The Retail Leadership Lens

In today’s retail landscape, where disruption feels like the new normal, there’s immense pressure to fill a leadership gap immediately. But a hasty permanent hire often adds more instability to an already turbulent situation. With recent data showing that the average time to hire for a permanent role in the UK is over a month and often much longer for senior positions, that’s a long time to leave a critical function exposed. This is where the strategic use of an interim leade

Your company’s AI strategy will likely fail. So what separates that successful minority from everyone else? It often comes down to a new type of leader: the "Head of AI." From my conversations with boards, it’s clear this leader’s success depends less on their technical skills and more on their ability to operate as a true business leader. This is especially true as powerful new tools like Agentic AI, which can automate entire workflows, raise the stakes even higher.

Feeling like your retail leadership job search is stuck on repeat? You’re not alone. It’s a strange time. You send out applications that feel perfect, you have conversations that seem promising, and then… silence. Or worse, you get feedback that feels so generic it could apply to anyone. The market is crowded, decision-making seems to have slowed to a crawl, and the goalposts for what employers want appear to be shifting daily.

I sometimes feel like I'm stuck in a retail conference groundhog day. The same panels, the same presentations, the same soundbites about AI, customer experience, and the need for experiential stores.  It's all becoming a bit… predictable, don't you think? Like that broken record stuck on repeat, but it just keeps going around. We all know the script by now, but are we actually doing anything differently? I hear a lot of talk, but I'm not seeing enough action.

Customer loyalty is increasingly fleeting, and revenue streams are often unpredictable, the subscription model offers a tantalising promise of stability and growth. I find it's so difficult to get right, but if you do, then it is an incredibly good revenue stream. Rapid Growth: The subscription economy is expanding rapidly-subscription-based businesses are reportedly growing at 200% annually and are outpacing traditional retail by a factor of nine. 

Remember late-night TV shopping? Back in the day, it felt revolutionary, a chance to snag a bargain from the comfort of your sofa, watching someone enthusiastically demonstrate a vegetable slicer or a "miracle" cleaning product. It was appointment viewing for a certain crowd, and it paved the way for what we're seeing now: live shopping. This time, things are on a much grander scale, and the audience is massive. Think of live shopping as QVC on steroids, fuelled by social med