Move of the week: Fenwick appoints Feather as chief executive

Not because Feather is an unsuitable candidate – quite the opposite, in fact – but because he has been touted for a chief executive role with much bigger businesses, including Halfords, and as a long-term successor to Mike Coupe at Sainsbury’s.

It’s easy to see why Feather was an attractive candidate to Fenwick. He has experience of the department store sector at John Lewis and boasts digital expertise from his role as online director at Sainsbury’s.

This will be of particular value to Fenwick as it plans to finally launch a transactional website in 2019 after a number of false starts.

Feather’s entrepreneurial streak (he is co-founder of Feather & Black) also gave him an edge over other candidates and should help him adapt quickly to a very different kind of organisational culture based on the values of the founding Fenwick family.

I’ve written a number of times about the challenges involved in an outsider going in to run a family business. Certainly, the dynamic at Fenwick will be very different from a giant PLC such as Sainsbury’s.

However, there is one factor that reassures me this won’t be a problem in Feather’s case.

Building bridges

Richard Pennycook became chairman of Fenwick in May, and if anyone knows how to get the governance of an organisation right, it’s the former Morrisons and Co-op man.

I would expect Pennycook to act as the bridge between Feather and the Fenwick family and do so extremely effectively.

The appointment of Pennycook as chairman marked the point at which the family decided to take more of a backseat at Fenwick, and the hiring of a number of executives from outside the business in key positions of late suggests they are prepared to let others lead the department store on the next stage of its journey.

“Feather is described as having an inclusive management style, which is likely to be a good fit for a business looking to fuse the old with the new”

In digital, in particular, the arrival of Kate Smyth, who joined from Dune as multichannel director in May, and Dixons Carphone’s David Cutts, who became the retailer’s first chief information officer in September, implies a recognition that Fenwick did not have the skills in-house to execute its online plans.

Feather is described as having an inclusive management style, which is likely to be a good fit for a business looking to fuse the old with the new.

His departure also represents a loss for Sainsbury’s Argos and may just push the highly rated Paul Mills-Hicks further up the pecking order of future Sainsbury’s leaders.

However, if Feather impresses in his first chief executive role, as I expect he will, don’t rule out a return to fill Coupe’s shoes at some point in the future.