The Very Group’s CEO steps down, Robbie Feather moves into top job

E-tail giant The Very Group has promoted its Retail Managing Director Robbie Feather to Group CEO, succeeding Lionel Desclée, “who has chosen to step down and pursue new opportunities”. 

The outgoing chief, a former CEO of Walmart Japan, joined the business in September 2022.

Feather will now join the board after three years spent at the business leading the retail team, which includes all category sourcing, buying, and merchandising, as well as group trading and marketing. 

The company — which owns the Very and Littlewoods webstores — said he’s also recently overseen the development of its “successful new brand platform and its market-beating retail performance”. This saw Very UK’s H1 revenue for FY24 growing 2.7% year on year to over £1 billion and its total online market share rising by 0.2ppts. In the light of the weakness in the UK fashion and general merchandise sectors lately, those figures are more than respectable.

It’s interesting that Feather’s job immediately before joining Very was as CEO of Fenwick, the upscale department store business that at the time was very much a latecomer to online retailing.

But he helped turn around and modernise the family-owned company and was key to the launch of its online business. He’s also previously worked at Sainsbury’s-owned Argos, including as Commercial Director.

It’s unclear as yet what the new opportunities are that Desclée will be pursuing. But the company said that under his leadership, it delivered “robust results” and its customer experience improvements helped it record its “best ever net promoter score, which remains high, while colleague improvements boosted engagement”. 

The company also reached “milestones in its tech transformation, such as migrating to cloud infrastructure, introducing AI-powered on-site search and partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate generative AI innovation”.

Desclée said that he’s “proud of our achievements and believe that under Robbie’s leadership, the company will continue to succeed”.

And Chairman Aidan Barclay said of the new CEO: “Robbie has proven to be an outstanding retail leader, both at The Very Group and throughout his career. He understands our business intimately and has a strong track record of transformation and growth. He is the perfect person to lead the next stage of The Very Group’s development.”