Sir Stuart Rose stepped down as M&S supremo on a high after Marks & Spencer reported a 5.1% profits rise in the fourth quarter of 2009, comfortably beating analysts’ forecasts of 1.7%.
Rose, who is now executive chairman at the venerable retailer, has helped to fill column inches in other ways in the past week. He was one of 23 signatories to a letter in the Telegraph denouncing the Chancellor’s move to raise National Insurance Contributions.
The man credited with cutting £300m of cost savings at M&S unsurprisingly thought cutting waste in the public sector was preferable to increasing taxes as a means to slash the huge public deficit. "There are better ways to skin a cat," he said.
Born in 1949 in Gosport, Hampshire, Stuart Rose spent some of his childhood in living in a caravan in Warwickshire. He also spent some time in Tanzania, where his father obtained a posting with the Imperial Civil Service.
His grandparents were ‘White Russians’, émigrés who fled the 1917 Russian Revolution they opposed. Rose, whose family originally had the name Bryantzeff, also had Greek ancestry, on his mother’s side.
Triumphant in seeing off the ever-acquisitive Green, Rose then burnished his reputation further by slashing costs, cutting prices, refurbishing shops and updating its notoriously staid fashion lines
His mother, who had a history of depression, committed suicide when he was 26.
His first job was as an administration assistant at the BBC. Rose actually worked for Marks and Spencer on a previous occasion, joining them in 1972 as a management trainee. He left after 17 years, frustrated by internal politics and excessive bureaucracy.
Joining the Burton Group as CEO in 1989, he oversaw its de-merger into the Arcadia Group and Debenhams in 1997 and transformed the fortunes of a company that had laboured under £250m of debt. When he sold it to Philip Green he pocketed a cool £25m himself.
His next port of call was Argos, where he fought off a bid from catalogue giant Great Universal Stores.
It was in 2004 that Rose finally returned to M&S, with the initial remit of fending off a takeover approach from Bhs and Top Shop by Sir Philip Green. Triumphant in seeing off the ever-acquisitive Green, Rose then burnished his reputation further by slashing costs, cutting prices, refurbishing shops and updating its notoriously staid fashion lines.
Rose was Knighted in 2008 for services to retail and corporate social responsibility. It’s largely thanks to Sir Stuart that M&S consistently wins awards for its ethical values and environmentally friendly approach to sourcing food.
Profits at the company tumbled from £1bn to £600m in 2009, although a retailer with a reputation more for quality than low prices was always going to struggle in a recession.
Sir Stuart Rose, unlike many of his counterparts, doesn’t obsess about work to the exclusion of all else. He values and maximises his leisure time, particularly enjoying reading, fine wine and flying.
