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Welcome to the fifth edition of our Selfridges Group newsletter, The Quarterly.

In this edition, we are focusing on the future of work, and how our banners are implementing change in their processes, technological innovations and people initiatives to stay ahead of the curve. The world of work is evolving at a rate that has never been seen before, especially with the advent of artificial intelligence and digital technologies, and we must keep this top of mind when making business decisions. I am proud that we continue to bring innovation and change to everything we do in order to remain a leader in our industry.

I am once again delighted to hear from another team member who has moved within our Group: Melody Mijnen, who transferred from de Bijenkorf to Selfridges & Co as Head of Customer Marketing this spring. Cross-Group mobility is a fantastic opportunity we are able to offer to our team members, and a great way of developing careers. If this is something you are interested in doing, please contact talent@selfridgesgroup.com.

As ever, let us know if you have any feedback or ideas for future issues of The Quarterly – we value your input.

Alannah Weston Deputy Chairman

The Quarterly

Byline

How each banner is driving progress in sustainability

Workshops, interviews and talks at Selfridges Careers Week

Future Leaders Program launched in Ireland

The Future of Work

We are living through a period of rapid change and business disruption; for example, the world’s biggest hotel company (Airbnb), taxi company (Uber), retailer (Amazon) didn’t exist 20 years ago and don’t actually own hotels, cars or until recently for Amazon, stores. With this change we are witnessing fundamental shifts in the way we work and want to work in the future.

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Message from the Deputy Chairman

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In this issue:

pg3De Bijenkorf reveals store renovations

Recently the Selfridges Group Team (Managing Director of each banner and Alannah Weston, Paul Kelly and other Group Executives) looked at some of these trends to consider what it means for us; how we recruit, train, engage and how we can work together in a more collaborative, flexible and empowering way.

Here are a few things we discussed:

Robots, artificial intelligence, driverless cars, fridges that can re-order your food, Alexa who can tell jokes and read your kids a bedtime story! There is no doubt technology is changing everything we do. We will need to be more agile

and less hierarchical. We will also need to learn new skills and make better use of technology, analytics, algorithms and artificial intelligence (all the As!) to improve the way we work.

We’ve all heard about millennials who make up 70% of our workforce, but as retirement ages change and we live longer we will have a multi-generational, multi-ethnic, multi-gender workplace. We need to recognise that different people want different things from work, we need to embrace this diversity and be able to accommodate different working styles and career paths.

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We also know that more than just profit matters now. The ability to do meaningful work in an organisation with a purpose and a social responsibility to look after the world we live in is more and more important. This is why we passionately believe sustainability needs to be at the heart of our strategy.

We concluded that the future of work at Selfridges Group needed to be a more agile organisation aligned around a common purpose and values where people are empowered and free to work collaboratively.

We would love to hear your views on this topic-email us at talent@selfridgesgroup.com!

The Future of WorkContinued from page 1

The Flipside was the latest, and arguably the most ambitious, element of the Selfridges Radical Luxury campaign, which explored and redefined what luxury means in 2018. The multi-sensory exhibition offered a fantastical mirroring of the new Accessories Hall at Selfridges London, and positioned Selfridges and partner brands as leaders in a new future-forward direction for luxury. Visitors experienced altered states of luxury demonstrated by Google, Loewe, Mr Lyan, Thom Browne, Gareth Pugh, Louis Vuitton and Byredo. These pioneering creative brands provided a thought-provoking journey into luxury mixed with radical ideas.

The Flipside

Brown Thomas and Arnotts has just appointed its first Digital Innovation Team. The team visited all seven stores and completed nine focus groups during March and April, with 72 attendees across Dublin, Limerick, Cork and Galway sharing insights into how digitalisation could improve the customer experience in the future.

In order to develop its internal network of innovation and idea generation, the team has just launched the ‘Innovation Star of the Month’ campaign, in which team members submit their innovative ideas and a monthly winner is selected. The team has also begun delivering ‘I-Talks’ across the stores, the first of which included virtual reality demos in Limerick and Dublin.

