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TWST: Your comments have been restricted to the UK marketplace? What international opportunities do you have to extend your own brands, recognising that there might be some licensing limitations on some of the other items and apparels that you carry within your domestic market?

Mr. Hall: I think it's safe to say that we feel we have plenty of opportunities in the UK, certainly, over the next two to three-year time horizon, and perhaps one of the biggest ones that we're tackling at the moment is the Internet, where we have set up two e-transaction sites. Initially, we sought to, obviously, have the normal corporate site with information about where Blacks Leisure Group was, and where it was going, and provide annual financial type information. We expanded that in July of last year to a First Sport site called fsx.co.uk, which was short for First Sport Exclusive, where we sold some 40 trainers that were exclusive to First Sport. So the reason to go to the site was to get a hold of exclusive products, but we used it as a testing ground to make sure that we had the right content, we could complete fulfilment, the technology worked, and we could get paid. Having used that experience, we then looked at our customer base and decided that, actually, the core customer within First Sport: the 15-25 year-old, walking around town on the High Street, didn't particularly want to buy it through the net. Whereas the Blacks customer, aged 25-45, who is generally A-B-C one demographic: is a little bit more wealthy, a little bit more time precious, often choosing the same brands year in, year out with repeat purchase, just wanting some technical information, represents an ideal candidate to sell through the net. And, indeed, a lot of our Blacks customers have been coming in asking us where was our Internet site? Indeed, I think looking for a community to be formed on it. With that in mind, and because we have a customer database of some 100,000 people, we have, in February of this year, launched a Blacks.co.uk site, which is transactional. Rather than the 40-odd products that we had on FSX, we have launched 350 products with some 1,000 SKUs. And although I describe it as "launch", we haven't marketed it externally, partly because we want to make sure that as it's a Blacks brand, and people trust it, because it's been around for so long. We want to be able to cope with the demand that comes through and sell it to our existing customer database first. That gives us two great opportunities: one, to repay the loyalty of those individual customers; and two, to obtain their e-mail addresses, so that in future, when we put on promotions and have, for example, skiers that come in and talk about what's going on in a store, we will be able to e-mail them. Actually, this is more efficient for us and more personal for them, so we improve service and improve our efficiency at the same time. So, in fact, going full circle, we believe the Internet is an interesting opportunity, great on the marketing side, and may be, has future potential for us as we see the response that there is to our site and react to it accordingly. ...