When John Lewis boss Sharon White’s plan to leave the retail group was leaked on social media earlier this week it took almost everyone at the business by surprise – only a handful of senior staff knew an announcement was imminent.
The resignation makes White the shortest-serving chairman – her chosen title – in the partnership’s history. She will have served just five years when she leaves in February 2025 – less than half the tenure of her two predecessors. Yet the former civil servant’s exit is no shock to retail watchers who have seen her three years of struggle at the head of the staff-owned group, which includes Waitrose supermarkets as well as the department stores.
Some have blamed the very public and painful decline of the brands revered by Britain’s middle classes on White. One former staffer said the boss was seen in the business as “a nice and decent person but just the wrong person in the wrong job”.
White joined the business from Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, just weeks before Covid swept through the UK and lockdowns turned city centres into ghost towns. Her arrival has been preceded by an ill-advised management restructure, led by her predecessor Charlie Mayfield.
Despite all that, the partnership held up reasonably well during the first year or so of the pandemic, thanks to investments in online infrastructure and a plan for its long-expected split from online grocery partner Ocado.
White – the first black and first female chair of John Lewis – proudly revived the staff bonus in 2022, having grasped the nettle in closing 16 unprofitable department stores. Those controversial closures included a new store in Birmingham that pitted her against her predecessor Andy Street, who was by then mayor of the West Midlands. But those stores had long been known as white elephants within the business, and White continued unwinding the over-ebullient expansion of Waitrose by shutting several supermarkets.
She also slashed the group’s debt, which helped insulate it from the problems that forced rival chains including Debenhams and Beales from the high street and saw House of Fraser shrink considerably.
White took an axe to its bloated head office, cutting more than 1,500 jobs, bringing the John Lewis and Waitrose operations closer together and paving the way for smaller and less expensive headquarters. All were necessary moves in a more cutthroat retail world.
As part of her five-year plan to reach £400m profits by 2025, White also ditched the never knowingly undersold (NKU) pledge, which had long seemed an expensive anachronism and had been costing the business millions in price matching.
But before long, White was making some big calls that raised questions about her judgment. As the retail business struggled, White put forward ideas for diversification including building homes to rent above stores and expanding into financial services. These plans had been on the cards for some time, but the emphasis on them was seen to divert attention from the core retail business.
Meanwhile, there was no clear strategy to replace NKU, beyond the launch of the Anyday budget brand, which, according to GlobalData analyst Zoe Mills, has since suffered from sputtering marketing support. The company says Anyday is a success, with annual sales of more than £160m – but even its presence in stores seems lacking in pizzazz.
One former staffer said White was failing to listen enough, and was ill-equipped for the job despite boundless self-belief.
“The biggest mistake was to let go of the people who made the brands what they were and really cared about them,” they added.
With the exit in 2020 of Waitrose boss Rob Collins and department store supremo Paula Nickolds – who later joined Sainsbury’s and took a number of senior executives with her – many years of business experience was lost.
One former adviser said missteps emerged as White built a team who were “all theory people”, and made changes without listening enough to long-term members of the retail business who knew the details of its supply chain and operations.
Rival supermarket bosses took to walking the aisles of Waitrose stores in bemusement, confronted with gaps on shelves, tired interiors and confusing layouts.
“Some people are too bright for retail,” the former adviser said. “Retail is all in the detail. It’s shopkeeping, not management theory.”
Another source and several former staffers agreed: “Her people judgment has been really poor.”
White picked former Sainsbury’s executive James Bailey to head Waitrose. He is seen as affable and capable, but slow off the mark in tackling revived competition from a more price-conscious and innovative Marks & Spencer food business. Insiders say Waitrose has begun to win back market share, and availability has improved as it recovered from an IT glitch.
The choice of former Co-op executive Pippa Wicks to head the department stores was controversial given that her experience lay in grocery, not fashion and homewares. Wicks abruptly left in February, leaving one of her deputies – Naomi Simcock – at the helm.
The source said White was used to the “genteel decorum of civil service life” and her leadership team was not quick enough to take “really hard decisions” required to keep a modern retail business humming. Insiders, however, pointed to White’s decisiveness on cost-cutting and store closures – moves that had been postponed for years by previous leaders.
A former senior staffer suggested retail basics had gone awry and questioned the quality and appropriateness of the product offer and its availability in stores. “Everywhere you look, other retailers [such as Marks & Spencer and Next] are thriving but John Lewis and Waitrose are finding it hard,” they said.
Perhaps the most cutting criticism is of White’s political savvy in hunting for funds to overhaul the business and cut debt. Aside from the homes to rent idea, White seemingly allowed a number of extreme cash-raising measures to be floated publicly, including risking the staff-owned group’s core values by selling off a stake in the business to raise more than £1bn. It also emerged that she had considered selling the group’s Leckford Estate farm in Hampshire.
Most recently she considered a sale and leaseback deal for 12 Waitrose stores – committing them to potentially rising rents in a market squeezed by tight profit margins.
Concerns within the business at the direction of travel saw White narrowly win a vote of confidence in May, with staff backing her to continue but dismayed at the retailer’s poor performance. One source said: “She was unable to orchestrate and execute a coherent plan.”
Last month, after reporting a loss for the most recent six months, White had to announce that the group’s turnaround would take two years longer than planned and cost more money. That came after March’s news that John Lewis was ditching its annual staff bonus for the second time in three years, after the group slumped to a worse-than-expected £230m full-year loss.
A source suggested White had been preparing for several months to announce her departure, and that her exit was “not a spur of the moment thing”. However, insiders disagreed.
Several sources said it was likely that White, who will not receive a payoff as she relinquishes her £1.1m-a-year job, had another, more appealing, role lined up elsewhere. There is speculation that she has been sounded out for senior position within a new Labour government, with the cabinet secretary post seen as a likely fit.
Despite the difficulties in her day job, White has sought a higher profile in recent months, authoring opinion pieces in newspapers and making speeches at events including at a recent Women in Work summit, where she told delegates: “You learn more from things that did not go to plan.”
White’s successor will need to decide whether to continue with her turnaround plan, which is not expected to deliver its benefits until 2028, or to scrap it altogether.
One former staffer said: “The main fear is that no one new is coming until February 2025 and so for the next [16 months] everybody is in limbo land and nobody is going to make any big decisions.”
However, John Lewis’s first group chief executive, former Hovis boss Nish Kankiwala, who was appointed in March, is now there to lead things forward. Some insiders believe he could step up from that role to become chairman, with a more hands-on retailer appointed in his place.
One source said White may fear that annual results due in March 2024 – for the year to the end of January – would not look like the “recovery story” was going well, so she was stepping away before pressure for a change became impossible to fight.
“Rather than be pushed, she would jump,” they said.
But the company said last month that business was on an “improving trend” and attracting more customers. In the statement confirming her exit, White said the business was “making progress in its modernisation and transformation, with improving results”.
With White’s legacy – and her future job prospects – on the line, all eyes are on the important Christmas season, amid rumours of a big budget festive ad campaign led by the group’s new agency, Saatchi & Saatchi.
John Lewis and Sharon White declined to comment.
