Instead he sold them through hair salons.

That move ensured two things – that ghd was seen to have hairstylists’ seal of approval and so made the price tag of £80-plus appeared more justified.

It was a bold gamble, as Powls readily admits.

“When I talk to friends in the trade they credit me with changing the attitude of hairdressers to the way they sold retail products. Prior to that it was £5

shampoos [being sold in salons].”

Despite the success of the business, it was still based at his Ilkley home.

“The number on the box was my home telephone number. [Opera singer] Lesley Garrett rang from America at 2am and said she wanted some of our irons!”

For Powls the early success brought the problem of how it could be sustained.

“I was worred that we didn’t have enough capital to keep it going. Martin Penney was a friend and said he would put some money in. He got another friend of

his called Gary Douglas, who was in plant hire, to put money in and we had a third of the business each.”

So the former hairdresser was now co-owner of one of the trendiest brands in haircare with a former asbestos consultancy owner and a businessman in plant hire.

In the first year Powls says that the business made £120,000 profit on £500,000 of sales.

“In year two sales were £12m and for much of that time we were still operating out of my kitchen. The overheads were still minute. We had containers full of irons arriving at my house at all hours – 4am sometimes!”

He says turnover in the third year had rocketed to £38m. He credits the work of Julian Kynaston and his Yorkshire-based marketing and creative agency Propaganda with developing the ghd brand into a household name with its ‘Do you believe in ghd?’ campaign plus sponsorship of TV show The Salon as well as a host of celebrities being linked with the styling irons.

Gary Douglas, who now lives in Spain, made around £15m from his initial £15,000 in Jemella.

“I was very fortunate, I made a great investment and it came good for me. But it was Robert’s baby and he hasn’t been recognised for that,” he says.

While Powls and Douglas are not critical of Penney, the relationship between the three did go “sour” as Douglas describes it, sometime before the first buyout by private equity player LDC.

Powls says he went out to Australia to launch an office and recruit a managing director and put in place plans to more to a new headquarters in Silsden

He says: “I was very aware that we only had one product and we were building a good brand name with a lot of brand awareness. I wanted to bring out more products and develop the iron further.”

Before that happened the three co-owners parted company following the MBO deal two years ago which effectively saw Penney buyout Powls and Douglas backed by LDC.

He then went on to complete the second deal in which Montagu backed him and bought out LDC at a considerable premium to their original investment in the firm.

Penney has since won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.

Powls, 61, lives with his wife on a luxury yacht on the Cote D’Azur where among the four-strong crew is Harrods owner Mohammed Fayed’s former chef.

He admits that ghd made him a wealthy man but the business was more than that to him.

“It had been my baby, I had lived and breathed it.”