Next CEO Wolfson replaces founder as Reiss chair - report

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
May 20, 2021

​Next CEO Simon Wolfson is also to become chairman of premium fashion retailer Reiss, taking over from founder David Reiss, a newspaper said on Thursday. 

The move come two months after Next bought a big stake in the smaller business with an option to buy a majority holding. The news about Wolfson was first reported in the Telegraph.

Wolfson, who’s one of the most highly regarded leaders in the UK fashion and retail sectors, is a busy man as he not only runs fast-expanding Next, but joined the board of Deliveroo earlier this year.

Reiss, which is also one of the more respected mid-sized fashion businesses to come out of the UK, is currently majority owned by American private equity company Warburg Pincus, which was looking to sell it pre-pandemic. Next bought a 25% stake this spring and can buy an extra 26% by July 2022.

Apart from Wolfson’s new role there, the company has other close personal links with Reiss with the latter’s CEO, Christos Angelides, having been a key player at Next for nearly three decades.

With its major stake in the business, Next already has a big voice in Reiss’s development and with Next’s Total Platform operation powering the Reiss webstore and logistics, the co-operation between the two is becoming deeper.

Despite Reiss having seen its turnover rising by 22% in the year that ended just before the pandemic hit, the global health crisis dealt it a major blow. The firm’s dressier approach to fashion didn’t gel with the work-from-home lifestyle and the loungewear trend, although Reiss responded with its own premium loungewear-to-street range.