Martha Lane Fox was very pleasantly surprised by her recent visit to Lucky Voice Dubai — the first overseas outpost of her London-based karaoke chain.
Before she set out to visit after dinner on a Saturday night, explanations were being made about the difference in the working week.
“Everybody said to me, ‘It’s Saturday night — it’s going to be dead. Nobody’s going to be there.’ But unless they’d hired actors, which I don’t think they did, it was busy. It was fun and it felt like a club and a singing place all in one,” she says.
Ms Lane Fox, who says her signature tune is Elton John's I'm Still Standing, is a well-known business figure in the United Kingdom, where she was a co-founder of Lastminute.com. She was just 27 when Lastminute.com floated in March 2000. Its shares were hugely oversubscribed and the £3.87 per share issue price gave it a value of £571 million (Dh2.67 billion), which then soared to £768m on the first day of trading.
She left the business three years later, shortly after it made its maiden profit and the company was eventually sold in 2005 to Sabre Holdings for £577m.
After leaving Lastminute.com, Ms Lane Fox took a few months off to go travelling, visiting Japan and its private karaoke booths.
“A group of us, friends, thought that this was something we should do. I was lucky enough to have the capital to be the founder, but all of us worked on the idea and I asked my friend, Nick Thistleton, who is the chief executive of Lucky Voice, to come and run it.”
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What: First overseas Lucky Voice karaoke venture spurs expansion plans.
Why: Dubai welcome for singing bar defies initial downbeat expectations.
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Ms Lane Fox was still travelling as the venue for the first site was being finalised when she was involved in a serious car accident in which she was left with 28 broken bones.
“So poor Nick was on his own doing a difficult construction task,” she says. “I’m not exaggerating, I would be lying flat unable to move and he would show me models. It would have made no sense at all because I was on morphine, but miraculously he was able to pull together this fabulous venue.”
The venue, which opened in 2005, was in a basement on Poland Street in London’s Soho district below a Yo! Sushi restaurant.
“It was kind of perfect and not perfect all in one,” says Ms Lane Fox. “ It needed a lot of construction to make it feel like a Lucky Voice. But actually, you can’t go wrong with a basement because it feels a bit exclusive and it’s at the centre of everywhere that people might be coming from and going to in central London.”
A second Lucky Voice followed in Islington in the capital and a third in Brighton — all of which are directly owned by the company — before its franchising deals took place, initially with Novus Leisure, to open four UK sites and then in December with Lucky Voice Karaoke Restaurants, the first international outlet, opening in Dubai.
Ms Lane Fox says a third London venue is likely to open later this year, which will be a company-owned store, and that decisions taken on whether to franchise a store or open one of its own has largely been based on locations.
“We’re in London — simple as that. We’re in the south-east. We’re not experts in Manchester, we’re not experts in Scotland and I think one of the things that I have learnt is even though you want to get that absolutely brilliant Lucky Voice experience it will be marginally different for each place and each culture. So we felt that was the right model to go with.
“Certainly, internationally we would not feel like we wanted to suddenly open a place in Dubai without having really strong local partners.”
Ms Lane Fox says she can see the chain becoming a global phenomenon due to the universal appeal of karaoke.
“We are talking to people in other locations — 100 per cent.
“Show me a culture that doesn’t like singing,” she says. “Arguably, if you can make it work in London where people are weird and shy and don’t do stuff in groups together, then you can make it work anywhere.”
One of Ms Lane Fox’s targets is to eventually expand the London-based brand to karaoke’s spiritual home, Japan.
“The KPI [key performance indicator] that I had as my own personal measure of success is ‘Do the Japanese want to import Lucky Voice back to Japan?’
“It hasn’t happened. There’s a company in Japan called Big Echo. They are the dominant karaoke provider. I’ve always said that when Big Echo pick up the phone and say, ‘We need Lucky Voice’ then we will have done a good job.”
Alongside her investment in Lucky Voice, Ms Lane Fox is also an advocate for boosting digital skills in the United Kingdom — a role which led to her being made Baroness Lane Fox of Soho and the youngest sitting member of the UK’s second chamber, the House of Lords. She also founded Go On UK — a charity campaigning for a more inclusive digital society.
“I spend a huge amount of my working life thinking about this,” says Ms Lane Fox, who is also on the board of the technology juggernaut Twitter.
She says diversity in the technology sector remains “atrocious”, with too many companies relentlessly pursuing growth ahead of everything else.
“I think that there’s this kind of quest that you only somehow are substantive if you have created a billion-dollar business. That is one measure of something, but it’s not to me the measure of success that I would like.
“I wish I could sit here and say that I have all of these answers. I don’t, but I know there are some things that work and I think there is a lot more attention in the last one to two years about the subconscious biases in this sector.”
For instance, she says in terms of gender bias, greater attention has been paid to the fact that more women are recruited when CVs are anonymised.
“But what I don’t necessarily think is being addressed are the top and bottom end of the spectrum — I mean, I’m not sure we’ve cracked how to encourage more girls and young women into technology.”
At the top end, women are still significantly under-represented on company boards, but Ms Lane Fox says that there are more female role models in the industry.
“I think it’s complicated and we just need to keep on talking about it,” she says.
mfahy@thenational.ae
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