Guy Farmer to join Shop Direct as Group Trading Director

Shop Direct has appointed Guy Farmer as Group Trading Director, who will join the business in September 2019 and report to Sam Perkins, Managing Director, retail. Additionally, the company announced that Carly O’Brien, who joined the business in early 2019 and has been interim CMO since April, will take over the role permanently.

Commenting on the Farmer and O’Brien’s appointments, Perkins said in a statement: “Guy’s outstanding trading and product experience means he’s ideally placed to cement our category management approach and even further improve the speed and quality of our commercial and customer decisions. Carly is already an integral part of the team and will use her marketing expertise to bring us closer to our customers through data and enable them to connect with our retail brands in new ways.”

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Farmer is currently vice president and global retail own brand director at Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA), responsible for all Boots branded products worldwide. During eight years at WBA, the company said, he has led a 155-strong multifunctional team and set up a global centre of excellence for the development of WBA’s own brand business. Farmer has also held the roles of global director for Boots cosmetics brands, trading director for healthcare & lifestyle, and trading director for beauty. He previously spent 13 years at L’Oréal, progressing from marketing director to managing director and country manager for Portugal, following six years in brand and category management positions at Procter & Gamble.

At Shop Direct, the company added, he will work with category directors and the director of the company’s global sourcing operation to oversee multifunctional teams including buying, merchandising, design, sourcing, data intelligence, finance and trading. Last year the company appointed fashion, home, electrical and developing category directors and is seeing strong results, including a successful peak period which saw group revenue up 3.7 percent year-on-year for the seven weeks up to and including December 28, 2018.

The company further said that Shop Direct’s retail team has also consolidated marketing activity under the position of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Newly appointed CMO, O’Brien has 18 years’ customer management and financial services experience, most recently as marketing director at Virgin Money Digital Bank. She was previously head of customer acquisition marketing for current accounts at Royal Bank of Scotland and head of marketing at Bank of America.