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Karin adcocK learned business with a group that had no interest in profit, then turned around and

made a fortune with the danish brand pandora. her second jewellery venture has hit

obstacles, but this story shows promise of a fairytale ending.

positively ever after

Early one morning in October 2013, workers on the dawn shift of the Sydney Opera House’s forecourt project saw something from a fairytale: a barefoot princess walking off a yacht carrying her high heels and holding up the skirt of her exquisite, layered chiffon ball gown. It was Australia’s fairytale princess,

Mary, still wearing the clothes she’d worn the night before as she and her Crown Prince husband Frederik hosted their Danish cultural awards in the Opera House. As official patrons of the house’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the couple had been in the public eye for days. On a spectacular night on Sydney harbour under a clear blue starry sky they cut loose, relishing the chance to party until dawn with some of their besties away from the public gaze. “Mary did not want to go home,” says Karin Adcock, the Danish-Australian businesswoman who hosted them on her yacht, Southern Cloud. Adcock had lent the royals the majestic, three-masted schooner for a weekend jaunt, and they’d had so much fun, Prince Frederik asked if they could go out again after the awards. “They both came up quite a few times saying, ‘thank you, thank you so much, this is the most wonderful night’,” says Adcock.

Mooring Southern Cloud at the Man O’War steps in Farm Cove alongside the Sydney Opera House during the weeklong round of 40th anniversary festivities is probably the most ostentatious thing Adcock has ever done. The self-made millionaire is not given to conspicuous consumption, and owned a share of the 40m yacht for sentimental reasons. Adcock made the money building the Pandora jewellery brand from nothing into a $187-million-a-year Australasian powerhouse and then selling the operation to Pandora’s Copenhagen parent as it prepared for a sharemarket listing. And she did it in less than five years, transforming the Australian jewellery market at the same time. “My kids would say, ‘oh, my mum is boss of Pandora’, and people would look at me as if I was God or something.” The Danish press has speculated that she and her former husband Brook Adcock earned as much as $100m from the sale of Pandora, but Adcock has never

disclosed the amount. “I try to fly under the radar where I can,” she says when asked about it.

It’s early spring in Copenhagen and we’re talking in her elegant apartment in the heart of the historic royal precinct, Frederiksstaden, about 50m away from Amalienborg Palace Square where three generations of Danish royals live in neighbouring palaces. Adcock’s apartment is in a building dating back to 1751, which was once owned by friends of Hans Christian Andersen, who spent many nights there. She has put a 75cm plaster bust of the famed fable writer in a window. H.C.’s large nose is shiny from being rubbed.

Adcock’s life has a fabulous quality to it: she spent her 20s roaming the world as part of an idealistic group that eschewed personal gain; she came to Australia for love; and then as a mother of three young children she made her fortune.

Adcock bought her apartment four years ago in the interregnum between quitting Pandora and starting another business. It’s the first time she’s owned a place in her old hometown and she’s filled it with Danish design classics: a huge PH Artichoke light, Poul Kjærholm’s classic round marble table and Hans J. Wegner’s wishbone chairs. On this visit she’s brought two of her three daughters, Tiffany, 19, and Ashley, 14, and the three are bonding in a way she says they’ve been unable to do for years because of her relentless work schedule. She’ll get her hair cut by Søren Hedegaard, who does Princess Mary’s hair and make up, and relax a bit. It’s a welcome respite from the maelstrom back in Australia surrounding her latest venture.

story jeni porter photography jan søndergaard

In early December Adcock took over the local rights for Alex and Ani, a hot American jewellery brand whose selling point for its pretty, expandable bracelets and necklaces is that they are “infused with positive energy”. She’s trying to do what she did with Pandora all over again, although this time using considerable amounts of money to give the operation a flying start. She has recruited experienced sales and marketing executives and embarked on an ambitious plan to achieve in two years what would normally take much longer. They’ve set up shop in the Warriewood building she bought to house her Pandora operation.

