Peugeot 206, drove home, and emptied it on my parents’ drive. They knew nothing about me leaving until they came out and saw my clutter on their driveway. They were furious. So then, I was on a mission to prove everybody wrong. Two weeks later I started working for the John Lewis website styling team based in Sloane Square in Chelsea. I was the website coordinator, so I was folding a hundred and fifty scarfs ready for them to be photographed, picking up props for shoots, etcetera. I skipped around a few different jobs until I settled at a Danish fashion company called Bestseller as a visual merchandiser. Daks : I don’t know them, but my girlfriend is Swedish so she knows all the Scandinavian brands. Noble : Yes, she will, they are an absolute beast. I was going back and forth to Denmark to do the buying and selling and then I moved to Superdry. I wanted to be a key account manager,
but there were already a lot of talented people at Bestseller who had been there for longer than me and I wasn’t getting the promotion that I wanted. I was getting a bit impatient. A headhunter got in touch and asked if I wanted to move to Superdry for a key account role, and the day I got the job I was told by the Danish company that I wasn’t ready for key accounts. Daks : Ha-ha! I’ll show you! Noble : Yes! Within three months I was international Sales Manager for Superdry, managing a £26 million budget. I was winging it to be honest, at the beginning, but I loved it. Then I moved to Juicy Couture after Superdry. Daks : Excellent. And you’ve recently bought Tayroc, but before that, you had another company, which was your own business consultancy? Noble : It’s called LID Project, which I still run, with my partner Danny. It’s a sales and business development agency. I met Dan back in 2014 when I was at Juicy and he was running the LID Project as an independent consultant and specializing in the events world. I joined him, except I was doing the same thing for fashion and retail. That’s how we came to
know Tayroc. They were one of our clients. Daks : So what was it about Tayroc that made you think that this is the next step in your career? Noble : Tayroc was set up by two sets of brothers with two different management styles. Daks : I think I can see where this is going. Noble : Two of the brothers left, and then the other brothers decided they wanted to do something else. So in January 2020, they asked us if we could help them find a buyer. We had a bit of a soft spot for the brand, and after looking at the figures, we said, why don’t we have a go at this ourselves? So now LID Projects owns the majority shareholding in Tayroc. Daks : So that brings us nicely on to talk about Tayroc the brand. You have only been working on the company for a short period of time, but it looks like there are already a lot of new things happening. It was a watch company originally, but you are already bringing a lot of new products onto the market.
Noble : Thanks, Michael! It’s really nice to meet you, even though I am a little bit nervous. I don’t know why, because I could talk about Tayroc until the cows come home. Daks : Well, why don’t we start at the beginning, because I am always curious about people’s career paths. You studied at Nottingham Trent University? Noble : Yes, I did, but I didn’t stay long. I went off to do fashion marketing and visual communication at University, but I was very frustrated and felt that I wanted to get on and get into a head office and do the kind of things that we had been talking about at Uni. So, I packed up the
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