Simon Wolfson has a tendency to play down some of the crucial decisions he has made over the years that have meant Next has defied the decline of the British high street.
The retailer’s foray into online shopping was a fluke, the chief executive has said, after he spent a mere £7,000 to set it up in 1999. Last year, half of Next’s sales worth £2bn came through the website.
Wolfson was among the first to launch fast home delivery. More recently, he saw an opportunity to make money from selling hundreds of other fashion brands, such as Barbour and Tommy Hilfiger, on its website.
The 52-year-old, who has already been at the helm for nearly two decades, is highly regarded in retail circles for nimbly adapting Next’s business model as the market shifts around him.
Now Wolfson is eyeing a new income stream. Over the past year, he has quietly built a platform that will effectively allow Next to run other brands’ websites and all the back-end operations for a fee.
Wolfson explains: “The website will have their URL, it will look and feel like their website, they will design it, they will have creative control over it, but it will link into all the other elements of our platform in exactly the same way as our own website does.
“What that means is, not only will we run their website, but we will also do all their warehousing, distribution, returns, call centre work, customer credit, international sites, we will do absolutely everything that is involved with selling to customers.”