A new chapter in our journey begins

by Martin Moodie |
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Martin Moodie

Martin Moodie

Martin Moodie is the Founder & Chairman of The Moodie Report.

Today is a red-letter day for The Moodie Report as we start trading from our new UK headquarters by the River Thames on the outskirts of West London.

We’ve moved just around the corner from our old offices to The Old Pumping Station, a beautifully renovated 19th century Victorian public utility building in a waterside residential development.

Here we’ve got the priceless asset of space, something we desperately craved in recent months as we expanded our team and product portfolio.

The acquisition gives me particular pleasure as I was on the verge of buying the same property nearly two years ago, only for illness to strike and put our plans on hold. Now we can move forward as a company, with plenty of space to accommodate our recent and anticipated growth.

It’s all a long way from our start-up days ten years ago in the original ‘Worldwide Headquarters’ (dubbed quite rightly by then-Abu Dhabi Duty Free Managing Director Mohamed Mounib as ‘the garden shed’ (pictured below) at the bottom of my garden. I have put in many long hours at that particular HQ and it still holds a special place in my heart.

As any entrepreneur will tell you, running one’s own company is a journey. There are many tough moments along the way but also many moments of absolute exhilaration. Since those long ago days of 2002, we have built a team of incredible talent, none of whom I would trade for the world. The portfolio has burgeoned from a single weekly pdf to a whole suite of multi-media products, conferences, awards, coffee table books and an airport commercial revenues benchmarking study.

With the active and encouraging support of our new shareholder, the Wampler Family Trust, we are more determined than ever to keep improving our ‘Fast, Factual, Free’ service, to maintain our reputation for innovation and, most importantly, to keep giving back to the industry and to the community.

Next month we will officially inaugurate The Moodie Report Foundation, which will be dedicated to raising funds for cancer research and other cancer concerns all around the world.

The Foundation, which will receive significant start-up funding from both shareholders in Moodie International, will be one of two beneficiaries of the monies raised at The Moodie Report 10th Anniversary Ball to be held at the Hotel Icon on 5 October in Hong Kong (more details soon). The other will be Hand in Hand for Haiti, travel retail’s towering corporate social responsibility achievement of recent years.

On Sunday I briefly popped back into our old offices (below), which had been vacated while I was in Turkey on Friday. The room was empty but absolutely packed full of memories. We spent eight good years there, a period that saw the company transformed from fledgling start-up to market leader.

I took it all in for a few moments, then turned to leave. Another chapter closed. Something protruding from behind a radiator grabbed my attention. I bent down and picked it up. It was a photograph (below) of Lars Johansson, an industry pioneer and legend and one of my great friends and mentors in this business, who died suddenly during the Cannes show in 2009 (his lovely wife Beverly) is pictured left.

Lars encouraged and cajoled me constantly in the difficult early days of The Moodie Report that I could make an independent business work, just as he had with Imagination Unlimited International, which he founded in 1998 and where he masterminded the extraordinary travel retail success story that is Inniskillin Icewine.

I like to think it was more than just fate that made me glance back at that moment. I like to think it was Lars guiding me towards a new chapter of our journey.

[Footnote: Our new UK address is:

Moodie International

The Old Pumping Station

Unit 3

Pump Alley

Brentford, Middlesex, TW80AP]

  • Martin,
    There is some incredibly good karma in your favour here…
    Best of luck in the new domicile!
    Steve

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