Harvey Nichols

Have you ever heard of the Top Drawer exhibition in London, which is the high end? So Top Drawer exhibition, beautiful homewares and goods, very high end.

And I got into Harrods, Harvey Nichols, John Lewis, all of the big stores that I wanted to.

But the next year...

sales completely dried up and the italian companies were selling direct into the stores and and for a minute i was like how dare they you know i've got a quite a sense of fairness you know fairness is is very difficult to grasp because what's fair to you won't be fair to me but there was a sense of fairness and i thought this is wrong um but i also realized i was short on time and i was short on money um and i can either spend my waste my time fighting them Or just pick myself up and get on with the next thing, which is what I decided to do.

project does have leather straps though actually we're talking

to the lady who would know this having worked for Harvey Nichols my god she's like yeah a tote bag of course it's two thousand pounds

oh it's awful isn't it I have absolutely no grasp on reality anymore like don't get me wrong I'm not buying them myself but I'm a terrible person everyone comes to me if they need like um someone to tell you to go and buy something because I just think everything's a bargain

you found a

Guiné launched Bobbute from Norway in February 2025.

The brand has reached 82 countries and it already has a physical retail presence in London's Harvey Nichols and, as of just yesterday, Liberty London.

So two of the world's biggest retailers.

Ginette already had over a million followers on her personal platforms ahead of Bob's launch, which on paper sounds incredible.

that makes a lot of sense.

Your first year and a bit in business has been extraordinary.

82 countries, you launched into Violet Gray and Harvey Nichols this year.

You start –

Also, so this week I discovered that King Philby had a passion, was a passionate Arsenal fan.

And when MI5 followed him, they noted that he went to his regular haunts, the Atheneum Club, the Goring Hotel, Harvey Nichols and Arsenal Football Ground.

And even when he defected to Russia, he still used to listen to Arsenal's matches on the BBC World Service, which I would think would be probably against the law in Russia, wouldn't it? I suppose if you were a senior KGB officer, you could do what you like.

So he died in, obviously, Moscow in 1988.

Well, you know, serve him right, I say.

Of course, he didn't like it in Russia either.

That was the other weird thing, wasn't it? He was disillusioned with the Soviet Union, which I thought, a man whose regular haunts were the Athenaeum Club and Harvey Nichols, why would he think that Soviet Moscow would be to his taste? I don't know.

Anyway, there we are.

Sarah Manning has been working in visual merchandising for over 20 years.

She started her career at Harrods, Selfridges, and Harvey Nichols.

She's run her own visual merchandising consultancy since 2006, and she's taught visual merchandising at the University of the Arts London since 2007.

Sarah was on the show earlier this year talking about shop windows, and I wanted her back for the windows that matter the most, your Christmas windows.

The Weston family, very notably, and Fairfax have agreed an $8.9 billion deal for boots.

Fraser's Group has bought Harvey Nichols.

Partners Group is reportedly pursuing the majority stake in Aromazone at a valuation of around $2 billion.

Why put that much money into retail right now?

But the winning idea is not going to be more boots.

It's going to be a more coherent boots with a clearer role in customers' lives.

Let's talk about Harvey Nichols now.

And I guess the question I got is, can operational discipline rebuild desirability? Fraser's have acquired it from the administrators and Fraser's have said quite openly that significant restructuring and difficult choices will be required.

Okay.

Then we have Frasier Group, British retailer, mainly responsible for JD Sports that has made a variety of investments in multiple companies, anything from Gibson Hawks, Harvey Nichols, Hugo Boss, and some other companies.

The question here is what is Frasier Group up to? This is less so speculative and more so educated guesswork because Burberry is also among the ones that they are taking a stake in.

They're now the fourth largest investor in Burberry, which has been struggling quite a bit for a multitude of reasons.

The curation is in my opinion, one of the best because they put outfits together on racks based on what goes together and not based on brands.

And so if you want just to buy entire looks, that's pretty efficient at the web store.

But back to Harvey Nichols and the entire story around Burberry, Hugo Bosque, Snogs, and what Frasier Group is actually trying to do here.

You know, the one that throws me off there is Hugo Boss a little bit.