Maria Hollins: Never Questioned Whether She Could

When Maria Hollins walks into a room, something unusual happens.

People relax.

The CEO of Ann Summers is often referred to as the “CEO of Sex”—a title that reflects her role at one of Britain’s most recognisable brands, but reveals very little about the woman herself. Spend five minutes in her company and another picture emerges. She listens.

Not the performative listening often associated with senior leadership, but the genuine kind that makes people feel heard. In a crowded room, she has a remarkable ability to make each person feel that, for a few moments, they are the only one there.

That quality was not learned in business. It was inherited.

Long before Maria Hollins became a CEO, she was watching women who never questioned whether they belonged. As a little girl growing up in Shropshire, she travelled with her maternal grandmother on her weekly “egg round”, delivering produce from their smallholding to homes across Crewe and Nantwich. At the time it simply felt like family life. Looking back, she realises those journeys were her first lessons in business.

Her grandfather affectionately called his wife “Mrs Jones the Trader”, a nickname earned through years of building loyal customers, one conversation at a time. If her grandmother introduced her to enterprise, her mother taught her leadership.

After Maria’s paternal grandfather was declared bankrupt, her parents bought and rebuilt the family farm together. While her father owned the land, it was her mother who constantly pushed the business forward, embracing innovation and expansion in a profession dominated by men. She stood beside the auctioneer selling cattle into rings filled almost entirely with men, never asking for permission because, in her mind, there was no permission to ask for. She simply got on with the job.

Looking back, Hollins believes those women shaped her expectations.

“I never really questioned that, as a woman, I couldn’t do something.”

That quiet certainty explains much of what followed.

Maria progressed rapidly through retail, becoming an Executive Director at just thirty before eventually leading one of Britain’s best-known brands. Yet success brought an unexpected companion. For years she lived with imposter syndrome, carrying the quiet fear that one day someone would discover she wasn’t good enough. Only with time did she realise that her success had not been accidental. It had been earned.

That experience fundamentally shaped the leader she became. Having benefited from people who recognised her potential before she fully recognised it herself, she now looks for that same spark in others. Attitude, curiosity and potential matter more to her than years served or polished CVs. Leadership, she believes, is not about proving yourself. It is about creating an environment where other people discover what they are capable of.

The same philosophy runs through her personal life.

For most of her adult life, Maria has trained four or five times every week. Not because she is chasing perfection, but because movement is the constant that keeps everything else in balance. It supports her leadership, her family life, her relationships and her health. Exercise is not something she squeezes into an already busy diary. It is one of the habits that enables everything else.

She enjoys good food, a glass of wine and the occasional cocktail. What distinguishes her is not perfection but consistency. Week after week, year after year, she has continued to invest in herself while balancing the competing demands of senior leadership and family life. That consistency mirrors the way she leads: steady, committed and always looking ahead rather than over her shoulder.

Spend time with Maria and another quality quickly becomes impossible to ignore—curiosity. Whether discussing football or talking about leadership, she is more interested in understanding another perspective than proving her own. Even after decades in senior leadership, she still asks questions, convinced there is always something new to learn.

That is why she embodies the philosophy behind Meta-Age.

Meta-Age is built on the belief that ageing should never become an excuse for withdrawing from life. It is about remaining curious, continuing to contribute and refusing to let experience harden into complacency. Maria Hollins has been living that philosophy for decades.

When she completed the Meta-Age questionnaire, she was not discovering a new way of thinking. She was recognising one she had already been living. The questions simply gave a name to values that had shaped her since childhood: purpose, curiosity, responsibility, consistency and growth.

The CEO of Ann Summers is impressive, but the little girl who watched her grandmother build a business one customer at a time, and her mother command respect in a world that rarely expected women to lead, tells the more important story.

Maria Hollins did not become a Meta-Ager. She simply discovered there was finally a name for the philosophy she had been living all along.