Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Co-founder of Green & Blacks, the first organic and Fairtrade luxury chocolate brand; a serial entrepreneur known for making ethical chocolate mainstream.
On the island
Eight records
one of the tracks that I kind of got from Craig, my husband, and it's definitely funkier than my normal music taste
I Wanna Be Like YouFavourite
We would go and see films as a treat, often on Boxing Day, and my dad would buy us the album. And we would then spend the next few months acting out this film in the living room.
My dad loved Sinatra, he loved the whole rat pack, and this was often playing in our house, and it's very appropriate because he had so much to do with the astronauts and so much to do with the moon landings. And we played it at his funeral, actually, as well
I love women singers like Carly Simon, like Carol King, and what my husband does refer to as sad lady music. But I love it. And this is the quintessential sad lady song, I think.
for me both music and perfume have an ability to transport you through time and space faster than a TARDIS and I was in New York with a couple of girlfriends it was steamy hot. We were walking down 2nd Avenue and there was a guy in front of us with a boom box on his shoulder blasting out La Isla Bonita and every time I hear it I can virtually feel the humidity in the air
I have chosen this because my best friend was Paula Yates, who I met through my journalism again. And we were best friends for 20 years and loved each other to pieces. I was always there for her. And George Michael was a particular favourite of ours. This track, when it came on, we used to slow dance together.
I hated opera before I met Craig. He introduced me to the joys of opera, and particularly Wagner, which I never thought I would like. And this piece of music we loved so much with its orgasmic crescendo that we had it played at our wedding.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:41What was it that convinced you to go in such a different direction back in 1991?
I found two squares of chocolate on my health food entrepreneur boyfriend at that stage desk and I put them in my mouth and a taste explosion went off and I said what is this? This is the best chocolate I've ever eaten and Craig Sams, now my husband, said it's the world's first organic chocolate. And I said what are you going to do with it? And he said I can't really do anything. … And I just kept on and on at him. And eventually he turned around and said, Look, if you're so interested, you do it. … And I had sold my flat before I'd moved in with him and I had banked £20,034 in equity. And two tons of chocolate were going to cost twenty thousand pounds. … So I literally gambled everything on what I thought was, you know, a really exciting idea.
Presenter asks
5:14What rules did you have for mixing your business and private life?
I had to be really strict quite early on because I realised that we were talking about business all the time and that we wouldn't have a marriage as well as a business. So we had separate offices, but when we got home in the evening, we would catch up by going for a walk round Nottinghill for an hour. And we would download our day, have ideas, discuss business, and then when we got home again, we were banned from talking about it till the next day. And that was how I think we managed to stay romantically involved as well as being in business together.
The keepsakes
The book
Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants
National Geographic
the book I really want to take is an absolutely beautiful book by the National Geographic, and it's called Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants. And we're very interested in our house in eating unusual things. But this book has all kinds of tropical plants, so I figure it will help me identify on the island which ones are edible and which ones might kill me.
The luxury
I am going to take my pillow, which isn't particularly special, but is my pillow and it's got my microbiome in it, which means that basically it's got my bugs in it. But it means wherever I go, any hotel I stay in, any plane I'm on, I am able to go out like a light. And I think that if I could cozy up with my own pillow, I know I'm very capable of making a lovely little bire in the corner.
Presenter asks
5:54You said earlier that if you had had any idea what you were in for, you would have been too scared to do it. Tell me more about that.
Everything that we did with Green and Blacks was very instinctive, it was very it felt right always. So I wasn't intellectualizing about it, thinking would this be right for the brand? I was doing it as I felt it. But if someone says one day your brand is going to be bought by a huge company, then I think I'd start to worry about figures more and worry about strategy and planning. And I'm really, that's not my thing.
Presenter asks
6:08In terms of the workload, what was your average day like back then?
Oh, I was no stranger to 18 hours because there was no money to pay me. All our money was tied up in stock right from the very beginning. So I retained my career as a journalist. And so I would get up really early in the morning to meet deadlines and interview people on the phone. And, you know, I just juggled these two roles. So quite often it was an 18-hour day.
Presenter asks
7:03Do you think that corporations and consumers might be moving away from that kind of social responsibility?
The Velvet Collection comes under the Cocoa Life Project, which is Cabrie's own project in West Africa. And they're very open about the fact that this was really influenced partly by seeing how we did business. You know, big business is trying to learn from small business about how to do things. I'm just incredibly proud that we've played a role in that, because a little company can make a small difference, but a big company can make a massive difference.
Presenter asks
8:27Tell me a little bit about your family, especially your maternal grandfather.
My maternal grandfather, William Powell Richards, you have to see it with a Welsh accent, came from South Wales with nothing and built himself up to be a very successful entrepreneur with factories producing women's clothing in the East End and lost everything in the war due to the bombing. I still have an attic full of buttons that were rescued from one of the factories, and if you open the box today, you can still smell the smoke from the factory burning down. So the most extraordinarily resilient man because. He had six children, and all he cared about at the end of the war was the fact that they were all still alive, including my two uncles, twin brothers, who were in the D-Day landings. So, you know. It's an amazing inspiration.
“I literally gambled everything on what I thought was, you know, a really exciting idea.”
“I was no stranger to 18 hours because there was no money to pay me.”
“I had this idea that somewhere out there was a much more interesting world and it wasn't happening within the four walls of Bromley High School for Girls.”
“If you s make so much as a Girl Friday, Joe Fairleigh, I'll eat my hat.”
“I think it's in your darkest moments that you find your greatest strengths.”
“I discovered a word the other day that I think sums me up. … at midlife, you either become generative or stagnant.”