One of the first projects I gave Malcolm [Miller] was to come up with a packaging design for a new range of car speakers and also work through some advertising ideas. My unpaid marketing expert Colin Lewin told me that the bee’s knees in car speakers was Pioneer – their kit was selling like hotcakes and the Taiwanese were effectively copying them. The packaging design for our kit looked identical to Pioneer’s – even the typeface was the same, albeit Amstrad’s was in our corporate plum colour while Pioneer’s was blue.

He’d done a good job in conjunction with our advertising agency, who handled all the artwork, which was swiftly sent to Taiwan. Within weeks, we started to sell these speakers and they were a tremendous success. Colin Lewin lapped them up, as did Comet, Laskys and G. W. Smith.

One day, Colin asked me, in passing, ‘Are you sure you’re not going to get into trouble with these, as they’re virtually identical to the Pioneer ones?’

I didn’t quite understand what he meant at the time, but I would certainly find out later!

...

One day we received a very formal solicitor’s letter containing lots of drawings and documents in legalese. I knew this was serious. I consulted a partner at Herbert Smith – Tony Willoughby, a specialist in this area.

He took a look at the letter and at the products and told me, ‘You have a seriously big problem. What idiot in your company would have done something as blatant as this? Do you not understand the world of copyright? Didn’t the corporate people do due diligence on your company before it went public to ensure there was no chance of litigation?’

I agreed with him. We had made a naïve and stupid mistake and we were most probably about to learn a hard lesson. In fact, Colin Lewin had tipped me the wink that Pioneer were up in arms and were going to take legal action. To cut to the chase, the result was that we had to deliver about 2,000 sets of speakers to Pioneer, who duly destroyed them.