It’s everyone’s dream: sitting at your kitchen table and coming up with an idea for a killer business. All the best ideas are simple ones, but maybe you need Parnell’s dynamism to act on it.
‘Around then, Irish people were starting to travel to the Far East, places like Thailand and Japan, and sampling what my dad would have called “food with notions”. I felt they’d want to start cooking those cuisines.’
So how did she set up her business?
‘I was working for a food export company, I’d met a few key people, so I knew where to source products.’
At the time, she had two years under her belt as a salesperson with Irish Dairy International.
Parnell getting a job with IDI was no mean feat: back then, their biggest customer was Saudi Arabia, who had a policy of not negotiating with women. In light of this, IDI had been reluctant to interview her.
But, according to Aaron Dillon, head of HR, as soon as Parnell walked through the door, he knew she was special. ‘Full of energy and optimism, very much a team player. Always smiling, always sunny.’
(Photos from the time show a healthy-looking young woman with fair hair, freckles and big teeth. You couldn’t call her beautiful, but she was bursting with vitality.)
‘Not everyone liked her,’ Aaron Dillon admitted. ‘The word “pushy” was used, but I reckoned she’d go a long way.’
Two people who did like her were two men who began working for IDI that same year – Rory Kinsella and Johnny Casey, her first and second husbands respectively.
‘That pair made a great team. Rory was the solid one and Johnny had the charm,’ Aaron Dillon confirms. ‘Both brilliant at their job.’
And both in love with Parnell, if the rumours are to be believed.
Parnell won’t be drawn on that. But, as Johnny Casey has been quoted as saying, ‘I was in love with her for her entire marriage to Rory’, it’s probably safe to say that they are.
Parnell drew up a business plan for her proposed business, which she cheerfully admits was a fiction. ‘I did a five-year projection,’ she laughs, ‘but I had no idea if I’d survive the first month.’
Nevertheless, she must have talked a good game, because she got a bank loan.
‘In fairness, in those particular days,’ she reminds me, ‘banks were very keen to lend.’
In late 1996 in a small shop-front on South Anne Street, Parnell’s International Grocers opened their doors for trading. Much has always been made of the look of the store. Over the lintel, the old-fashioned mirrored sign with curlicued gold-leaf lettering looked simultaneously novel and as though it had always been there. Instantly, it guaranteed confidence.
Inside the store, Parnell featured recipe cards and cooking demos. The staff was knowledgeable about what to cook with those adorable little jars of Saigon cinnamon or Burmese salt-cured anchovies.
Of course, Irish customers paid a hefty premium for the privilege of buying these ingredients, which could have been picked up in the markets of Birmingham or Brick Lane for a tenth of the price.
Parnell is unapologetic. ‘I was paying the carriage, the Customs duty, and I was taking all the risk.’
From the very moment it opened, PiG (as it quickly became known) enjoyed a brisk trade. From today’s vantage point, it seems a no-brainer that Parnell’s International Grocers would be a success – a newly sophisticated population, richer than at any other time in their history.
But Parnell says it was nothing of the sort. ‘I’d given up my job to work full time on getting the business off the ground and my flat was my guarantee for the loan. I could have lost everything. I was petrified. It’s an audacious thing to set up your own business. Plenty of people would have been happy to see me fail.’
When I demur, she’s insistent. ‘Not everyone likes an “ambitious” woman. When it’s said about a man it’s always in a good way. But a woman? Not so much. If I’d failed, the embarrassment would have been as painful as the financial loss.’
But she didn’t fail. She insists – correctly – that a large factor in her success was timing.
In 1997, when she married Kinsella, the Cork branch was up and running. At this point, Kinsella left Irish Dairy International to work as a salesman for his wife’s company and, less than a year later, Johnny Casey joined them.
By the early days of the new millennium, there were seven stores nationwide, three of them – Dublin, Malahide and Kilkenny – featuring cafés. During this time, barely seeming to break stride, Parnell also had two children: her only son Ferdia in 1998 and her eldest daughter Saoirse in 2002.
When the crash hit in 2008, PiG had sixteen outlets around the country, including a fine-dining restaurant next to the original site on South Anne Street.
In some circles, PiG was known as ‘The Land That Recession Forgot’. But Parnell is quick to disabuse me. ‘The recession hurt us, the way it hurt every business. Eight of our premises shut.’
The recession may have passed but the world has changed beyond all recognition since PiG first opened its doors. How has it remained relevant when the most obscure ingredient can be sourced on the internet and your local Centra stocks Scotch bonnet chillies?
‘Very high-quality exotic fresh produce and diverse cuisines. In the last five months, we’ve showcased Uzbeki, Eritrean and Hawaiian food. We’ve also featured Gujarati cooking, instead of generic Indian, and Shandong instead of Chinese. And every launch is supported by the cookery school.’
Ah, yes, the cookery school, perhaps Parnell’s greatest achievement. It’s a mystery how she continues to woo highly strung, over-scheduled, big-name chefs to little old Dublin, but continue she does. In the last month, Francisco Madarona, the chef-patron of Oro Sucio on the Yucatan peninsula, did two days – immediately sold-out – of demos of his Modern Mayan cuisine. Considering that Oro Sucio is fully booked for the next eighteen months, this is quite an achievement.
So how did she manage to bag Francisco?
‘I asked,’ is her reply.
Hmm. I suspect it’s not as simple as that. However, she has a unique combination of charm and dogged determination. It may not hurt that she’s a very attractive woman. She’s grown into her youthful toothiness, her hair is a sharply cut bob in an expensive-looking golden blonde and, considering she’s forty-nine, her skin is flawless, not a wrinkle in sight.
She’s refreshingly up-front about her forays into cosmetic surgery. ‘No Botox, but I’m a divil for the laser. I got all my freckles lasered off – it hurt like you wouldn’t believe but it was the happiest day of my life. Now and again I get the face zapped off me to stimulate collagen. Excruciating but no pain, no gain.’
Speaking of pain, experts agree that if she’d sold PiG in 2008 – apparently three buyers with deep pockets made overtures mere weeks before the worldwide crash – she’d have made an eye-watering amount. But she turned them all down – too much of a control freak?
Or perhaps she’s not motivated entirely by money. It’s common knowledge that her staff are well taken care of. Which may explain, despite her reputation as ‘a benign dictator’, the almost cult-like loyalty she inspires among her employees.
It seems as if she lives a charmed existence, but we must remember that her first husband died when they were both only thirty-four. They’d been married less than seven years and had two young children.