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“The regrets are still there, because it was a rotten thing to have to do and you’re interfering with people’s lives, but it had to be done.”
wellies from an outdoors tool into a fashion accessory. Accounts filed at Companies House show the growth has continued, with turnover now sitting at £113m. “A lot of it was down to luck,” Cannon laughs. “That first summer was one of the wettest ever. We gave free wellies to 50 celebrities at the Glastonbury music festival – Hello! magazine photographed 26 of them in their boots. “The business had expanded into the wrong areas, like luggage and leather goods. We bought some excess stock from the administrator and gave it away for free to help build our highstreet credentials.” Success involved hard decisions though. In 2008, Hunter Boot closed its factory at Heathhall near Dumfries, with the loss of 22 jobs; 48 posts had been lost two years earlier when the firm sank into administration. “It was horrible,” says Cannon quietly. “It was the worst time. Laying people off is not pleasant at all. “Let’s be honest, Dumfries will never erect a statue to me, but the brand needed that closure so it could move on, and it should have been done long before, but I was the one who took it on the chin. “Even though it was tough at the time, it was the right thing to do. The regrets are still there, because it was a rotten thing to have to do and you’re interfering with people’s lives, but it had to be done.” Hunter then asked Cannon to relocate from Edinburgh to London, but the move wouldn’t have suited his family, so he left the company. He could have been forgiven for thinking history was repeating itself though when he joined the Edinburgh Solicitors’ Property Centre (ESPC) as its chief executive. “ESPC had many similar challenges to Hunter – expanding into the wrong areas,” Cannon explains. “It had opened shops in England at great expense, but they didn’t work because estate agents not solicitors sell houses down there.” Cannon joined in September 2009, just as the full force of the previous year’s financial crash was beginning to hit the property market. His first job was to shore-up support from the 170 law firms that owned the ESPC, visiting 120 of them within his first six weeks. “I had to stand there and take the brickbats because these people hated the ESPC for having got into such a perilous situation,” he recalls. “There was a feeling that it was a busted flush and people wanted out, but I asked them to give me a year to sort it out – in the end it only needed six months to get the bank back on board with a loan, supported by letters of guarantee from the member firms, which were never used.”
Getting shirty When he’s not running Cricket Scotland, Malcolm Cannon has another trick up his sleeve – he’s the co-owner of the Scottish franchise of Shirt By Hand, a company that – as the name suggests – produces made-to-measure shirts. “I’m the Victor Kiam of tailoring – I liked the shirts so much, I bought the company,” laughs Cannon. “I’d been mentoring the previous owner and I helped him find a buyer for his business. That buyer asked if I wanted to come in on the deal. “We sell about 120 shirts each month. We kitted out the Scotland cricket team for last year’s ICC World Twenty20 competition and the Scotland rugby side for the 2015 World Cup. “The prices are somewhere between Marks & Spencer and a Jermyn Street tailor. We have a guy based in Bridge of Allan who comes to your house and measures you for a shirt and then – as long as your shape doesn’t change too much – you can keep reordering them from the internet and they’re delivered within 21 days.” The shirts are proving especially popular with his misshapen rugby chums; a bulging neck or long arms are no problem when your clothes are made-to-measure. Clients pick the design, the shade and the fabric and then customise their shirts down to the style of the collar and the colour of the buttons. “People tend to order one for a special occasion and then keep coming back,” Cannon adds. “Some customers now have a whole wardrobe full of our shirts.”
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