Written by: Nick Kirby
Posted: 26/10/2012
As Managing Director of the Huggler Group,
Lawrence Huggler oversees a seemingly eclectic mix
of businesses, but there is very clear thinking behind
each one, as he explains to Nick Kirby.
You wouldn't normally expect one
company to have a hand in hotels, restaurants,
printing, beauty products and online posters,
photobooks and greetings cards, but that is
exactly what the Huggler Group does.
Huggler
is a name that has been synonymous with
business in Jersey for decades, but it is only in the last eight years that
the Group has really started to branch out into these diverse areas.
The Group currently owns and operates the five-star Club
Hotel & Spa, and the three-star Apollo Hotel in Jersey (as well as
the Apollo Hotel in Basingstoke). It also owns and operates Bohemia
Bar & Restaurant in Jersey, as well as being the major shareholder
in feelunique.com, an online health and beauty retailer, and
mymemory.com, the UK's fastest growing site for photobooks and
photo-related products. And to round things off, Huggler Properties
develops, owns and manages properties, and Huggler Print is
Jersey's largest printer.
At the helm of the company is Managing Director, Lawrence
Huggler, who appreciates that this may seem something of
a miscellany of business interests. He took time to explain to
businesslife.co exactly how this all came about.
Tell us how you got started in business.
While I was at Nottingham Uni doing my engineering degree, I was
actually doing some motor racing, and left university to try and carry
on with that for a couple of years. Unfortunately, I was no Michael
Schumacher and it's a very expensive sport to be in, so in 1999
I decided to go into the family business.
At the time, we had just purchased a former Hilton hotel in
Basingstoke, so my first job was to take over its day-to-day running,
and then its redevelopment – we knocked half of it down and rebuilt
it. Running a hotel while developing it was quite a steep learning
curve. In 2003, after that project was complete, I returned to Jersey.
Why did you move back?
To take over the management of the Jersey hotels as well. At the time
we had the Apollo and the Beaufort, and they were both three-star
leisure hotels. When I came back, the original plan had been to
redevelop the Beaufort and we had been looking at options such
as commercial property and flats, then we came up with the idea
of creating a boutique hotel. No new hotel had been opened in Jersey
for over 20 years, so it was a pretty big concept.
We designed and developed Bohemia Bar & Restaurant first, and
20 months or so after that had launched, we opened the hotel above
it, having totally gutted and rebuilt it.
As there had been no hotel for 20 years, were there naysayers
– people expecting you to fail?
Jersey people aren't afraid to speak their minds or be critical.
When we announced the plan, some people said we were mad
even thinking about opening a hotel. So its success has been very
satisfying! Only 18 months after the restaurant opened we achieved
a Michelin-star accreditation – a phenomenal achievement by the
Bohemia team. This happened just a couple of months before we
opened the hotel, so the timing couldn't have been better.
Aside from the hotels, the family business has its printing
operation, but you have also branched out into e-commerce.
Did you spot an opening in the market?
Printing is where the family business started 40 years ago. My
grandfather was a newsagent and he came up with a news-receipts
system, which he started printing, and he and my father built that
side of the business up. We still continue to do that today along with
general printing work.
In October 2005, we launched feelunique.com. It wasn't really
a new opening in the market – we were already doing health
and beauty through the spa and we thought there was an opportunity to take that online. However, once we started, it became
something else altogether. About nine months in, there was an
opportunity to invest in a similar company, Island Cosmetics, run by
Aaron Chatterley and Richard Schiessl, which was rebranded under
the feelunique.com name. It has grown into a fantastic business we are
proud to be part of.
And what about mymemory.com?
That developed out of looking long-term at what we could do with
printing. If you're in Jersey, you only have a marketplace of 90,000
people, so you are limited as to how big you can grow unless you get
off the island. But if you go online you have the potential to reach an
audience of hundreds of millions. From a printing perspective, we've
never really been just a Jersey printer – most of our printing has gone
off-island for the news-receipts system – so the idea was to use the
internet to continue and evolve that. Rebecca Gimenez and Karl Moss,
who has a great background in e-commerce, are leading this. While
only in its second year, it is growing very strongly and hopefully will
be very successful.
