Reinventing Retail

Introduction

Why now?

This book was born at about 2am one January night in 2012. Stumbling out of the offices of a big London law firm where my team and I had spent the preceding 18 hours negotiating with our own banks over the future of the retail business I ran, I suddenly realised the time, that all the trains and tubes had stopped running and that I was many miles from home.

In the end, we didn’t succeed in our negotiations and a UK retail business with thousands of colleagues and operations in nine countries collapsed into administration.

My overriding thought that night, apart from how on earth I was going to get home, was that it should never need to be this way. The cost of a business failing, to suppliers and creditors, to shareholders ...