Burberry is hunting new chairman

Burberry is reportedly looking for a new chairman not long after the struggling luxury business announced it was replacing its British CEO with former Coach and Jimmy Choo chief Joshua Schulman.

A Sky News report said it’s seeking a “new board member who could take over from Gerry Murphy” and that it’s “working with headhunters to identify two new non-executives who would be contenders to replace Mr Murphy”.

Murphy has led the Burberry board since 2018. He’s also chairman of a very different business, supermarket chain Tesco.

There’s no timetable for when the replacement needs to be in place and sources told Sky that the firm’s development amounts to an “indirect hunt” for a successor. A luxury goods ‘insider’ told it that Burberry has been “pretty explicit that the job is available for the right person”.

The development comes after last week’s news that CEO Jonathan Akeroyd was out and Schulman was in. Akeroyd had continued his predecessor’s strategy of driving the label even further into the ultra-luxe segment of the luxury industry and there has been speculation that Schulman might vary the approach with a renewed focus on aspirational shoppers too.

Some kind of the rethink is seen as being needed because the company has reported lower sales and profits with the current strategy failing to ignite the kind of growth it wants. Of course, it’s not alone, with other major names in the luxury sector also finding growth hard to come by at present.