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Mothercare's CEO, Simon Calver, aims to parlay the international British brand into a truly global enterprise.mini storage By Joyce HooiSIMON Calver is bracing himself for next year. He has plenty to preoccupy himself with, what with being Mothercare's turnaround man and a new father to two small children. But what he is steeling himself for, however, is his birthday."It's my 50th, next year, so I've got to just be brave," he tells The Business Times, grimacing slightly at the prospect of the looming semi-centennial milestone.Mr Calver has no reason for any apprehension, for even before joining the British maternity and children's merchandise chain, he has done just about everything that a man in suit can hope to do in a lifetime.Having practically been born into retail, the Englishman has had a head start."My grandfather set up supermarkets and my brother was born above one of the supermarket shops, and for the first 16 to 17 years of our lives, we were stocking shelves, merchandising, working on the tills. It's probably the best retail training that you can have, when it's your own family business," he explains.The youngest of three boys, he spent his early years in Gloucester literally trying to pull his own weight. "My father said that we were no use in the business until we could carry a sack of potatoes, (which was) about 25 kilos or something like that. So at the age of 10 or 11, you desperately try to drag a sack of potatoes around," Mr Calver says, smiling at the memory.After stints at the big boys of retail - Unilever and PepsiCo - he branched out into technology, first with Dell, and went on to become CEO of a venture called LOVEFiLM in 2005. Europe's answer to Netflix, LOVEFiLM hit startup jackpot when it was bought out by Amazon in 2011. This deal was estimated by some to have valued LOVEFiLM at ¢G200 million (S$415 million).Fateful tryst along the aislesThe buyout would partially pave the way for Mr Calver to join Mothercare and return to his retail roots, for about the same time, the group hit the skids in a very public manner.In 2011, the beleaguered company issued a series of profit warnings as parents tightened up their purse strings and Mothercare's UK stores were the worse off for it, dragging down the group's bottom line. That year, the company joined the ranks of High Street retailers targeted by short sellers.Towards the end of 2011, the bell tolled for its then-CEO, Ben Gordon, who left Mothercare by "mutual consent" after nine years with the group.Fatefully, at the same time that Mothercare's corporate office was looking for a new CEO, Mr Calver was bewilderedly wandering the aisles of one of its stores.This is Monty's fault, Mr Calver will have you know. It is a weighty accusation to level at his baby boy who was only three months old then, but history is what it is."I was sent out to get some baby clothes and where else would I go, but Mothercare. I was walking around and I struggled to find what I needed. So I went home and tried online, and again, it didn't work as seamlessly as I thought it would," he says. "This was a brand that is one of the best globally. It had amazing customer loyalty and yet wasn't delivering the experience that I wanted."At this stage, any other man would have thrown up his hands and sent the wife out for the baby clothes instead. Mr Calver, however, turned a thwarted shopping expedition into a new career."I heard about the changes going on, and I thought, this is a business I want to be involved in. So I sent a note to the people who were doing the search for the new CEO, and I said, 'You've got my next job'. And they said, 'What's that?' And I said, 'Chief executive of Mothercare,' " Mr Calvers recalls.His background, which ran the gamut of retail, marketing and online ventures, was enough to convince the Mothercare board, and by April 2012, Mr Calver was hired.That, however, was when the real work began. Once at Mothercare, he put in place a three-year turnaround plan that involved cost-cutting, store-closing and a fundamental rethink of how the business should view itself. "At that stage, we had about 311 stores (in the UK), there were about 111 or so that weren't profitable. So we set ourselves a target of getting to 200 stores," Mr Calver says.Eighteen months into the job, he had brought the number of UK stores down to 237. "The UK, when I first arrived, lost ¢G25 million. We estimated that there was about ¢G15-20 million of cost savings we could take out and about ¢G13 million of losses that we had in unprofitable stores. So if we fixed those over three years, we could improve the profitability of the UK (business)," he explains.The biggest change, but perhaps the one that was the most intangible, was going from being an international firm to a global one. There is a world of a difference between the two, Mr Calver believes.A cohesive whole"An international business means you happen to have some markets internationally... but to become a global business, you need to think about your customers, partners and markets in a very different way. You need to develop things once for your global market as opposed to developing it twice for (the) UK and international markets," he says."It's a subtle difference but it means a lot in terms of the type of people you recruit, the way you structure and think about the business. We've been international for many years; we're now in a transition to becoming global."One of the reasons Mothercare floundered before Mr Calver's arrival is related to this ability to think of the group's global sprawl as a cohesive whole.In contemplating how Mothercare had reached the state it was in two years ago, Mr Calver says: "The same people were doing international and UK, and as international grew, they turned their focus towards international rather than the UK. It was just about focus and