Molly Hawkins

This is a Gylian name. The surname is Hawkins. This person is customarily referred to by the given name Molly.

Molly Hawkins
Born	(1930-03-19) 19 March 1930 TACS, Alscia
Occupation	Confectioner chocolatier businesswoman
Known for	Founder of the Molly Hawkins Group
Net worth	Ŧ20 billion (c. 1992)

Molly Hawkins (Gylic transcription: Moli Hokinys; born 19 March 1930) is a Gylian confectioner, chocolatier, and businesswoman. She is the founder and former president of the Molly Hawkins Group.

Nicknamed "the countess of chocolate", she is considered one of Gylias' most esteemed business figures, and is well-known for her eccentric public image.

Early life

Molly Hawkins was born on 19 March 1930, in a village that was part of Alscia's TACS. Her Anglophone family had lived in the Cacertian Empire for a long time, and moved to Alscia after the Cacerta-Xevden War.

Her parents were cocoa farmers. She began helping out on the family farm at an early age, and later served apprenticeships, learning how to make chocolate and confections. She had a limited formal education, attending school only enough to become functionally literate.

During the Liberation War, she travelled the Free Territories as a merchant, and developing several of the recipes that would drive her later success.

Career

After the war, Molly settled in Kausania. She opened her first company in 1959, and established a chocolate factory in Dáuzas. The company steadily gained in popularity, and transformed into a cooperative federation by incorporating competitors.

Molly admired Arlette Gaubert, the founder of Gaulette, and developed an ambition to achieve a similar status. Early in her career, she visited Arlette in her Senate office, and stated, "I want to be to Gylias what you were to Alscia." Arlette was impressed by Molly's boldness, and provided her with career advice, which Molly wrote down and "followed like a sacred text", according to one biographer.

Arlette impressed upon Molly the importance of compartmentalisation, arguing that she would need to be "two-faced" to succeed in business: generous and loving towards her friends and allies, and ruthless and underhanded towards enemies. Arlette taught Molly that both extremes needed to be balanced, and that she must always think of her actions in the service of a greater cause: protecting workers' rights and providing consumers with superior service at lower prices.

When the group's expansion attracted the attention of the Inspectorate of Competition, Molly began to implement her Gaulette-inspired strategy. She approached the Darnan Cyras government, and secured an agreement: the group would fully cooperate with the Agricultural Produce Marketing Board and follow its directions, and in return it would be allowed to consolidate the Gylian confectionery industry under its umbrella.

As the Molly Hawkins Group steadily expanded, Molly increasingly moved from a hands-on role towards a more administrative one: advancing a vision for the company and securing the workforce's support for it. She still remained involved in devising recipes, inspecting factories, and training new employees.

She devised an ambitious plan to dominate chocolate production in Tyran, based on the advantage of Gylias being Tyran's main producer of cocoa and vanilla. The first international branches of the group were set up in neighbouring Molise, and initial expansion focused on Common Sphere member states.

Molly soon encountered another obstacle in the group's expansion: the limit of local milk supply. To solve it, she traveled to Tennai in 1966, alongside Niloufer Khanum Sultana, where she managed to negotiate the "Hampi agreement": the group committed to mainly import milk from Tennai, and in exchange it received free rein to expand in Tennai's confectionery market.

The Molly Hawkins Group embarked on an aggressive international expansion after the "Hampi agreement". Molly's approach was to rigorously follow Arlette's advice to the letter. The group used its Gylian profits to fund its expansion and reproduce domestic conditions: workers were offered high wages and workers' self-management, while consumers were offered low prices and higher product quality.

The international members of the group took full advantage of their freedom in advertising and pricing, which was absent in Gylias. Cooperatives invested heavily in advertising and launched price wars to squeeze competitors out of confectionery markets across Tyran. When a competitor was driven out of business, the group would buy the competitor and turn it into a cooperative as part of its cooperative federation — a strategy that appeased the concerns of competition regulators in the countries it expanded to.

By the 1990s, Molly had achieved her ambition of turning the group into Tyran's largest confectionery manufacturer. She attended the Decleyre Summit and became an enthusiastic participant in the Social Partnership Program. She stepped down as the group's president in 2000, while remaining an honourary member of the Management Board.

Her autobiography, Business Is Business, was published in 2002. Surpassing Molly's own expectations, it became a best-seller and received critical acclaim. Radix commented that "one of the book's advantages is its arrogance: Molly believes she is unquestionably right about everything she's done, and thus doesn't bother much with editing or self-justification. The effect is to turn what could've been another exercise in self-mythologisation into a fascinating warts and all portrait."

She was interviewed for Rasa Ḑeşéy's documentaries Our Clothes (2012), where she discussed the importance of her public image to her career, and Beloved Rascals (2017), similarly commenting on her public persona.

Public image

Full body portrait of Molly Hawkins

Since the beginning of her career, Molly has cultivated a distinctive public image. In all her public appearances, she wears a trademark outfit consisting of a white shirt with a bow, a red skirt suit with a small jacket, high-heeled shoes, and thick-framed glasses. Her fashion style was dubbed "Hawkinstyle" — by analogy with Levystile — and is regarded as evocative of Alscian fashion. She once remarked, "Outfits with buttons are what brings us closer to divinity."

Influenced by her family background and interest in stoicism, Molly writes in Business Is Business that she consciously devised a "stone-faced, stiff-upper-lip" image for herself, describing her conclusion that being perceived as "a stern and imposing monument" would aid her career. She cites her fascination with Letizia Silvestri and Tamara Łempicka, particularly the magnetism of their "steely gaze", and states she wished to give herself a similar mystique — to present herself as "a being of pure ego".

Rasa Ḑeşéy stated in an interview: "Of course Molly is different in private. She smiles, she laughs, she listens and shares charming anecdotes. But put her in public or in front of a camera, and she is utterly committed to playing the role of 'Molly Hawkins'."

Molly was one of Gylias' richest people, with an estimated net worth of Ŧ20 billion in 1992. She is a prolific participant in the Social Partnership Program, and has numerous buildings in Kausania named after her due to her contribution to their construction and maintenance.

While recognised as one of Gylias' most esteemed business figures, she has largely kept a low profile during her career, giving few interviews. She commented in her autobiography, "Silence builds gravitas. I realised I must say very little for my words to carry greater weight."

Adding to her image of eccentricity, Molly lives in a 20-room mansion in Dáuzas, staffed by a "small army" of lavishly-paid domestic workers.

Private life

Molly practices polyandry, and has had a total of five husbands simultaneously. Expressing a desire to establish a "dynasty", she adopted 10 daughters in total, and raised them using the same methods as Valeria Valente. Many of her daughters entered the family business, one being appointed to the Management Board of the Molly Hawkins Group, while others pursued different career paths. One of them stated in an interview that Molly strongly insists on a sense of decorum at home, and "loathes" casual clothes, requiring her family to "be as well-dressed as she is".

She is agnostic and has rarely commented on politics, describing herself as "some sort of liberal" and remarking "I wish Valeria Valente would've won the Liberation War."

Among her other endeavours, she is an investor in Polaris and The Pump.