Face of Nation : Chief executive Steve Rowe will take over from Ms McDonald in the short term.
He said the firm needed to “address long-standing issues in our clothing and home supply chain around availability and flow of product”.Ms McDonald had previous senior roles at Halfords and McDonald’s.
“Her lack of skill in clothes buying and supply chain appears to be the problem. But then the problem existed before she joined, didn’t it?” Global Data retail analyst Maureen Hinton tweeted.Ms McDonald joined the company in autumn 2017.Jill McDonald’s appointment came as a surprise.
The former boss of Halfords had been parachuted into one of the trickiest jobs in retail with no fashion experience.We were told she’d been hired for her “first-class customer knowledge” and experience in running high-achieving teams. In the end, that wasn’t enough.
Marks & Spencer still hasn’t fixed the basics when it comes to its all-important clothing business. This week, at the firm’s annual general meeting, Mr Rowe said it had been a “troubled year” for the clothing and home business.
He said there had been some major failures in clothing, including not buying enough jeans for a February promotion.”That led to us having some of the worst availability in casual trousers I’ve seen in my life,” he said.
However, he also said clothing ranges had improved in terms of fit, style and value.”I think here we’ve done much of the hard work on style and fit and it’s the process that we need to change,” Mr Rowe said.
“Further work [is needed] on getting size ratios correct, making sure we reduce the number of lines we’re running [and] concentrating on the big lines that we’re famous for across the UK,” he added.
