My Conversation with Dame Sharon White
And don't miss my interview with David's Bridal CEO Kelly Cook 👰
Greetings from Dusseldorf airport!
I’m just heading back to London after attending Amazon’s Delivering the Future event. I’ll share more in the next newsletter but, if you can’t wait, you can always check out my posts on LinkedIn, Instagram, or the podcast.
Sorry for the silence. The combination of visiting family in Florida (and genuinely switching off for two weeks 😎) and then April/May being peak events season means it’s been hard to keep on top of everything. I literally went from one event at the Belfry to another at the Savoy in one day!
That is a sentence I’ll unlikely ever say again in my life. 😂
Let me tell you about the Belfry though, which is where I was chairing the Richmond Retail & E-commerce Directors’ Forum. I had the enormous privilege of interviewing Dame Sharon White, former chair of John Lewis Partnership.
Unfortunately, the session wasn’t recorded *but* she has promised to come on the podcast and, in the meantime, here are my takeaways from our conversation:
On agility? Agility can’t just be for the boardroom; it needs to be woven throughout the business.
On tariffs? Volatility will eventually ease, but we’re heading towards a world that is 10-15% more protectionist than what we’ve seen over the past 20 years.
On DEI? As the first female chair and first black person to become chair of John Lewis Partnership, what are Sharon’s thoughts on DEI? Very simply - customers and staff are diverse so it would only make sense for retail leadership teams to reflect that. However, she noted that DEI hasn’t always worked as intended and we need to make sure no one is left behind.
On making difficult decisions at JLP? Does she stand by her tough, but arguably necessary, choices to shut stores, cut staff, axe bonuses? 100%. She inherited a business that was overspaced and slow to embrace e-commerce. Then, weeks into her new role, the pandemic hit. Maybe they didn’t move fast enough, she says. Although closing stores is never an easy decision - she likened this to closing a maternity hospital.
On scrutiny? Her critics were hyper-focused on her lack of retail experience. Was this justified? No. JLP is the biggest employee-owned business in the UK and the third biggest employee-owned business in the world. She never felt hindered, quite the opposite in fact.
I agree, as I said in this BBC article at the time. Worth calling out here that she left the business with its strongest balance sheet in 25 years.
On reinventing department stores? We need fewer, more BRILLIANT stores. Shoppers today want service, experiences, they want to test products, and try stuff on.
On external investment? A big challenge at JLP was lacking access to necessary investment to digitize and future-proof the business, but facing opposition when considering external partners.
On AI? We’re overestimating the speed and underestimating the scale of its impact.
How does she do it all? She says having kids made her 1) more efficient and 2) want to prioritise her time to ensure she was doing meaningful work. Tech helps her multi-task. She is grateful to her family and for her education. She calls out how her parents were unable to finish school, having emigrated to the UK from Jamaica as part of the Windrush generation.
Can she ever be tempted back to retail in the future? Never say never, she tells me. ✨
Aisle to Algorithm: David’s Bridal’s New CEO on Retail Transformation
What do cowboy boots, QR codes, and AI have in common?
👰♀️ They’re some of the biggest trends shaping the bridal industry, David's Bridal CEO Kelly Cook tells me!
Kelly is the newly appointed CEO of David’s Bridal. She joins me on the podcast to discuss how David’s Bridal is embarking on the biggest shift in its 75-year history, transitioning from a legacy bridal retailer to becoming a tech-powered retail, AI, and media powerhouse.
📺 This is a video episode and can be watched here or you can listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Kelly and I explore:
How David’s plans to expand beyond wedding dresses to capture a bigger piece of the $65 billion wedding industry, leveraging first-party data, AI-driven planning tools, and a digital marketplace to transform how brides shop, plan, and celebrate.
Retail media: with 90% of all US brides entering the David’s ecosystem, how is David’s monetizing this reach and what does Kelly think of the broader retail media explosion we’re witnessing around the globe?
From virtual try-ons and mood boards to AI chatbots, how is David’s utilizing AI to enhance the customer experience?
100% of all David’s owned communications are now AI-driven! How has this enabled David’s to better serve the customer?
From cowboys boots to QR codes, what are the key bridal trends that Kelly is observing in 2025?
Learnings from pandemic pivots – curbside pick-up and augmented reality.
Kelly is the most recent example of a CMO to CEO transition, but we’ve also seen this with brands like Starbucks and Taco Bell. What’s behind this trend?
Advice for future retail leaders.
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