Andrew Douglas Brownsword CBE DL (born 1947) is an English entrepreneur who established the Forever Friends company. He has regularly featured on the Sunday Times Rich List, with an estimated fortune of £190 million.[1]
Biography
Brownsword attended The Harvey Grammar School in Folkestone and then trained as a chef.
Career
He started the Andrew Brownsword Collection, a publishing business founded in Bath in 1971. Brownsword started by selling greeting cards to retailers like WH Smith from boxes out of the back of his car.
In 1987, he agreed to market artist Deborah Jones Teddy Bear design, developing the Forever Friends genre in a flat above a Chinese takeaway in Reading, Berkshire in the early 1980s:[2] "I wanted to develop a teddy bear that appealed to adults as well as children. I based Forever Friends specifically on the teddy bear that Sebastian Flyte carried around in Brideshead Revisited. It became the bear found in the attic." The success created a financial income to develop the Andrew Brownsword Group, based on greetings cards and associated gifts with a peak turnover of £65 million. The Andrew Brownsword Collection, Andrew Brownsword Gifts and the Gordon Fraser Gallery (the latter acquired in 1989),[3] were acquired by Hallmark Cards in 1994 for an estimated £195 million.[4]
External links
References
- Estate up £10m for landowner^
- Michael Durham. Are we soft? Guardian Unlimited, Guardian, 10 August 2004^
- Hallmark Acquisition The New York Times, 17 November 1993, retrieved 25 April 2010^