Joshua Schulman took a precocious interest in retail as a child, writing to James Nordstrom, a grandson of the eponymous US department store chain’s co-founder, to say he was “ecstatic” that one would be opening in his native Los Angeles.
This week the 52-year-old former Coach and Jimmy Choo boss was named chief executive of Burberry, replacing Jonathan Akeroyd as the British luxury brand issued its latest profit warning and confirmed plans to slash a few hundred jobs.
The retail obsessive will need all the skills gleaned from a quarter century in the industry to turn the 168-year-old company around, particularly given chair Gerry Murphy’s insistence this week that he will not be “reversing strategies”.
Akeroyd’s vision, alongside creative director Daniel Lee, of turning a heritage outerwear company famed for its trenchcoats and scarves into a “modern British luxury brand” making expensive leather handbags and accessories backfired after two years in the role.
Burberry “perhaps went a bit too far too fast with a creative transition at a time when customers are feeling a bit more challenged . . . especially at higher price points”, Murphy admitted this week.
However, he said the brand, whose men’s polo shirts cost £490 and whose Rocking Horse handbags start at £1,250, would not lower prices en masse but would instead seek to sell more of its traditional staples as well as introduce lower price points.
Schulman, who is relocating to London from New York for the Burberry job, has credited his mother for his penchant for fashion.
“She always made sure I had a kippah [skullcap] to match every outfit,” he said at an awards ceremony in 2018. On family holidays they would often visit the country’s malls, fuelling Shulman’s childhood interest in shops.
After attending New York University and Parsons School of Design, Schulman held senior roles at Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent in the late 1990s and early 2000s before spending five years in London as chief executive of Jimmy Choo, building the British shoemaker into a cult luxury brand that was sold to Labelux in 2011 for about £500mn.
At Neiman Marcus Group in the US, where he was president of luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman between 2012 and 2017, he redesigned the layout of the super premium store and widened its online appeal, spearheading the 2014 acquisition of luxury ecommerce platform MyTheresa.com.
A three-year tenure as CEO and president followed at handbag maker Coach, owned by Tapestry, where Schulman was credited with improving sales and operating income while boosting the brand’s popularity among aspirational luxury shoppers.
After leaving Coach in 2020, Schulman ran rival Michael Kors at Capri Holdings and was due to become the group’s chief executive, but after an about face, incumbent John Idol stayed on and Schulman left after about six months in March 2022 with a multimillion-dollar separation agreement. Tapestry last year announced it would acquire Capri.
Rumours started to swirl in March that Murphy was speaking to prospective candidates to replace Akeroyd at Burberry. But the chair said this week that the board “didn’t conduct any serious discussions with anybody about replacing Jonathan until very recently”, and then acted “very quickly”.
“Josh was known to a lot of us at the company, and we’d [initially] been talking to him about a board role,” Murphy said. “As things evolved, it was clear that he was interested in a bigger role.”
Murphy, who also chairs UK grocer Tesco, rejected suggestions from a retail investor this week that he had presided over a “revolving door” of chief executives and financial chiefs since he joined in 2018.
Although Burberry has had four CEOs in 10 years, Murphy had only hired two, Akeroyd and now Schulman, he said at Tuesday’s annual meeting. “Is that a revolving door?” he asked. “When things don’t work you have to change your plan . . . [We are] very confident we have a competent team across the board.”
He also defended Schulman’s pay package, worth as much as £5.6mn a year including bonuses plus a one-off recruitment share award worth up to £3.6mn, saying a large chunk was dependent on delivering shareholder value. “If he does well, we all do as shareholders.”
Lydia Christie, legal director and head of the retail and leisure group at law firm Howard Kennedy, said there was now “a very high expectation on delivery because otherwise . . . there’s potentially more damage that could come if there isn’t [a] turnaround”.
Murphy this week rejected the notion that Schulman’s appointment signalled Burberry’s repositioning as a more affordable brand, and was effusive about the US executive’s luxury pedigree.
Schulman on Thursday reiterated the message to staff, ruling out any suggestion that Burberry would become a “British Coach”, according to a person familiar with the briefing.
He said that while Burberry should remain a luxury brand, it should be one that leans into its strengths, namely outerwear and scarves, and should focus more on its original purpose to create clothes that protect people from the weather.
But Luca Solca, an analyst at Bernstein, questioned the board’s decision to remove Akeroyd relatively early into a five-year turnaround if there were no big plans to change tack.
“If the strategy only needs to be tweaked,” he said, why did “the CEO have to leave with immediate effect? Either he was wrong and he goes or he tweaks the strategy and he stays.”
He added that with Burberry’s stock languishing far below its peak of more than £26 a share in April last year, it remains a takeover target for private equity or US-accessible luxury players. “If nobody buys it at £7, nobody is ever going to buy it.”
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