Each Alex and Ani bracelet comes with a message such as positivity, karma, power and soulful enlightenment. And she’s needed all of that to deal with the reaction of her former colleagues. Ten days after Adcock announced her return to the jewellery industry, Pandora’s Australian president Brien Winther threatened to dump any retailer who put Alex and Ani in their stores. Over the next couple of months Adcock did 18 roadshows through Australia and New Zealand meeting hundreds of retailers, many of whom owe their success to Pandora. “I knew a lot of them and what’s really striking to me was that what we were very good at in my time was relationships – we knew stores, owners, husbands, wives, children. Now it seems to be this [attitude of] ‘it’s my way or the highway’.” She says there are 100 retailers wanting to stock Alex and Ani but they can’t risk being dropped by Pandora because it accounts for 30 to 70 per cent of their sales.

Some retailers complained to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission about Pandora’s actions, but the watchdog deemed the move would not substantially lessen competition. Winther says: “We always believed we were compliant and are pleased with the ACCC response. Pandora is focused on working with its partners to deliver a strong experience for retail customers.”

Coleby Nicholson, managing editor of Jeweller, has tracked the rise and rise of Pandora, from Adcock’s first trade show selling the customisable charm bracelets out of a polystyrene box, to wholesale revenues equating to more than $500 million in retail

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sales. “No one has the power of Pandora,” he says, adding that the lack of a comparable competitor is an issue for the industry.

Some people think Adcock got lucky riding the worldwide wave that turned a small family-owned Danish company into, arguably, the biggest jewellery brand in the world. But Nicholson rejects this: “You don’t get to be that successful by sheer luck.” In a nutshell, he says, it was the right person bringing in the right product at the right time. It helped that Adcock entered the market as consumers were moving towards fashion jewellery faster than incumbents realised. Many jewellers dismissed Pandora’s interchangeable glass beads and trinkets. “She had the tenacity to stick at it when everyone else would say, ‘we’re not interested in this junk’.”

How does Nicholson think she will go with Alex and Ani, whose US sales trajectory is not unlike the early days of Pandora? “She’s got the capital and experience behind her to do it – I think it will be successful, just in a different way than she first planned because of Pandora’s actions against her,” he says. “I’m not necessarily sure that’s a bad thing.”

Nicholson has told Adcock many times she’s crazy for re-entering the fray. “And she laughs. I’ve said to her, ‘you don’t need to be doing this’.” But she’s like other entrepreneurs he has met over the years who aren’t motivated just by money. Adcock has the classic traits of

star hotels to furnish them. It was an adventure but also an entrepreneurial apprenticeship with everything except the profit motive.

For a year in her mid-20s she helped build what became Southern Cloud, first in a boatyard in northern Denmark and then in Germany, where she lived in a cabin on-board while the rig was built. (When the motorised sailing yacht appeared in Sydney harbour 25 years later, she rowed up and talked to its part-owner stockbroker Colin Bell, who invited her to buy a share.)

In 1994, after some 17 years with Tvind, Karin Adcock met her future husband at a bus stop in Hong Kong. The next year she followed him to Sydney. “I bought a one-way ticket to Australia and I had some cash and nothing else. I thought, I’m 31 years old, I’ve got to make this work.” Tiffany was born soon after. For the next few years Adcock tried various, largely fruitless ways to earn a living including selling jewellery by party plans. In 2004 a Danish friend told her about these very popular bracelets and she flew with Tiffany to Copenhagen to pitch.

