A tiger in the boardroom

The music blares, the lights turn everyone a sickly shade of green and a diminutive woman steps on to the podium. In vertiginous heels, a snakeskin print dress emphasising her hourglass figure, she looks more like a glamorous country and western singer than the head of a £155 million business. But then, Jacqueline Gold, chief executive of the Ann Summers organisation, is acutely aware of her assets; she knows better than anyone in the room that sex sells.

We are at the Entrepreneurs' Forum Conference in Newcastle, and Gold is explaining how she turned two seedy sex shops acquired by her father in the 1970s into a 123-strong chain employing 1,400 people. Ann Summers is where the sexual revolution and the retail revolution meet. It is sex 'n' shopping rolled into one. The customer base, once predominantly male, is now over 70 per cent female. The man in the dirty mac has morphed into the woman in the MAC make-up. Last year, Gold tells her soberly suited audience, her business sold two and a half million vibrators.

Evan Davis, the BBC's urbane economics editor and chair of the conference, cannot contain his incredulity at the idea of sisters doing it for themselves. "Two and a half million vibrators?" he splutters. "Isn't it all just novelty sales, lads buying them for their mates as a joke?" Completely unruffled, Gold turns to him slowly and says: "No, Evan. I don't think so." The audience, which by this time is eating out of her professionally manicured hand, guffaws at the putdown.

Jacqueline Gold didn't get where she is today - private jet, silver Mercedes convertible and a salary of over £500,000 - without being underestimated by men every step of the way. Davis is just the latest in a long chain. Her father, David Gold, a soft porn publishing magnate, cried when he realised he had no sons to inherit the business. The all male board of Ann Summers initially refused to take her ideas for expansion seriously. "Women," she was told by one board member, "are not interested in sex." Even the Government has misjudged her. When her shops were banned from advertising for staff in Job Centres, Gold took them to court and won, generating valuable publicity in the process.

As a young woman alone in the sex industry, she was often seen as easy prey. "It used to be awful," she says. "But I knew that if my business was successful, nobody could challenge that. That was the focus of my determination."

Having wowed the Geordies, Gold does not hang about for the plaudits. It's straight into two waiting cars with her entourage - Virginia, her stylist, Ghislain, her personal publicist and Sarah, her PA - and off to a private airfield where the company Lear Jet is waiting. Our destination is Valencia on Spain's Mediterranean coast, where Gold is due to open her first non-UK retail outlet. If she is nervous about how Joyrider love rings, vibrating knickers and Rampant Rabbits will play to a Spanish audience in a predominantly Catholic country, it doesn't show.

"Expanding abroad is a natural progression for us," she says. "The Spanish are very sensual people. Ann Summers is not a sex shop; we are there for the person who wants to spice up their sex life and have a bit of fun. There isn't anything like us in Spain at present."

Our conversation is interrupted by the pilot, who kneels beside us to pass on the weather forecast and expected time of arrival. The jet boasts eight roomy leather seats with walnut veneered tables. In-flight catering is a large platter of fresh sea food. Gold picks at a few prawns then opts for three cheese and pickle sandwiches which she asks Sarah to wrap in a paper napkin to pop in her handbag for later. It is a touching contrast to the bling of her Bulgari sunglasses and Cartier watch.

Gold is explaining to me, over the roar of £5.2 million worth of jet engine, that Ann Summers targets ABC1 women. From my own homework (a quick gander around the Stirling branch on a wet Tuesday afternoon), I had assumed the whole thing was targeted at 15-year-old boys. Once you get past the underwear (very tight, very bright), the place is basically a dirty joke shop.

Readers of an aesthetic disposition and anyone allergic to nylon should look away now. There is an entire wall devoted to willy toothbrushes, willy bottle stoppers, glow willy earrings, spunkey monkey key rings, penis hoopla, banana dick lick, posing pouches in the shape of animals, and blow-up dolls. The "edibles" include Bite Me Butts, Tasty Tits, A Load of Old Bollocks and Hob Nobs. It is the adult equivalent of farting putty and woopee cushions. I would defy anyone who has ever read a Shakespearean sonnet or felt a moment of true tenderness to look on it and not feel profoundly depressed.

