“The world is in crisis, economies are crashing, politics is toxic and people are divided. As we fight each other, fight to survive, the world literally is burning,” Mary Portas OBE writes in her new book I Shop, Therefore I Am: The ’90s, Harvey Nicks – and Me.

The former “Queen of Shops” and government “high-street tsar” continues: “We can go one of two ways: we can continue the course of unchecked and rampant capitalism, letting the don’t give a f*** tech bros run riot or we can build something new, something beautiful, where ideas are guided by imagination and morality, where success is measured not only in profit, but in the richness of culture, the wellbeing of communities and the health of our planet.”

I Shop, Therefore I Am is Portas’s sixth book. It’s an entertaining, honest, sometimes eye-popping memoir about her time in the 1990s transforming Harvey Nichols from an old-fashioned, buttoned-up, loss-making department store into a famous, cutting-edge and profitable fashion brand.

Some might say it’s an unusual time to write about the heady days of the consumerist 1990s, but Portas wants to revisit the “beautifully innovative” decade. She believes that level of risk-taking and bold creativity is the way to take us into the planet’s next chapter, an era she calls “post consumerism”, where we rebuild a healthy planet and society.

Rebel, rebel

Portas’s idea to travel back to the thrilling and often brilliant 1990s was sparked by the 2023 Design Museum exhibition, Rebel, celebrating 30 years of the British Fashion Council’s NewGen programme. NewGen was conceived, created and launched by Portas during her time at Harvey Nichols. It spotted and nurtured new, fresh-out-of-college designers such as Erdem Moralioglu and Alexander McQueen.

“To this day, if I don’t have a great finance person with me, I’m stuck”

“I’ve always known when something feels right,” she says. “Back in 2023 I went out with my old HN team and we were laughing. We were like ‘Oh, my God. Did we really launch a NewGen designer show on the fifth floor in the restaurant and invite Vogue editor Anna Wintour and designers from all over the world? And they came.’”

Portas called her book agent as soon as she got home. “I told them I’d got a new book in me and all they had to do was work out how to publish it without being sued!” Some names in the book were changed.

I Shop, Therefore I Am is not only an unputdownable, roller-coaster ride through Portas’s time at the Knightsbridge store, but also a contextual jumping-off point for her to talk about the role creativity can play today, in our volatile and crisis-ridden world. It’s a call to action to business leaders to encourage creativity, imploring them to lead societal, cultural and commercial change. It asks business to be bold and to take risks.

“Risk has always been the thing I’ve done,” she muses. “Maybe because I had nothing to fall back on, and I was always slightly projecting forward. I literally had nothing.”  

Moving up

When Watford-born Portas was 16, her mother died. Her father remarried, but then died suddenly two years later of a heart attack. His widow chucked the Portas children out of the family home, leaving Mary Portas “homeless and skint” with a younger brother to look after. With no way to support herself in London, the aspiring actor turned down her Rada place and remained in Watford, staying with family friends and enrolling in the local Watford School of Art to study merchandising.

After a Saturday job in John Lewis, she moved to Harrods to manage window displays, then to Topshop as Display Manager. Burton Group Chairman Ralph Halpern spotted her talent and promoted her to Head of Visual Merchandise at the group’s new acquisition – Harvey Nichols. She moved up the ranks, taking on the additional responsibility of all comms and becoming a board director aged 32.

Portas left in 1997 to launch her business transformation consultancy, Yellowdoor (since renamed Portas), which works with companies ranging from Pandora to Patek Philippe, Sainsbury’s to Liberty and Clarks to the Crown Estate. Along the way there have been regular books, an OBE and numerous TV shows including the 2007 Mary Queen of Shops. In 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned The Portas Report, which looked at ways to revive the UK’s town centres in the face of growing ecommerce, and saw her dubbed the government’s “high-street tsar”. Then there is also her chain of Mary’s Living and Giving shops, now numbering 21, which have raised more than £23m for Save the Children.

Portas’s role at Harvey Nichols was not just to see it turn a profit, but also to make it famous for its creativity. She delivered: the windows became tourist attractions with themes ranging from Baroque to ‘car henge’, in which the windows displayed junkyard Chevrolets filled with mannequins holding Chanel bags.

It was Portas who invited a studious Jennifer Saunders into the store to research a new programme she was writing. Launched in 1992, Absolutely Fabulous turned Harvey Nichols into Harvey Nicks overnight and brought in a tranche of new adoring fans. The days leading up to the broadcast were nerve-wracking as she had no idea how the store – her employer – would be portrayed until the night of transmission.  

