A Brand Champion Aims For Champion Brands

The Age

Saturday August 25, 2007

Nabila Ahmed

Family business has prepared Sue Morphet for her role as CEO, writes Nabila Ahmed.

AT THE zenith of her career, Sue Morphet is anxious to point out she is no superwoman.

"I mean, like (there have been days when) we've all fallen out the door and breakfast has been on the table for three days."

But it is hard to believe the former schoolteacher when she says that had it not been for her father's sudden death at 50, she may well have been enjoying a pleasant life of academia right now instead of preparing to take over as chief executive of the $1.7 billion Pacific Brands business.

Although her formal education in business has been limited, it seems Morphet was always destined to follow in the footsteps of her mother, Valma Counsel, who not only managed her husband's businesses after his death but went on to forge a successful career of her own.

Counsel was a finalist in one of the early businesswoman of the year awards three decades ago, and now her daughter becomes only the second woman at the top of a listed top 200 company, after Gail Kelly's ascension at Westpac this week. Morphet will officially take over from departing Pacific Brands chief executive Paul Moore at the end of the year.

While their names may not be as readily recognised as the father-son dynasties littered through Australian business history past and present, the stories of Morphet and her mum are no less remarkable.

Valma, who had always helped with bookkeeping and other tasks in her husband John Bird's various businesses - a bakery foremost, and then including advertising and a restaurant - picked up the pieces and took them to the next level after his death.

Gradually, she ventured out to run the renowned Mitty's racing silks business in Melbourne.

"She went on to open shops on most of the major racecourses in Australia, which was quite groundbreaking," recalls Morphet. Morphet, then a young mother of two, helped her mum with some of the work in those days, while also taking charge of the small bread-making school her father had opened.

"He was playing golf one Saturday and had a cerebral hemorrhage and died. It was quite unpleasant. He was only 50 so he wasn't even as old as I am. It was very sad . . . It was a very significant turning point for me in that I got into business."

Bird's Country Mills was eventually bought out by global food and agribusiness giant Bunge, which then funded a book of bread recipes compiled by cooking personality Beverley Sutherland Smith and Morphet in 1984.

Sutherland Smith remembers the work Morphet was doing with Bird's was "ahead of its time" as bread mixes were a completely new product.

Later, when her daughters were older, Morphet worked at pillow manufacturer Tontine, then owned by Pacific Dunlop, from which Pacific Brands emerged in 2001. The company now owns a range of underwear, workwear and homeware labels, including Bonds, Berlei, Hard Yakka and Sheridan.

Her parents' lessons still resonate. "My parents were very hard-working, as they would need to be with six children and being a baking family in the country (Bacchus Marsh)," she says. "Dad taught me to be a fair trader, a very fair trader. He was very very insistent that we could work with the people who were cleaning the bakery as well as the people who were putting money in the bank.

"My father always told me to leave a dollar on the table for the next man, that sort of thing. And my mother taught me that 'really Sue, it's not a matter of how hard you've worked, it's did you get done what needed to be done'?"

As head of Pacific Brands, the 52-year-old will be most concerned with what she describes as the task of "untapping the energy of our brands". At a time when department stores such as Myer are pursuing a strategy of private-label goods, it is Morphet's job to make sure people continue to buy, and love, brands. The trick is to keep the brands relevant, which she did with the company's underwear and hosiery division, by lifting sales 6.4 per cent in the second half of 2006-07.

"There is room and need for us both. If we do it well, retailers and shoppers need us in that offer."

Morphet's work-wear wardrobe may be more Armani and Akira than Hard Yakka, but on the day she is anointed, Morphet reveals with a cheeky smile that underneath her elegant pin-striped Herringbone suit, she is a company girl through and through.

"I do wear our product underneath. Always, always. I would never go to anything important without our product on, so Bonds undies, Berlei bra. I know (no one will know) but it's my job to make sure it's good enough for me to feel special in," she says.

Morphet is reluctant to talk specifically about the financial outlook for the company at this stage, but she has signalled there will be no change of direction for Pacific Brands, which disappointed the market with a subdued profit guidance for fiscal 2008 of 10 per cent earnings growth.

In the next four months, before Moore leaves, Morphet will concentrate on understanding "what goes on in the corporate balance sheet versus what goes on in the underwear and hosiery one".

A rare breed in a corporate world of tightly guarded CEOs, Morphet is candid about her apprehensions.

"I make no bones of the fact that I have not grown up with a financial background so as much as I can run a business, and I run the big business and understand all of that, just the stockmarket and how we work as a public company will be a new learning curve for me," she admits.

It will also take some adjusting at home, where Morphet and husband Barry are supporting their youngest, son Jack, through year 11. Their daughters have left home, with Rachael marrying recently and Melissa moving to New York.

But while she admits to succumbing to "the guilts" in striving to maintain a balance between her family and her career, Morphet has managed to orchestrate a rhythm at home that ensures things run as smoothly as possible.

"The last out has to leave the house nice for the first in, the first in sets the table . . . First-in cooks and last-in cleans up. If someone was waiting for the last person to come in and cook, they'd be slaughtered."

She is eternally grateful to her husband, who is now working at their farm in Merton in country Victoria.

"All my children wanted when they were growing up was a mother that did the tuckshop. And they had a father that turned the sausages at the barbecue. He's turned more sausages than I have sold underpants, I promise you. He has been to every barbecue, every fundraiser, been on all the excursions and everything."

It's fortunate for her, she says, that he has loved it.