In My View by Eric Musgrave: There’s no value in staff loyalty

Hail and farewell, Russell & Bromley and LK Bennett, the first two major fashion retail casualties of 2026.

If anyone believes either business will continue in any recognisable form under respective new owners Next and Gordon Brothers, they are not going to convince me.

As always in these matters, my concerns are with the staff who have been dumped already or soon will be exiting the businesses. I am particularly appalled by what I’ve read about the Russell & Bromley experience: the best part of 450 employees set to lose their jobs with precious little financial compensation from notice periods or redundancy.

And this from a 146-year-old company that until recently was very well-regarded as a classic patriarchal family firm where staff stayed for a very long time. In these days of cosy pre-pack administrations, employees seems the last asset to be considered.

Staff loyalty has no value these days.

Russell & Bromley: 33 stores are closing (PA)

“You’re a new boy until you’ve been here 20 years and that’s a real strength,” said CEO Andrew Bromley in a trade press interview from February 2025 that outlined his vision for turning round the already struggling premium chain.

It summed up how R&B was regarded by the footwear trade – a place at which people made a career. I understand that the company was in the hands of administrators at the end, but at one time wouldn’t the wealthy Bromley family, which I understand has a large property portfolio, had offered some sort of financial cushion to its ousted workforce?

Or am I being too romantic here?

I was surprised to see this long and detailed interview as during most of my 40-plus years in the business Russell & Bromley famously never spoke to industry magazines. I cannot recall ever speaking with Andrew Bromley’s uncle and long-serving predecessor Roger Bromley, who was revered as a superb product man for many decades.

R&B was a private company that stayed private.

Andrew, who became CEO in around 2019, is the fifth generation of the family to steer the business and footwear sector observers blame him for a strategy that has gone very quickly from lots of big talk to the wreckage of the company being picked up for just £2.5m by Next.

A decade ago, even though it was already seeing declines in its sales, for the year to 31 December 2015, Russell & Bromley’s turnover topped £114m and profit was £16.6m. Some £11m was paid in dividends, presumably to the Bromley family.

Eight years later, to 31 December 2023, turnover fell by 7.1% to £62.9m, leading to an operating loss of £7.1m. Something had gone seriously wrong.

Footwear industry observers question the recent strategy of opening more stores when the existing ones cannot have been performing. They point to the perceived error of lowering the premium price point with lower-quality materials and manufacturing. Even the appointment of Daniel Beardsworth-Shaw as the company’s first creative director in August 2024 did not impress some long-time R&B admirers.

“Hiring someone who previously worked at Accessorize tells you all you need to know about the ambition of the management,” one ex-employee told me.

As widely reported, Next has taken the brand name, the intellectual property and has kept open – for now – just three of Russell & Bromley’s 40 or so shops. It also picked up an unspecified amount of stock for £1.3m.

I wonder, in addition to the UK staff, how many suppliers in Italy, Spain and Portugal will be left severely out of pocket by this collapse.

I foresee Russell & Bromley becoming simply an in-house premium house brand for Next. Does anyone really believe Next will want to rebuild the chain?

LK Bennett has been bought by Gordon Brothers

While it has snapped up R&B, Lord Wolfson’s giant platform passed on acquiring LK Bennett, which is now being run by the distressed retailers’ specialist Gordon Brothers.

Once again, we can expect most if not all existing 145 LKB employees, including 89 in its shops, to be kicked out by the end of April as the new owner introduces its “asset-light” strategy. I think that means it will license out the LK Bennett brand.

Sadly, there was an inevitability about the second (or was it the third, or fourth?) demise of the chain Linda Bennett founded in 1990. Anyone reading CEO Darren Topp’s unsentimental and honest appraisal of the pressures on the business in my interview with him in October 2024 will have understood the consider challenges faced by such a business.

There are some similarities between LK Bennett and Russell & Bromley, notably a reliance on dressy clothes and shoes that are a vastly reduced category in the UK today. Both struggled to recover from the COVID lockdown that gutted the existing dress-to-impress sector. Also both traded at a price level noticeably above what many female consumers are prepared to pay these days. Both had too many shops and therefore too many fixed costs that have increased steeply in recent years.

I’ll leave others to decide if either of these business could have been saved. Every competent retailer I talk to tells me the game is very tough these days, definitely not helped by the Labour government’s perplexingly inept policies towards physical retailing and the grim underlying economic malaise.

I have another thought about LK Bennett, which went into admin in 2019, and then underwent a CVA (Company Voluntary Arrangement) under its new Chinese owners in November 2020 during the pandemic. Should we realise sometimes that a business has come to the end of its natural life?

Quiz is now in administration

And seeing the Scottish value womenswear chain Quiz being put into admin almost exactly 12 months since its previous rescue only underlines this thought. This is another business that has never recovered from the pandemic lockdown, as founder Tarak Ramzan outlined to me in October 2023, when Quiz was still a listed company.

As always, the thoughts of readers are very welcome.