The bigger projects being worked on this year include the roll-out of ‘Endless Aisle’ which is a digital tool (iPad based) which extends Brown Thomas’ exclusive flagship store offers to their regional store sales team to browse and transact with customers instore. The team will also be trialling extended reality experiences in store and live personal shopping.

Digital Innovation Customer experience in the future

Selfridges hosted their very first Careers Week across all of their locations in May. The week-long programme consisted of inspiring talks and workshops designed to support professional and personal development.

Over 3200 team members experienced workshops, interviews and talks with Selfridges insiders as well as guest speakers. From sessions with Selfridges Group Deputy Chairman Alannah Weston and Selfridges Managing Director Anne Pitcher, to advice on managing time and interview preparation - there was something for everyone!

Careers Week at Selfridges

“The ability to do meaningful work in an organisation with a purpose and a social responsibility to look after the world we live in is more and more important.”

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For de Bijenkorf, 2018 is very much about the future of its stores, concentrating on structural innovation. Investing in renovations to its stores is important for their customers’ experience and its premium service strategy.

In March, de Bijenkorf opened and celebrated the revamped store in Maastricht with a weekend full of events and member activities.

In May, it opened its renovated store in Amstelveen, where all departments have been reinvented.

There has also been investment in the Rotterdam store. Earlier this year, they renewed the Cosmetics department and in April they completely renovated the Watches & Jewelry department.

Later this summer, the Accessories & Leather goods department will also open completing the full renovation of the ground floor in Rotterdam.

The Utrecht store has also been revamped. When the Women’s department opens later this month, the whole store will have been renovated and expanded from 9,000m2 to 15,000m2.

HOLTS 360 is a mobile app Holt Renfrew introduced entirely for Holts store associates, personal shoppers and managers. It’s a place where associates can have a ‘360 view’ of all things

Holts, anywhere, anytime, to enhance the overall customer experience at Holt Renfrew.

The HOLTS 360 app enables associates to have immediate access to own-bought products across the entire Holts network, allowing them to show products in different colours and styles to their customers. The app serves as an educational tool, and, most importantly, all customer data is readily available, regardless of location. So

if a customer shops at Holts in Montreal and later travels to the Holt Renfrew Calgary store, any associate is able to view the customer’s entire shopping history and provide them with a seamless experience by knowing their size, brand preferences and style.

The app can also create automated reminders to notify an associate to follow up with a client about a product arrival or beauty replenishment. This encourages a more proactive approach, calling customers and scheduling appointments, and ultimately getting them into our stores.

This is the first release in an exciting journey to expand the tool and elevate both the client and associates’ experiences.

“ the whole store will have been renovated and expanded from 9,000m2 to 15,000m2 ”

There’s an App for That – Holts360

The Future of our Stores

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came into force across the EU last month, with far-reaching implications on how businesses process all types of personal data. Selfridges Group is committed to keeping our employee and customer data safe. Thank you to all our teams who have worked tirelessly to ensure our organisation complies with the new regulations.

GDPR Thank You!

Future Leaders Program

Brown Thomas and Arnotts launched a Future Leaders’ Programme in May 2018.

This 18-month-long programme has a thorough selection process encompassing psychometric testing and interviews. Two separate groups are targeted at different levels within both banners:

1. Senior Future Leaders

2. Emerging Future Leaders

After a huge number of applications were reviewed, 27 team members were selected. These members will receive external 1:1 coaching specific to their needs.

The Future Leaders’ Programme will help selected candidates accelerate their careers and provide them with experiences and skills needed to become strong role models and leaders within our business.