This book is of course primarily “the story of this young 28-year-old, growing and finding her place, and finding her voice within that place”, she says, adding: “It is also a business story. It shows how creativity is a business act.”

Portas is also careful to warn about the less helpful side: “When digital came in, everyone became obsessed with ‘how quick, how fast and at what price?’ The role of finance became absolutely vital, and we lost the role of creativity – that’s the wrong way round.

“Creativity fuels business, business never fuels creativity. Everything starts with an idea. We are in new territory, and we don’t quite have the language yet for this territory, but what will get us out of this [mess] is connection, ideas and creativity. And whoever’s dealing with the money has to let the ideas people breathe and bring them in.”

Kitsch and camp

In the book, Portas tells the story of one “disaster” at Harvey Nichols that started to redefine success in her head. The MD had commissioned a large US consultancy to “engage with the customer and drive efficiency”. The 56-page report that came out of it was, she recalls, “uninspiring” with one conclusion being to target the 35-year-old woman. This is a concept which gets an eye-roll reaction from Portas, who asks why businesses are so desperate to target 35-year-olds when the growth lies with the over-50s. Despite this, she did as she was asked.

“I’d read that Barbie was 35 that year so we went for a Barbie theme. Kitsch and camp.” Portas worked with Mattel to create a limited-edition doll collection to be sold in store, the concept being for windows and life-size Barbie mannequins based on New York club queen Dianne Brill. The mannequins were to be dressed in key fashion looks from the past 35 years. Mattel sent hundreds of dolls to cover the floors of the window displays.

Within a day of the launch, the dolls had sold out. But the next day campaigners were marching with placards reading “Unrealistic plastic bodies aren’t fantastic”. When a furious ex-customer issued what they called a “fatwa” against Harvey Nichols, cursing it as “everything that’s corrupt about the Western world – you must pay”, Portas was ordered by her bosses to remove the installation overnight. To make matters worse, she even received a disapproving call from her ultimate hero Anita Roddick.

Portas recalls going home that day, distraught and convinced she had destroyed her 20-year career with one window display. Arriving sheepishly the next day, she found her assistant wrapping up the redundant dolls to send to children in Great Ormond Street Hospital. As she writes in the book, Portas sat down to help: “As I wrap the dolls in Harvey Nichols tissue paper, it strikes me that success doesn’t have to be measured by sales and industry acclaim. Retail can be brutal… we need to open our eyes to the impact business can make, the joy it can spark.”

Future focused

Portas believes we are on the brink of change and shrugs at any suggestion that we are fighting against a human desire for consumerism. “There’s always going to be someone wanting to have more, but there is a rise in consciousness about consumerism,” she says.

“People don’t have as much money as before. And there’s a really important cultural shift happening about ‘do I need as much?’ The media is far less ‘get this bag before it’s gone!’, and much more about vintage and recycled, which is the fastest-growing segment in fashion.”

“Whoever’s dealing with the money has to let the ideas people breathe and bring them in”

While she emphasises the role of the individual and business in this fundamental shift, she acknowledges the part government needs to play – and is underwhelmed by this one’s actions so far. “Small and medium independent businesses are 98% of this country, and what the government has done in terms of tax and national insurance is absolutely killing them. They’ve got it wrong by putting all the power with the employee and taking it away from the businesses. It’s ridiculous because now business can’t afford to employ people.”

And if there was one thing she would ask the government to do? “Cut [business] rates. That would be the biggest thing,” she says, adding: “I’ve written to Rachel.”

Summing up her business philosophy, Portas finds a quote from theologian Krista Tippett that she keeps saved on her phone: “I talk about hope being a muscle. It’s not wishful thinking, and it’s not idealism. It’s not even a belief that everything will turn out OK. It’s an imaginative leap, which is what I’ve seen in people… who said: ‘I refuse to accept that the world has to be this way. I am going to throw my life and my pragmatism and my intelligence at this insistence that it could be different and put that into practice.’”

Portas smiles, reminding herself of the connection between daily actions, impact and hope. “Every pound spent is a vote to the future we want to live in,” she says, “and that is something we should not lose sight of. We all have a part to play in the change.”

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I Shop, Therefore I Am: The ’90s, Harvey Nicks – and Me
(Canongate, RRP £20) is out now

Book your place at the ICAS International Women’s Day ‘In Conversation’ with Mary Portas OBE. All proceeds go to the charity Smart Works