In his book Pandora: Denmark’s wildest growth story, Danish business journalist Ole Hall retells how Adcock didn’t mention her other daughters, Ashley and Paris, who were both under two, during meetings to persuade Pandora to give her the distribution rights. She figured they were unlikely to do the deal if they knew she had three children, two of them very young. A few years later

“she’s got the capital and experience to do it – i think

it will be successful, just in a different way.”

an entrepreneur: a strong belief in her own ability, a desire to do things her own way and a relish for risk-taking: “If you don’t take risks you’re not trying hard enough,” she once said. But hers was a circuitous route to riches. Her formative years were spent with Tvind, a controversial Danish group founded on Maoist-inspired philosophies, which ran alternative schools. Tvind followers pooled their income, using the communal finances to fund charitable causes and commercial operations from Africa to South America.

Adcock, who went to boarding school at 14 and never returned home to live with her parents, went from student to teacher to project manager. Through Tvind she travelled to 55 countries working with architects to renovate schools and buying used furniture from five-

adcock’s apartment in fredriksstaden, near the royal amalienborg palace in copenhagen

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Adcock sent a Christmas card to head office with a photo of her family, writes Hall. “Only then did it dawn on Pandora’s leadership, it was a mother of three who had made Australia one of Pandora’s most successful markets, and the whole clan was even more impressed.”

Adcock is utterly natural, warm, open, and self-deprecating. She’s easy to talk to and jokes that she still can’t read a P&L statement properly – you can hire someone else to do that. When she says she built everything around relationships, it rings true. A former colleague says she gave so much of herself to her staff they would “basically chop their hands off” for her. One of her hardest decisions was cutting employees whose skills were outgrown by the rapid growth of the business.

Her meteoric success also put huge strains on her marriage. Brook, a Qantas pilot, used a super payout from the air force to buy a taxi business around the same time as Adcock started Pandora, with $35,000 borrowed from her father. As Pandora took off, Brook became involved with the finances and IT while concurrently flying and running the taxi business. The day they sealed the deal to sell out, they split.

“If we had done that beforehand the whole deal could have fallen on the floor, you know, so I just had to stick it out,” she says. After the sale, Pandora head office wanted only Karin to stay. “That was difficult,” she says.

Then CEO, Mikkel Vendelin Olesen, says when he first joined Pandora, he thought Adcock’s knowledge

clashing with the new regime, Adcock quit, exhausted. She wanted to regroup and spend more time with her daughters. She launched a multi-brand company but withdrew after sinking in a lot of money and realising she couldn’t find the right brand managers to make it work.

She rebuffed Alex and Ani’s first approaches because she had made a more balanced life with a new partner, John Winstanley, and was wary about jeopardising it. They live on the northern beaches and tootle around Pittwater in a dinghy with their kids, the dog and some gin and tonic.

Winstanley has run public companies and now owns a water filtration business. He knows what makes 52-year-old Adcock tick. When Alex and Ani came back last August, he encouraged, if not pushed her to take it on, because she was bored. Adcock is excited about putting her Pandora experience to work for another brand she feels fills a gap in the market.

Having found more balance in her own life, she believes consumers are seeking something beyond just buying a product. “This brand is completely different. It’s made from recycled metals and with every little bangle there are three key words – if you buy it as a gift those three words stay with that person.” She gives me a bangle about embracing the power of positivity. The text reads, “love is the thread, the common bond we all share. When stretched globally the world will know peace.” That’s a lot to ask of a $55 bracelet. W

and understanding of the brand was more convincing than the mother company’s: “It was why Karin was so very, very important in what was Pandora going forward.” Adcock built Pandora by taking market share not just from other brands but from unbranded products – something that was unheard of, says Olesen. “The amazing thing about the business in Australia is that it was driven by this very, very strong brand awareness. She really understood consumers, PR and marketing.”

As part of the sale agreement Adcock agreed to stay on as Australian CEO for at least two years. A downgrade of prospectus forecasts less than a year after the 2010 IPO led to the ousting of Olesen amid intense market pressure. In mid-2012 after three years of flying to Copenhagen once a month for board meetings and

she gave so much of herself to her staff they would “basically chop their hands off” for her.

adcock in her copenhagen apartment with the bust of hans christian andersen in the

window sill, and alex and ani jewellery