• Fat Face trading director Simon Pickering leaving the business
  • Heads of buying, design and merchandising to report directly to boss Anthony Thompson
  • Thompson outlined renewed focus on “a stronger and faster business, with sales and profit growth”

Fat Face will restructure its management, with function heads reporting to boss Anthony Thompson after the departure of its trading director.

Fat Face trading director Simon Pickering is leaving Fat Face after six years. He is not being replaced “for the moment” and is not leaving the business for another position.

As a result, head of design Emma Shaw, head of buying Kate Brown and head of merchandising Nick Stevenson will report directly to chief executive Anthony Thompson.

In a note to all staff sent last week, Thompson said that after five years of top-line growth and investment in US expansion, IT infrastructure and a new distribution centre, scheduled to be built this year, there would be a renewed focus on “a stronger and faster business, with sales and profit growth”.

He added: “I want us to really focus on these priorities and deliver real growth in the core of our business, with pace and conviction. I realise that there is more I can do to help and so I have decided to become more directly involved in the business to lead and drive the move to becoming faster and stronger.

“I am also confident that we can become faster and stronger in everything that we do. When we focus as a team we always deliver market-leading results.”

Fat Face launched its first stores on the East Coast of the US at the beginning of this year, in Portland, Maine and Lynnfield, Massachusetts early this year and began construction of its new distribution centre at Dunsbury Hill Farm, Hampshire, which is to open in 2017.

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