At the back of the shop, semi-cordoned off, are sex toys, bondage wear and the DVDs. There is enough PVC to keep a Dusty Springfield convention happy. More tellingly, there is a warren-full of Rabbits. If there is one product that sums up the whole Ann Summers phenomenon it is the Rabbit. First there was the Rampant Rabbit, then the De Luxe edition - these things mutate - now there is the Platinum version; the Ferrari of the vibrator world. Six-and-a-half inches of pulsating, vibrating, whizzing jelly, the Platinum version comes in six speeds, seven pulse options and looks as if it was designed by Dyson. There hasn't been such an impressive bunny since Bugs, though why you would want one if you had a fully functioning, voice-activated husband, I cannot begin to imagine.

But the thing about the Rabbit is not the fact that it has more gears than the average family runabout, but that it is well and truly out of its hutch. Five years ago the Rabbit was the love that dared not speak its name. It has since featured in No Angels and Sex and the City, and this summer it gets its own movie, Rabbit Fever. Billed as "a comedy about the world's best selling vibrator", its tagline is: "Can you feel the buzz?"

Gold says Sex and the City got people talking about the Rabbit, but despite its £40 price tag, the Platinum has long been a bestseller. "Women are buying one and then going back and experimenting with another," she says. "It's OK to talk about it, these days." Interestingly, Gold will not be photographed holding one. Image is extremely important to her: the hardest working member of her team is Virginia, who touches up Gold's make-up before and during every photo session.

Depending on who you talk to within the Ann Summers empire - and it sometimes seems that there is more elastic in their statistics than in their knickers - between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of British women own one of these toys. If they are to be believed, an outbreak of myxomatosis would bring the nation to a grinding halt. But taboo remains a vital ingredient in the Ann Summers formula and Gold is astute enough to know she needs to hang on to the last vestiges of it.

"Two per cent of the population are not comfortable with Ann Summers and we want to keep it like that," she says. "It is our unique selling point. That's why we are as successful as we are." She lives in fear of the big high street chains burrowing into her market. Both Debenhams and Boots have considered selling vibrators and Gold takes every opportunity to disparage the notion: "Imagine buying a vibrator with your haemorrhoid cream."

So how much is Ann Summers leading the sexual revolution and how much is it following it? "It's our customers who are pushing the boundaries," says Gold. "We respond to them. Most of the products we produce are fun. When it comes to drawing a line, I trust my gut feeling. It's all about allowing people to experiment." But just how liberating is it to dress up in a minuscule version of a 1960s air hostess outfit? Is sexual liberation really just about empowering women to demean themselves? "Women love dressing up for their men," she says. "It's part of our biological make-up. It's women who are buying this stuff. Nobody is forcing them. These days women are taking the initiative. Yes, they dress up but they do it with attitude."

Yet it is undoubtedly true that Gold has been more of a player in the sexual revolution than her father, David, who with his brother Ralph set up a pornographic publishing company. The privately owned business now includes 50 per cent of the Sport newspaper group, Gold Air International - a chain of private-hire luxury aircraft - and Birmingham City Football Club, in addition to Ann Summers. Valued at £495 million in the Sunday Times Rich List, the family business will be chaired by Gold when her 67-year-old father retires.

She was just 21 when she devel-oped the idea for Ann Summers parties, based on the same concept as the Tupperware party. After breaking down the initial resistance of her father's board, the company lent her £40,000. She made a turnover of £83,000 in her first year and the parties - there are 7,500 Ann Summers party planners nationwide - remain an important part of the business. Her genius was to restrict invitations to women only. "They're like the female version of the Masons," quips Ghislain. Thus, Sex in the Suburbs was born.

How does Gold respond to accusations that she has contributed to a climate of promiscuity? "If someone is going to be promiscuous, they will be promiscuous," she says. "They don't need Ann Summers to encourage that. What we do is promote sex in a positive way, in a welcoming environment."

The plane lands and we are whisked to the shop in downtown Valencia, without so much as a glance at our passports. En route, Gold takes a call from her managing director, Julie Harris, with whom she has worked for 20 years. It's 8pm and the shop is packed for the opening, the marketing director is trying to keep the crowds at bay and the television crews are getting restless. It's all getting a little out of hand. Gold rereads her speech and keeps her nerve.

