You may think the department store has had it day. Debenhams and Beales have left the high street, House of Fraser has closed almost two-thirds of its stores and Fenwick exited its prime London site.
Peter Ruis, the managing director of John Lewis, has a different view. After closing 16 stores during the pandemic and shedding thousands of jobs as it fought for survival, he says expansion is now “definitely something we are looking at”. The 161-year-old retailer is spending £800m by 2029 on giving its 36 remaining outlets a reboot.
Ruis, who returned last year after more than a decade away to lead the revival of John Lewis, says: “The store is a perfect invention, and we’ve seen only too well, coming back from Covid, how people have gravitated back to the stores.”
He says there are “definitely no plans to close anything” and there are parts of the country the department store would like to step into.
Ruis, who started his career as a graduate trainee at Marks & Spencer, was credited with putting the fashion back into John Lewis before going on to lead retailers including Jigsaw and Anthropologie. He says his current job is about bringing “radical relevance” to the group’s once – staid outlets.
“We are getting rid of the old stuffy department store and replacing it with something more experiential,” he says.
However, this season could be a nail-biter, with British shoppers likely to leave their present-buying late again this year, as many people will have a full five days of holiday before the present giving begins.
As shoppers bustle into the chain’s Bluewater store in Kent to visit its packed cafe and busy beauty and gifting section, Ruis says of the Christmas shopping rush: “I do get the sense that obviously has been a lot of doom and gloom, and it’s coming late, but it’s coming hard.”
The employee-owned department store chain, part of the wider John Lewis Partnership, made a £10m profit for the year to January. In a similar fashion to last year, it will have to fight back from a £53m loss at the half year to stay out of the red in this financial year. Ruis says: “I think we’re optimistic, but, you know, it’s a difficult market. It’s difficult for the customer.”
Standing in the doorway, Ruis gestures to a new gifting section that draws together an eclectic array of items from puzzles and mugs to an electric bicycle, perfume and vases all livened up with a gin bar run by independent brand Mermaid.
Previously, these items would have been dispersed around the store in a number of departments. While those departments still exist, Ruis wants more mixing and pulling together of products around lifestyle themes in future.
He says making items more easily browsable is the future of shopping, as John Lewis tries to help shoppers happen on what they want in a way that is not possible online.
As suggested by its Christmas ad featuring a father and son bonding over a vinyl dance track, which Ruis claims has gone viral as far afield as Germany and Hong Kong, John Lewis is gunning for teens and twentysomethings as well as their parents and younger siblings.
“It’s not the generation of my parents where I’d be watching Top of the Pops, and they would be like, ‘Who’s that person with makeup?’,” he says. “It’s the generation where the father is pulling the daughter or son to watch Jools Holland.”
New brands that have cross-generational appeal, from Topshop, Carhartt and Charlotte Tilbury, to Apple and Waterstones bookshops are part of the story.
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It has plans to expand a tie-up with Uber Eats on a 45-minute delivery service being tested in two stores, where customers can order products such as headphones and beauty products.
Ruis says he wants to create “that sense of a day out, but with a more modern vision about that day out,” whether it is picking up a parcel ordered online, having a massage or going for lunch in the cafe.
To him, John Lewis is well positioned to be the last chain standing among the national department stores because of it has “more three dimensionality, which make gives us a reason to survive”.
He says its staff-owned model gives more financial security with “a billion quid in the bank” and the ability to take a long-term view as well as look after staff with pay, conditions and benefits.
With so many of its competitors having closed outlets, he adds that John Lewis is one of the few players that can offer brands a spot on high streets across mainland UK teamed with a slick online service.
“If you add all these elements together. It’s more than a department store,” Ruis says.
Womenswear is the next big opportunity with “some big, announcements coming” on new brands next year after John Lewis became the only national host for Topshop on the high street.
“The brands are queueing up to come into us, whereas that was, you know, a few years ago, we were probably trying to convince them.
“They see all of this change, all this excitement and suddenly the relevance of what we can offer them.”