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Ideas, questions or feedback? https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/N5KSVQF

This quarter, we talked to

Melody Mijnen

Candidate of the LEAP programme

Selfridges Group career to date:

2018 Head of Customer Marketing, Selfridges & Co

2016 Head of CRM & MI, de Bijenkorf

2013 Manager Loyalty Marketing, de Bijenkorf

Tell us briefly about some of your career highlights. In 2015, I participated in the development of a renewed loyalty programme at de Bijenkorf, titled the Privilege Membership. Together with a team of analysts in both the e-commerce and CRM departments, we worked on building the foundations for personalisation. The biggest change we made was shifting from a credit card loyalty proposition (points-reward driven) to a more service-driven proposition. It has been really satisfying to support the business in customer and market insights through the measurement of marketing initiatives. This February, I permanently transferred through the LEAP programme to Selfridges & Co. I could not be

more thrilled to join Selfridges as the Head of Customer Marketing.

What do you love about working for Selfridges Group? I love the brand and Selfridges legacy. The extraordinarily high level of service and experience in store cannot be beaten.

Describe the experience of living in London and working in Marketing. My recent move to London has meant I’ve experienced ‘the Beast from the East’ and the hottest day in April for almost 70 years, in just two months. It is an exciting city with lots of great places to eat. Working in the Marketing department at Selfridges & Co, with a diverse team of people, has been really inspiring.

What made you want to stay within the Group? I believe in learning from each other and working together rather than reinventing the wheel individually. There is so much we can learn from one another to become more effective and efficient through sharing best practices among our banners.

What does the future of work look like to you? The future of work, for me, is all about a strong work-life balance. Working smarter, living better.

Last issue, we introduced the Selfridges Group’s framework and 5 year plan for sustainability (Build, Buy, Work, Ship, Sell). This month, we take a closer look at the Work element and how each banner is driving progress against their goal to engage and inspire action with their wider team members on sustainability. In 2018, there is a Group level commitment from all banners to implement core activities, such as rolling out a volunteering day and gauging employee views about sustainability through our opinion survey.

Sustainability Corner

Career Case Study

De Bijenkorf is working hard to sow fields, educate children about the importance of bees and to rehabilitate bee habitats. This was timely, given the start of bee season and national sowing day (22 April) in the Netherlands. All de Bijenkorf stores and HQ are planning or have already held events with their respective teams. Working together, teams can make a positive change and help save the bee, de Bijenkorf’s namesake! (De Bijenkorf means ‘The Beehive’ in Dutch).

Holt Renfrew has produced a new video to engage employees around the direction of their renewed Purpose, Vison and Values. The Brand Spirit video was inspired by feedback from team members and promotes the role of social responsibility at the heart of the business. It is used to onboard new employees and is promoted through internal communications such as the newsletter and digital screens. Visit https://bit.ly/2J4oCXV to watch the video.

A volunteering pilot programme has launched across Brown Thomas (Dublin) and Arnotts. Both stores’ nominated ‘Helping Hands’ charities for 2018 and other charities close to team members’ hearts. Team Arnotts completed the ‘Darkness Into Light’ walk for their non-homeless charity ‘Pieta House’ on the 12th May. A worthy cause for suicide prevention.

The Selfridges Sustainability Team recently launched a ‘Communities Toolkit’. The guidance (top 10 tips and FAQs) empowers team members to develop and maintain communities that focus on connecting people outside of their day to day roles, through identity or shared interest. Existing communities include the Green Warriors, who are passionate about environmental issues. They have helped drive a beach clean in London for World Oceans Day, as well as tree planting days and other initiatives.

Selfridges has partnered with Nudge, an independent and confidential service that helps team members better understand their finances and make the most of their money. Regardless of age, salary or personal circumstances, Nudge provides financial advice to everyone at Selfridges, through easily accessible digital platforms such as e-mail, SMS and WhatsApp.

Nudge for Selfridges was launched in April 2018 and is now part of the benefit offer as a result of team members giving feedback that financial wellbeing is an important focus for them.

The Future of Managing Your Finances With Nudge