America and contain the risk of currency fluctuations between the pound and the US dollar. The experiment was not successful and the San Francisco shop was surrendered. The attempted expansion overseas coincided with the opportunity to acquire the lease on the shop next door at 186 Piccadilly, affording the firm a wonderful double frontage on Piccadilly. Unfortunately the firm overreached itself, moving too far away from its core strengths, and nearly collapsed. The firm found some financial relief when the Japanese conglomerate Fukuske Corporation paid £750,000 for a 20 per cent stake in the company. A Swaine & Adeney shop was opened in 1989 in the fashionable Jingumae in the Shibuya ward, Tokyo. That same year, Robert sold the firm's freehold factory at Great Chesterford and built a new 10,000 square foot factory nearby. Although Robert had nursed the firm back into trading with a small profit, he and the Adeney and Brigg family shareholders decided in the summer of 1990 to sell their 80 per cent stake in the company for a reported £4 to £5 million. The new controlling shareholder was the Ensign Trust, the investment arm of the Merchant Navy Pension Fund. Swaine Adeney Brigg (1990–2022) The company was reincorporated as Pictology Ltd, but continued to trade as Swaine Adeney Brigg. The financial challenges were not over, however, for the firm was running at annual losses of more than £3 million even as it went through various chairmanships. First came Anthony Tryon, 3rd Baron Tryon as successor to Robert Adeney; he was followed by Rohan Courtney in 1993–4; and then John de Bruyne, the Cambridge entrepreneur, who had grand ideas of making the company into a British Hermès or Gucci. De Bruyne achieved big savings by moving the shop from Piccadilly to cheaper premises in Old Bond Street. A further move took place in 1998 when the shop opened at 54 St James's Street, not far from where Brigg's old shop at No. 23 had been. The period of de Bruyne's chairmanship was not without success. Swaine Adeney Brigg bought Herbert Johnson, the venerable firm of hatters of 38 New Bond Street in 1996. By that year the firm was making 2,500 briefcases a year; this was to be augmented with the acquisition of the luggage-making division of Papworth Industries, the manufacturing arm of Papworth Village Settlement near Cambridge in 1997. De Bruyne closed down the Great