Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Memories, Music and Movies – 1991 – Perfume, Posh Bird, Diana Ross and The Commitments
I cannot remember a time when music and movies where not a part of my life.
1991 – Perfume, Posh Bird, Diana Ross and The Commitments
Doesn’t time fly by when you are enjoying yourself? It only seems like yesterday that I wrote the first post in this series for the year 1962 when I was nine and in love with Nat King Cole and Richard Chamberlain. Twenty-nine years later I was still listening to Nat King Cole and re-watching Shogun and The Thorn Birds which had pride of place in my VHS collection.
At the end of 1990 after six months working as Advertising Sales Manager for the holiday brochure subsidiary of the newspaper I had moved over from, I decided that cold calling to hotels and seaside B&BS was not perhaps the direction I wanted my career to go in. It had been a great three years but my hours were long and so were David’s and something had to give.
I decided to work for myself and I began to offer my services to start ups in our local area that needed someone to look at their marketing and promotion. At the same time I signed up for Echoes L’Arome and for the next 15 months I held perfume parties locally and built up a network of about five agents who did likewise. We lived in South Woodford and my patch was the Walthamstow area and for a time things went well. I smelt nice that is for certain.
In essence it was a pyramid business with everyone getting their percentage and I got into it at the wrong end of the trend. The market was actually pretty saturated in the London area and I ended up going further and further afield to build my network. On one occasion I was in a tower block in East London when I was confronted with a handful of gentlemen who felt the need to interfere in my business. Luckily I am endowed with a fluency in Anglo-Saxon and they were rather taken aback that this ‘posh bird’ could out do them in that department. Their obvious bemusement gave me time to slip off down the stairs to my car but my enthusiasm was waning and by Christmas after a few good parties I decided to go back to work. 1992 thankfully proved to be a much better year for me and more about that next week.