execution."Now, Mr Calverself storages turnaround has begun to show up in the numbers. For its latest half-year earnings announced last month, Mothercare raked in the first half-year underlying profit that it has seen since the financial year of 2010/2011.While its UK stores' like-for-like sales growth had languished in negative territory since before Mr Calver's arrival, the decline has at least slowed down from -3.4 per cent a year ago to -1.4 per cent in the last period."We're not positive yet, but we're moving towards that direction," he says.Just as Mr Calver's firstborn, Monty, had a pivotal role in his decision to join Mothercare, his second child, Nieve, has had one small, chubby hand in the group's product development."Recently, we launched a range of feeding bottles called Innosense. Nieve was just born at the time. She doesn't know that she was a guinea pig, but I used Nieve to test the product and she loved it," he says."I was able to tell the team that this is what's working well and this is what we should change. I can speak passionately as someone who's stood there at 3 o'clock at night with a bottle in my hand, trying to feed the baby."Being a relatively new father, Mr Calver is himself the ideal target market of one, which came in handy during a visit to a pushchair supplier in China a year ago."I was walking around the factory, speaking to them and I saw a product and offered to demo it... it was exactly the product that I would have loved to have had when Monty was born. It was a flat bassinet as well as a pushchair and you could change (it to be) front and rear-facing, (with) a car seat," he says.There and then, Mr Calver did an exclusive worldwide deal with the supplier for the pushchair and five months later, the Xpedior pushchair was in stores."It's now probably one of our fastest-selling pushchairs," he says.While the group's retail role might be clear, the brand occupies a special niche in the consumer landscape, given its close association with one of the most sentimental and meaningful of life events."We have some examples in the UK where store colleagues have become godparents to children of customers because they've built a relationship and a friendship with them," Mr Calver reveals."It's very different from a lot of retail stories and the High Street. One of the most important things we can do is care for our customers like no other retailer I've met."For all the attention being paid to Mothercare's UK operations, it is easy to see why its international markets have long overshadowed the domestic end.Examined side by side, the group's UK and international markets form a study in contrasts. For the first half of its financial year ended October 12, underlying losses for the UK operations stood at ¢G14.9 million, 12 per cent less than the losses sustained a year ago.Its international businesses, however, carried on like gangbusters, gaining 13.5 per cent to ¢G25.2 million, helped along by a net 87 stores opening up in that period. Now, stores outside the UK account for about 60 per cent of space and worldwide network sales.As Mothercare moves into 2014, it will expand its global presence at the same time."We have fewer than 50 stores in China at the moment. If you consider the number of Chinese babies there are out there, we're just scratching the surface. We would expect to double our storebase in China in the next 12 months," Mr Calver says.Even in Singapore, where the populace is not renowned for its fecundity, there is room for expansion.Pang Kim Hin, the chairman of Mothercare (S) Pte Ltd, told BT: "Our next focus is quite a fair bit of trying to expand existing stores in Singapore, especially the ones which are very successful for us. We're in the midst of negotiations now, and we will expand two of our stores."Elsewhere, in markets such as the Middle East, the same expansion strategy is slated to unfold. "Where before a smaller store, 3,000, 4,000 square feet would have been big enough, now it's 6,000, 8,000, 12,000 square feet. So stores are getting bigger as people are looking for more things to shop for," Mr Calver says.Revamped platformEven as Mothercare stacks up the bricks and mortar, its online presence is taking shape. Last year, the chain launched a new website. "The one that we had wasn't really providing the service that we need for customers," Mr Calver says."Now, many customers shop with us in a way that they didn't before. They're shopping online, using their phones to showroom, to look at products in stores before they buy. There're a lot of changes going on and we need to ensure that this is a business ready to cope with those changes and be absolutely on our game."So far, the numbers bode well for the new revamped platform, with online sales for the UK seeing double-digit growth.In keeping with Mr Calver's Web 2.0 background, he also maintains a Twitter account under the handle @Simonformums, through which he responds to customers, retweets customers' photos and posts updates on the brand."I have a few followers (he had almost 600 at last count). I'm not an international celebrity or rock star. It's a great way to get feedback and interact with customers," Mr Calver says."So, watch this space. There'll be more coming."Mr Calver might turn 50 next year, but if Mothercare continues on its present course, he will have more than his birthday to celebrate.joyceh@sph.com.sgSIMON CALVERChief Executive Officer, Mothercare plcBorn July 19641985-1988 Graduate trainee, Lever Brothers1988-1991 Senior Associate, Deloitte Consulting1995-1998 Vice-President and General Manager, Pepsi Cola UK & Ireland1998-2000 Vice President International sales operations, Pepsi Cola International2000-2003 Vice-President and General Manager, Dell Inc2003-2005 Chief Operating Officer, Riverdeep PLC2005-2012 Chief Executive, LOVEFiLM International Ltd2012-present Chief Executive Officer, Mothercare plc迷你倉