You launched the hotel and restaurant and feelunique.com prior to
the recession, yet you have managed to ride it out. What would you
put that down to?
We don't really have any debt, which makes life easier. We have great
management teams in all the businesses, including Tim Phillips at The
Club Hotel & Spa and Duarte Silva at the Apollo Hotel, and we kept
doing what we were doing before and doing it as well as we could. Yes,
we made changes and had to react, but basically you have to do what
you do well – and perhaps do it a little better – in a tough market.
Hospitality is a very competitive industry. Do you feel the Channel
Islands is a more ruthless place to do business?
In most industries, the islands are incredibly competitive. Everyone is
competing for a finite amount of business. This isn't helped by the fact
that costs here are higher than in the UK. Take restaurants, for example
– there are 180-odd restaurants in Jersey, so that's one for every other
day of the year, for a population of 90,000. While everyone grumbles
about the death of tourism, it's still an enormous business, with
700,000 visitors a year – and that is vital to our survival, yet everyone
still has to go for that market. It can be tough.
How has the abolition of LVCR affected your business?
Not massively to be honest, because most of what feelunique.com
sells is over the threshold, and following a recent ruling in the UK,
photobooks are exempt from VAT being classed as books, so it wasn't
a big thing for us. Besides, we weren't in Jersey for LVCR, we were here
because we all live here, and the reason we are in online retail is that
we wanted to sell to more than 90,000 people. We weren't like the big
UK guys who came here for a postbox.
You're not alone in levelling that charge…
There is a distinct difference between e-commerce, which is what we
do, and fulfilment. We're irritated by the whole ‘fulfilment industry'
thing, as it's people who just set up a warehouse here to ship in and out.
Our employees are all on-island doing everything from marketing to
web development and design, whereas a lot of those postbox people
don't employ anybody so brought little, if any benefit to the island.
Moving back to tourism, what is your view on where tourism
stands right now, and what, if anything, can be done to boost it?
Tourism is still a pretty big market – tourists pay about £11.5 million in
GST, around one-fifth of the total – but Jersey is never going to be the
huge mass destination it was 10 or 15 years ago. It can be an upmarket,
niche short-break destination, however, and I believe that is the way
to go – to deliberately target high-value tourists.
The point is you don't go somewhere because you think it's cheap,
you go because it's aspirational, irrespective of your budget. So if you
market somewhere as a luxury destination it doesn't mean people on a
lower budget won't come. There are more three-star hotels in Monaco
than there are five-star, but you wouldn't think that from the image.
We also need to look at other sources of tourists. We have more flights
from Germany than we've had for years, and seeing as it has a strong
economy and 70 to 80 million people, there are opportunities to be had.
People have criticised Jersey Tourism for not getting their marketing
right, but you are something of an advocate of them. Why is that?
I think they've got an impossible task, as they've got to be all things
to all people. Their job is to market an entire industry that goes from a
campsite to a five-star spa and Michelin-star product. It's hard to cover
everything in one go and sometimes I think they try too hard – the
moment you try and be everything, you will lose impact. But if they
try to narrow it down – say aim purely at luxury, as I'm advocating
– you get people in the B&B industry saying ‘this can't be right'. But
remember, I also have to fill our three-star hotel and I know marketing
Jersey as aspirational will do this, not marketing on price.
Back to retail, it's unusual to see an online retailer migrate to the high
street as you have with the feelunique shops. Why did you do that?
It's just part of the bigger picture, the entire offering – feelunique has
the feelunique Spa at the hotel, feelunique Hair & Beauty at Longueville
and now we have the feelunique shops in both Jersey and Guernsey.
So if someone wants a consultation about a hair product, if they want
spa products, then they have options. It's that simple.
So what comes next – more organic growth or something different?
We want to continue what we are doing, but we're always looking for
opportunities. We've looked at hotel options in London, but recently
we have concentrated on investing. We tried to take a small listed
company private, but after building up a three per cent stake the share
price rose too high and we had to walk away.
With mymemory.com, it took years of weighing up options before
we found one we could work with and be comfortable with. We're less
than two years into it and we've got triple-digit percentage growth, so
that is keeping us occupied.
What comes next? Well, there's nothing concrete in the pipeline,
but we wouldn't rule out anything. Never say never!