We arrive at the shop and the weirdest thing happens. Ann Summers suddenly makes sense. The underwear, which looked so tacky back home, looks great in the Mediterranean sunshine. The customers, showing lots of bronzed flesh, fall on the gingham bras. The novelty tat has been discreetly hidden and the shop has been fitted out in a softer, boudoir style. The merchandise may be identical to that on offer in the UK but here it looks more sophisticated. The whiff of Barbara Windsor is gone. There is the added advantage that, in Spain, the brand is untainted by Ann Summers' origins.

Gold, who has the presence of mind to announce a 20 per cent discount for one night only, is mobbed by camera crews. Upstairs a group of women, ranging from 16 to 60, are examining the Rabbits. Before you can say "Watership Down", they've set them rotating and pulsating. "I love it and I want it all," says the most elderly of them before we are herded outside for the fashion show. Three blonde models parade on a catwalk in tiny scraps of nylon lace and manage to carry it off with aplomb. When the 1960s air hostess costumes appear, the crowd goes nuts.

"We're thinking of opening a shop in Inverness," says one of the Ann Summers directors. "We should do more openings like this in the UK." Try this on a Thursday night in Inverness, however, and the models would have hypothermia before they've managed a change of outfit. Have they ever considered a thermal range?

"The further north you go, the less inhibited people are, the friendlier they are and the fewer hang-ups they have," says Gold, who is planning a homeware range and is just about to open her first "superstore" in Cardiff. "When we get our party plan girls together, the northern girls have a much louder, more raucous time. We've got nine shops in Scotland and they do really well."

By the time the opening is over, Gold is exhausted. She has a soft drink in the bar, decides not to attend the Ann Summers party in a local night club and retires to bed and the cheese and pickle sandwiches. Even by her high octane standards it's been a very successful day.

An Ann Summers virgin, my prejudices have been broken down by the Spanish store but more so by Gold herself. "She's not a spoiled brat," says Sarah, who previously worked for Normandie Keith and Lucas White. Gold has none of the defensive prickliness women who have struggled to make it in a man's world usually acquire. There is no doubting who is boss, but she listens to her staff, takes advice from them and answers all my questions openly and honestly. There is nothing raucous about her. Her manners are impeccable and she doesn't swear. On the jet, it is she who cleans up the dishes.

She has the good sense never to talk about her sex life and she doesn't exploit the business for cheap laughs. At the Newcastle conference she was asked about the problems of out-sourcing her product in the Far East. Gold embarked on an answer but then dried up. The problem she faced in China was that the manufacturers made the prototypes of the sex toys too small. She could probably have got away with saying it but she was worried about offending her audience.

Bizarrely, for a company boss whose fortune comes from sales of Shagasaurous sex toys and Toffee Body Drizzle, she is strong on good old-fashioned family values. She has dinner every week with her father and her sister Vanessa, who is head of buying for Ann Summers.

How did it feel growing up the daughter of a porn baron in 1960s Kent? "My parents divorced when I was 12," she says. "I lived with my mother. My father was quite a shadowy figure. I never really knew what he did. It wasn't really talked about." In her autobiography, Good Vibrations, however, she paints a picture of an unhappy and insecure adolescence. When she had her first kiss, she pinned her top to her trousers to prevent any hanky-panky.

Formerly a workaholic, with a failed marriage and a failed long-term relationship behind her, she now takes time to relax with her boyfriend Dan Cunningham, a trader with a Belgian bank. They live together in a converted barn in Westerham, Kent. "I have made sacrifices to get to where I am," she says. "I would like to have children at some point."

Gold is 44. Immersed in sex every day for two decades, she does not seem to have much idea about procreation. But in the Ann Summers' world, sex and babies are poles apart.

"There are three questions I am always asked by men," says Gold. "The answers are yes, I do wear the Ann Summers' underwear; no, I don't test all the products myself and yes, size does matter."

Her customers' brains may be one-track, but Gold is single-minded. While they snap up the crotchless undies, she is concentrating on the bottom line. We will never know if she keeps a pair of furry handcuffs under the bed but one thing is obvious - she is a tiger in the boardroom.