Tiger growl florida12/8/2023 ![]() Their idea to bring the business to Britain took off when Philip saw a shop to let in Crouch End, north London, that he thought would be a good site for the brand. Photograph: Hakan Yazici/PR Company Handout The Flying Tiger shop in Stratford, east London. Because something is low-price doesn’t mean it needs to be nasty or negative or anything like that.” Philip, whose sister Susanne is the award-winning director of the BBC TV series The Night Manager, says: “There was disconnect between the prices and the product and the environment from a British perspective. We used to see him a little bit socially and say ‘you know, this would be such a brilliant idea to bring this to the UK’.” “We knew the guy who had started it, somebody that Philip had known through school and through family. I just thought it would be a brilliant idea to bring it to the UK. “Philip hates shopping and I would make sure that every visit I would happen to go in there because it’s a fun place and there is always something I would buy. “When I first saw Tiger there I loved it,” she says. Emma, from Liverpool, thought it could thrive in the UK. The Biers initially came across Tiger when shopping in Copenhagen, Philip’s hometown. There is no way you could buy that kind of frame for £10.” But then he realised “we had loads of artists buying them to use the frame. “At first I was like, ‘Ok, nobody is going to buy that’,” Philip says. One of Tiger’s most popular products over the last decade was a fake Mona Lisa painting. Tiger now sells products for as much as £60 and has shops on Kings Road in Chelsea and Oxford Street in central London. There are now 44 shops in the region.Īnalysts initially described Tiger as a “posh Poundland”, but the Biers believe it has developed into an affordable Danish design store. In 2015, the most recent accounts available, their share of the Tiger business – which covers London and the south-east – generated sales of £41m and profits of £7m. “It depends on what happens to tuition fees,” he says with a smile. He declines to reveal how much they made by selling their stake, saying only that it was an “amazing return on our initial investment” and that his ambition for his two children has been met. Philip says he decided to change careers because he wanted see his children leave university with no debt, which he considered impossible in photography, an industry under pressure from a digital revolution. It was a brand that nobody knew, and we were underfunded, incredibly underfunded, with hindsight.” I had no experience of employing anybody and no book-keeping or financial training. “If you had applied logic to it, it was so full of holes. If you rewind to when we started and you said to us ‘could you run 44 shops, including one on Oxford Street, and have a thousand staff?’, I would have said ‘no way’. “Neither of us had real business experience before. “We have brought it to way beyond our expectations in numbers of shops, staff, finances, and in finding out our own capabilities,” Philip says.
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