Karren Brady joins Arcadia parent firm as chairman

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jul 17, 2017

Baroness Karren Brady has been named chairman of Sir Philip Green’s Taveta Investments, the company that controls fashion retail giant Arcadia.

A veteran non-executive director at the business, in her new role, she heads the board of a parent company that is responsible for Topshop and Topman, Wallis, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Outfit, Burton and Miss Selfridge. Arcadia employs over 24,000 people globally.

She is stepping up with immediate effect as previous non-executive chairman Lord Grabiner ends a 15-year tenure that saw him being heavily criticised by MPs for “weak” corporate governance. This was claimed to have contributed to another business that Philip Green had owned, BHS, going under in 2016.

Brady has a tough job ahead as Taveta and Arcadia navigate their way through a difficult trading environment. Only recently the company announced lower sales and profits with the collapse of BHS having been partly to blame for the profits hit. But a 2.5% fall in sales to a little over £2 billion was also worrying.

On Monday Brady said she looks forward to “driving the Arcadia brands forward on their global expansion."

She first came to prominence in the early 1990s when she was made Managing Director of Birmingham City football club, a post that shocked many both because of the appointment of a woman and the fact that she was only 23 at the time.

She is also a media personality and has a long association with retail having held a non-exec position at Mothercare before joining Taveta in 2010.