WILDGEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD:Gilliane Quinn de Schonen MD, Zumo juice bar franchise, in France
THEY HAD high hopes for the Zumo juice bar in Aulnay-sous-Bois, a northern suburb of Paris. “It was new, it was very pretty, everyone was very happy with it,” recalls Gilliane Quinn de Schonen, MD of the franchise in France. “Then it opened and sales were pathetic.”
Mystified, Quinn – who was living in Dublin at the time – flew to Paris, went straight to the shopping centre in Aulnay, donned a uniform and prepared some tasting trays. And still there were no takers. “Of course, it was Ramadan. We had ticked all the boxes – how many shoppers, competitors, everything else. But we’d forgotten about Ramadan.”
The Aulnay bar does a good trade these days, but Quinn tells the story as a lesson in assuming a good product can be sold the same way everywhere. It’s an idea her company has grappled with constantly since setting up the first juice bars in France in 2008.
Whereas Irish people will buy a smoothie at any time of day and drink it on the move, French customers won’t. “The lunchtime trade just didn’t exist,” Quinn remarks. Eighty per cent of business comes after 3pm. “They couldn’t imagine having a juice for lunch. You have to sit down. You need a meal. And it’s not done to eat while you walk.”
So Zumo adapted, adding soup to the menu and putting pressure on shopping centres to provide more seating. Sitting in her office in central Paris on a wintry afternoon, Quinn can afford a smile at those early lessons. Rapid early growth of the French business was followed by a difficult period in 2010, culminating in the closure of several loss-making outlets, but the company now has 85 staff, 12 successful bars and a sure footing in the market.
Quinn has become a prominent figure in the community of Irish business people in one of Ireland’s biggest markets. Her connections to France stretch back to childhood, thanks to a memorable French teacher and her parents’ decision to send her here to work on the language. When she graduated from Trinity College in 1987, she moved to London – as did about 80 per cent of her class – to work with management consultants Bain Company. A transfer to the Paris office followed and, after two years, she packed in the job and moved to Chile to do a year’s charity work. “I thought I’d never get the chance to do it again,” she says.
But Paris exerted its pull. Quinn returned, married Frenchman Nicolas de Schonen and took a job in the food industry. Her post involved working with British food companies entering the French market by selling triangular sandwiches, ready meals and other then-virtually unknown imports to big retailers such as Auchan and Carrefour. With a French business partner, Quinn set up her own consultancy, specialising in advising retailers on the latest trends in the industry. One project was to design Daily Monop, the flagship city centre convenience store chain run by Monoprix.
“Although France was the first country to invent hypermarkets, by the early 2000s they were beginning to reach the end of their cycle,” Quinn says. “They were so powerful that they didn’t see that young people were not going to be driving cars, they were not going to be going out to your hypermarket in the suburbs. They want something in the city centre.”
Monoprix’s competitors duly followed suit.
Quinn’s move into the food business was less a departure than a return. Her father is Feargal Quinn, senator and founder of Superquinn, and the business was “in my blood” – from her days helping on the shop floor as a child to joining the board in the 2000s.
Just before the Quinn family sold their interest in Superquinn in 2005, Gilliane and her own family moved back to Ireland for the first time since she had left as a 20-year-old. “It was a very interesting time to be in Ireland. I remember thinking when I moved back, I’d love to buy a little house, and just seeing prices go up and up. Places were more expensive than in France. It was just crazy.”
But Paris called once again. Two Irish business people were bringing the Zumo franchise to France, and Quinn – who had set up Ireland’s first juice bar in a Superquinn store after coming across the concept in the US in 1998 – came aboard. The first bar – in a Lyon shopping centre – was a huge success, and won a prize in 2010 for the highest sales per square metre in France. “We thought, gosh, this is phenomenal. If we roll this out across the whole of France, we will be doing fantastically.” The firm quickly opened 20 stores, a move Quinn now says was a mistake. “Some of them were fantastic successes, but some of them weren’t.”
When she became MD in 2010, her task was to oversee cutbacks. These days, the firm’s 12 outlets are doing well, and Quinn is convinced – not least because its offer chimes with governments’ healthy eating campaigns – that the concept is here to stay. “The minister for health does all our advertising for us,” as she puts it.
Twenty-five years after she left Dublin in an earlier wave of emigrants, she has no regrets. She moves back and forth between Ireland and France these days, and is glad that her children have close links with her country. “It’s wonderful to see more. It’s good to go away. And then you appreciate much more what you have back in Ireland.”
