The Unicorn Problem.

Why Retail Can’t Find Enough CEOs — and What Boards Should Do About It

I took a brief from a retail board last year that made me pause. 

They wanted a CEO who could lead a digital transformation, restructure a legacy supply chain, rebuild a brand proposition for Gen Z, manage a private equity relationship, and ideally, had run a profitable P&L in food or fashion. 

Oh, and they needed someone in 3 months.

I told them what I’ve been telling more and more boards lately: what you’ve just described is not a person. 

It’s a committee.

Welcome to the unicorn problem.

The Job Has Changed. The Talent Pool Hasn’t Caught Up

Twenty years ago, the path to a retail CEO role was relatively well-trodden.

You came up through buying or merchandising. You understood margins, ranges, and suppliers. You could read a shop floor the way a conductor reads an orchestra. 

The brief, put simply, was to be an outstanding merchant.

That brief no longer exists.

Today’s retail CEO is expected to be a technologist, a merchant, a marketer, and a supply chain strategist simultaneously. The search for these multi-dimensional “hybrid leaders” has created what some are calling a “unicorn scarcity.” 

The demands have expanded enormously. The talent pool has not expanded with them.

The numbers confirm the scale of the problem. More than 1,500 chief executives left their posts in the US alone through August 2025. This is  the highest on record since tracking began in 2002. 

Retail led the charge, with CEO exits up 116% year-on-year. 

And here’s the statistic that should genuinely concern any board planning a succession: 86% of all new CEO appointments globally in 2025 were first-time chief executives. People who had never held the top job at a listed company before. 

That tells you the experienced, proven CEO candidate pool is essentially exhausted. 

Boards aren’t choosing from a field of seasoned operators. They’re making bets on potential.

The Impossible Job Description

Let me describe the typical CEO brief I see landing on my desk today. The board wants someone who can:

Lead a digital transformation - because every retailer is now, in effect, a technology company that happens to sell products.

Manage an omnichannel operation - because the days of being purely a bricks-and-mortar or purely an online business are over.

Navigate AI adoption - in 2026, the board wants a CEO who can distinguish between genuine opportunity and expensive theatre.

Drive commercial performance on razor-thin margins - because retail remains, at its core, a business of pennies.

Inspire and retain talent in an industry that lost 200,000 jobs in the UK in 2025 alone - because the people problem is now as pressing as the technology problem.

And they want all of this in one person, ideally with sector experience, at a compensation level that often lags behind what the same candidate could earn in private equity, technology, or consulting.

It is no wonder that while traditional merchandising expertise hasn’t become irrelevant, it has become insufficient. The skill set hasn’t disappeared. It has simply been swallowed by a much larger set of demands.

The Diversity Problem Within the Problem

The shrinking talent pool is compounded by a persistent failure to develop diverse leadership pipelines. In 2025, only 25% of newly appointed CEOs were women, down from 28% the previous year. In UK retail specifically, a record 14 women were appointed CEO, with three being ethnically diverse CEOs, a figure that hasn’t materially changed in a decade.

This isn’t an equity issue. 

It’s a supply issue. 

If your board is drawing from a pool that overwhelmingly looks like the last three decades of retail leadership - white, male, merchant-background,  you are fishing in the most overfished pond in the market. 

The candidates who bring genuinely different pattern recognition, who have built digital businesses or led international expansions or transformed customer propositions in adjacent sectors, are often the candidates that traditional retail search processes never surface.

I placed a chief digital officer from a hospitality group into a mid-market fashion retailer last year. 

She had never worked in fashion. 

But she had rebuilt an entire customer acquisition engine, scaled a loyalty programme across 14 markets, and led a technology integration that the fashion board had been trying to deliver for three years with internal candidates. 

Within six months, she was the most impactful hire that business had made in a decade. She would never have appeared on a traditional retail search.

The boards that are solving this aren’t lowering their standards. 

They’re widening their aperture.

Five Moves That Actually Work

I’ve spent nearly three decades placing senior leaders in retail. 

The boards that consistently find their “unicorn” aren’t finding a mythical perfect candidate. They’re approaching the search differently. Here’s what I see working.

First, disaggregate the role before you write the brief. The single biggest mistake I see is a board that writes a CEO specification that is, in reality, a description of three jobs. Before you go to market, ask: which of these capabilities must sit in the CEO, and which can be built around them? 

Primark did exactly this last month, confirming Eoin Tonge as CEO while creating a brand-new Chief Commercial Officer role filled externally from H&M. That’s not a compromise. 

That’s intelligent architecture.

Second, look across sectors, not just within them. The most transformative retail leaders I’ve placed in the last five years have brought experience from outside traditional retail, from FMCG, from technology, from hospitality. 

Cross-sector candidates often carry exactly the pattern recognition that a retail-only career cannot produce. Peloton appointed a CEO with experience at Ford and Apple. Kroger, for the first time in 143 years, is searching externally. 

The old assumption that a retail CEO must have spent their career in retail is breaking down, and boards that cling to it are shrinking their own talent pool.

Third, invest in your internal pipeline before you need it. Allan Leighton can afford to say Asda’s next CEO will come from within because he’s been deliberately assembling the bench to make that possible. 

Most boards haven’t done this work. If your succession plan consists of a name on a spreadsheet that the board reviews once a year, you don’t have a plan. You have a wish.

Fourth, stop confusing experience with readiness. When 86% of new CEOs are first-timers, “previous CEO experience” can no longer be a prerequisite. The question is not whether they have done the job before. The question is whether they have the capability, the judgement, and the resilience to do it now. 

Boards that insist on prior CEO experience are eliminating the vast majority of the available talent pool before the search even begins.

Fifth, shorten the prove-it window but lengthen the support. Boards are giving new CEOs shorter runways to demonstrate results. But the data also shows that externally hired CEOs serve shorter tenures than internal promotions - 7.3 years versus 8.7. If you’re going to hire someone into the most demanding version of this role in history, invest in their integration. 

The first 90 days matter more than ever. A structured onboarding process, an independent sounding board, and realistic early milestones are not luxuries. They are the difference between a successful appointment and a costly failure.

The Unicorn Is Not the Answer. A Better Search Is

The retail CEO role has never been harder. The combination of technological disruption, geopolitical volatility, margin pressure, and rising consumer expectations means that the person sitting in this chair needs to operate at a level of complexity that simply didn’t exist a decade ago. As some have put it: the “prove-it clock” is ticking faster than ever.

But here’s what I’ve learned: the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough talented leaders. The problem is that too many boards are searching for one person who ticks every box, when they should be designing a leadership structure that covers every capability.

The question for your next board meeting is not “where do we find our unicorn?” It is: “are we defining this role in a way that makes it possible to fill - or are we designing a job that no single human being can do?”

If the answer is honest, the search gets a great deal more productive.

And if you want help asking that question with fresh eyes, we’re always here for that conversation.

Maarten Jonckers

Managing Director, Nicholas Alexander Executive Search

www.nicholasalexander-es.com