End of Alliance’s era at N Brown as CEO prepares to go too

LORD Alliance, chairman and major shareholder of Manchester home shoppping group N Brown is to retire in September after more than 40 years in the role.

The Iranian-born veteran businessman and Liberal Democrat peer, who was 80 last month, will preside over his last annual meeting as chairman today.

In a further major change for the Lever Street-based group which owns the JD Williams, Simply Be, figleaves, High & Mighty brands, long-standing chief executive Alan White will leave the business some time next year.

Mr White, who celebrates 10 years at the helm of the business next year – and 25 years of service in total in 2013, is a highly-regarded figure in the retail sector.

He told TheBusinessDesk.com: “As I have said to the staff, all good things must come to an end. I always knew that I would be looking to stand down in the next year to 18 months, and with Andy Higginson (Tesco’s former finance director) coming in as chairman, I thought the time was right to announce this.

“It will allow us to conduct the search for the new chief executive in an open manner, rather than trying to do it in private, which will he helpful.”

Mr White, who plans to build a portfolio of non-executive roles when he leaves, said his biggest achievement has been overseeing the migration of N Brown from a catalogue-based business to a multi-channel retailer.

He said: “I think we have done a great job in adapting to the change in technology – when I took over 95% of our orders came in by post – now more than half of our sales are online.”

Mr White also paid tribute to Lord Alliance for building up N Brown Group into a major concern: “He likes to shun the limelight, but he has been instrumental in building the business worth more than £700m over many years, it’s a great achievement.”

As well as N Brown, Lord Alliance was the co-founder of the international textile group Coats Viyella, which at one stage operated in 67 countries with 70,000 people. He retired as chairman of Coats in 1999.

Lord Alliance’s brother, Nigel, also a long-serving non-executive N Brown director, is also standing down from the board.

The Alliances, who holds around 47% of N Brown’s shares – worth around £330m – have indicated that they will remain major investors in the business, Mr White said.

Meanwhile in a trading update, the group said sales in the 17 weeks to June 30 had risen 2.5% (1.9% like-for-like), despite the bad weather and continued economic uncertainty.

Gross margins have been hit by 1% due to higher discounting to woo shoppers by offering daily deals online. Mr White said sales of womenswear – which are the highest margin products – had been more affected by the bad weather than other categories.

“We expect this situation to improve as we go further in the year, as our planned lower stock levels will result in reduced volumes of discounted sales of excess stocks than we saw in the second half of last year.”