A businesswoman behind the controversial “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts – which caused one of 2014’s most memorable Westminster spats after they were worn by politicians including Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband – has ended the year on a high by being named among a clutch of small-business bosses in the New Year honours list.
Jane Shepherdson, who is chief executive of the clothing brand Whistles which supplied the shirts to the poverty campaign group the Fawcett Society earlier this year, received a CBE for services to UK retail business. She was previously brand director for high-street store Topshop, and is widely credited with turning the chain into the success it is today, but she hit the front pages in 2014 after it was alleged the Fawcett T-shirts had been sourced from a sweatshop in Mauritius, where migrant women were making the £45 tops for 62p an hour. Whistles and the Fawcett Society both denied they had dealt with a sweatshop and said all workers were paid above the official minimum wage, while an independent audit of the factory had found no concerns over working conditions.
Other CBEs went to James Caan, a former panellist of the BBC’s business game show Dragons’ Den and chairman of the Start Up Loans company, as well as Brent Hoberman, who with Martha Lane Fox founded late-booking website Lastminute.com. He is also an investor in internet furniture retailer made.com and a director of Guardian Media Group. Both were given the award for entrepreneurship, as were Julie Deane, who founded the Cambridge Satchel Company, and Richard Moross, founder of online printer Moo.com.
There were MBEs too for “plumber to the stars” Charlie Mullins, chief executive of Pimlico Plumbers whose company’s vans are often found in London’s wealthiest areas and who was honoured for services to the plumbing industry; and Will Butler-Adams, the boss of UK folding-bike-maker Brompton, for services to UK manufacturing.
Butler-Adams got his job running the bike-maker following a chance encounter when he sat next to Brompton’s chairman on a coach trip, while Mullins left school at 15 to become a plumbing apprentice in south London and then founded his own company in 1979. Pimlico’s clients now reportedly include the actor Keira Knightley and X Factor judge Simon Cowell, although Mullins found himself in the news during 2014 after appointing lawyers to pursue people behind negative anonymous online reviews of his company, which he claimed were “unfounded and libellous”.
There were also honours for leaders behind huge companies including Andrew Wyllie, the chief executive of construction group Costain, which was involved in the construction of the Channel tunnel and the recent revamp of London’s St Pancras Station. He received a CBE for services to construction and engineering.
There was also a knighthood for Dickson Poon, the Hong Kong businessman whose business owns the Mayfair department store Harvey Nichols. In 2012 Poon donated £20m to the law school at King’s College London, which has been renamed in his honour.
