THE PATRON SAINT OF GAFFES

THE PATRON SAINT OF GAFFES

 

I don’t recall about whom it was said, but the article in the newspaper I read more than  twenty-five years back said that he had “done a Ratner”. I did not quite get the meaning then, but the expression stayed with me.

The memory cells were reactivated the other day when this came up in a quiz. “To do a Ratner” is to say something so stupid that it sends your fortunes plummeting. Research led me to his autobiography “Gerald Ratner: The Rise and Fall … and Rise Again”.

Ratner was the CEO of the Ratner’s Group. Think of him as the poor man’s De Beers. He had worked for about two decades in the family business of imitation jewellery which had about 150 stores but had seen no spectacular success. After he inherited the business in 1984, he “re-engineered” it and in six years, it had 2,000 outlets targeting the working class.

How did he do it? Ratner claims that when he was young, he had noticed that the vendors selling the best goods at the Petticoat Lane Market were not the ones who got the most sales; it was the hawkers who yelled the loudest that most customers were drawn to.

Ratner applied this concept to his own business when he took over the Ratner's Group and he made sure that all of the shops in the Ratner's chain had bright orange displays that loudly advertised their prices and deals. Soon he captured half the market and Ratner’s became a household name.

True, those who could afford the real stuff thought that the baubles he sold were tacky and gaudy and looked cheap. Though ridiculed by other jewellers and the affluent, those who did not have the moolah to buy the genuine stuff or did not want to dip into their savings flocked to Ratner's. Spurred by the publicity blitz and the low prices, sales went through the roof.

As the key person responsible for the stupendous success of the company, Ratner was invited by the Institute of Directors to speak about how he’d made his company so big so fast.

 

He started the speech well, but at some point, a member of the audience asked him  how his company could sell things so cheap. That was a fateful moment. You can listen to his now infamous response here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKtBkVrqYYk

You can hear him say “Because it’s total crap.” He also said that the earrings he sold were “cheaper than prawn sandwiches but probably wouldn’t  last as long”.

 

This has gone down as one of the biggest blunders in business history. So much so that even Ratner refers to this as “the speech”.

 

He may have been honest, or may have spoken in a light vein because it was a private event. He may not have expected that the journalists listening would not report all that. The next day it was national news. Overnight, the market capitalization of the company dropped by 500 million pounds (much more than one billion dollars at today’s rates). Customers began avoiding and English language adopted a new eponymous phrase: “do a Ratner”, meaning really screw up things.

 

If you ever said something that you immediately regretted having said or wanted to take back straight away, remember Gerald Ratner, the patron saint of gaffes.