John Lewis The 'perfect invention' gets an £800m reboot to lure in the younger crowd

You may think the department store has had its day. Debenhams and Beales have left the high street, House of Fraser has closed almost two-thirds of its stores and Fenwick has exited its prime London site.

- Sarah Butler

Peter Ruis, the managing director of John Lewis, has a different view. After closing 16 stores during the pandemic and shedding thousands of jobs in a fight for survival, Ruis said expansion was now definitely being looked at.

The 161-year-old retail chain is spending £800m by 2029 on giving its 36 outlets a reboot. Ruis, who returned last year after more than a decade away, said: “The store is a perfect invention and we've seen only too well, coming back from Covid, how people have gravitated back to the stores.”

He said there were “definitely no plans to close anything” and there were parts of the country that John Lewis would like to step into.

Ruis, who started his career as a graduate trainee at Marks & Spencer, was credited with putting the fashion back into John Lewis before going on to lead retailers including Jigsaw and Anthropologie.

He said his latest job was about bringing “radical relevance” to once-staid outlets.

“We are getting rid of the old stuffy department store and replacing it with something more experiential,” he said. However, this season could be a nail-biter, with shoppers likely to leave their present-buying late because many will have a full five days of holiday before the big day.