John Lewis shock departure following tough trading

Peter Ruis will leave the business in order to “pursue new projects”, John Lewis said in a statement today.

He will be replaced by Will Kernan, a non-executive board member of the employee-owned John Lewis Partnership, which also runs the Waitrose supermarket chain. Kernan said in a statement that John Lewis still had “significant headroom for growth”.

READ MORE: Jeremy Clarkson’s Cotswold pub no longer serves ketchup

The surprise departure comes after John Lewis’s chair, Jason Tarry, last week warned of “really tough” trading conditions in an interview with the company’s in-house magazine.

John Lewis, which has a flagship store at Westgate Oxford, had felt confident enough in the economic outlook in March to pay its 69,000 workers – which it calls partners – an annual bonus for the first time in four years after underlying profits rose. Staff shared a bonus pot of £35m, worth about one week’s extra pay each.

However, the US-Israeli war on Iran has caused a rise in inflation as oil prices have soared. That has put shoppers’ finances under pressure and raised costs for retailers.

Mr Tarry said in the interview that “we have to adjust for an immediate future that we weren’t expecting even six months ago, let alone a couple of years ago”.

Mr Ruis had returned to John Lewis at the start of 2024, after leading retailers including Jigsaw and Anthropologie. During his previous nine-year stint Mr Ruis was John Lewis’s buying and brand director.

The Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and Mayor of London Sadiq Khan are welcomed to the John Lewis department store on Oxford Street by John Lewis Executive Director Peter Ruis and Deputy Branch Manager Melissa Lidder. (Image: Picture by Simon Walker / Deputy Prime Minister’s Office)

Mr Ruis will stay in post until September 6. Mr Kernan, a non-executive director since 2023, will take over in the middle of September as the retailer prepares for its Christmas peak trading period. John Lewis has started a search for a new non-executive director.

He oversaw investment in the 36 John Lewis department stores that remained after the company closed 16 stores during the pandemic and as recently as November he told the Guardian that he was looking at expansion for the chain.

John Lewis owns the only remaining department store in Oxford following the closure of family-run Boswells, and Debenhams.

In May, it was announced that Platter John Lewis will replace the long-standing The Place To Eat brand across 32 in-store cafés, including the one at Westgate Oxford.

Boutique hotel The Store was built on the site of Boswells on the corner of Cornmarket and Broad Street.

The former Debenhams building in Magdalen Street is being converted for new laboratories in a multi-million pound project overseen by The Crown Estate.