Holt Renfrew president Mark Derbyshire asks an employee for a Diet Coke before he settles into an interview at his Vancouver store, where he discusses his luxury retailer’s plans for a significant expansion at Pacific Centre.
“It’s my vice,” the Toronto-based executive said. “All those years when I was in school, I wasn’t into coffee, so if I wanted caffeine, it was Diet Coke.”
Smartly dressed in a grey suit, Derbyshire simultaneously conveys exuberance, confidence and stylishness.
He has also proven to be a deft leader who has refreshed the Holt Renfrew brand with moves such as putting a bigger spotlight on menswear.
Total sales have more than doubled at the Vancouver Holt Renfrew store since Derbyshire took the corporate reins in January 2010.
Chain-wide expansion is in full swing. Derbyshire plans to expand his 150,000-square-foot Vancouver store to include what is now a 40,000-square-foot Sport Chek store next door. He is also revamping stores in Montreal and Calgary on the heels of a completed renovation in Toronto. A store in Mississauga is set to open next year.
Despite recently closing stores in Ottawa and Quebec City, he expects that his chain will occupy a total of 1.2 million square feet by 2017 – up about 400,000 square feet from its total footprint in 2012.
That will mean a substantial rise in sales if the chain maintains its impressive record of selling about $1,400 to $1,500 per square foot of leased space.
Derbyshire chalks that sales success to “harnessing the power of people.”
It’s the kind of thing many executives say, but Derbyshire’s understanding of empowerment flows from knowledge he gleaned while completing a PhD in organizational behaviour.
“People can do infinitely more than we can imagine,” he said, explaining that getting the most from each employee is a task that demands a high amount of customization.
The first thing an executive has to do is ask what motivates each employee.
The key is then to channel that motivation while focusing primarily on the employee’s strengths, he said.
“We want to focus on their strengths and use their strengths to build them to be the best,” he said of his 2,700 employees. “We’ve got to make sure their weaknesses don’t weaken them but, at the same time, we’re not going to focus on their weaknesses to make them good. We’re going to focus on their strengths to make them great.”
The 45-year-old has always been a leader, and he attributes his ongoing success in business to being able to create strong relationships.
Derbyshire earned his MBA at the University of Montana while he was in his early 20s.
He then bought a Baskin-Robbins franchise in Kingston, Ontario. He had mostly grown up in Toronto and then in the small town of Perth, Ontario. So, he wanted to return to the province.
Sales rose so fast he was able to sell the store just two years later for three times what he had paid for it, he said.
Flush with that cash, Derbyshire launched his own chain of franchised ice cream stores, Mark E.D.’s, in the Kingston, Ontario, region.
He excelled at creating ice cream recipes and soon had a good enough business formula that Baskin-Robbins bought his seven-store chain, leaving him another cash windfall.
Derbyshire then completed his PhD, worked at Canadian Tire in marketing for about five years and joined Russell Reynolds Associates, where he helped companies recruit board directors.
“It was building on my experience of marketing and organizational effectiveness as I was working with Fortune 500 boards across Canada and the U.S.,” he said. “I was helping them orchestrate successful boards, and I had to understand what’s the profile and dimensions of the people on those boards.”
It was there that he met then-Holt Renfrew president Andrew Jennings, who was impressed enough with Derbyshire to hire him as Holt Renfrew’s vice-president of human resources.
Several years later, Holt Renfrew owner Galen Weston moved Derbyshire to what is now known as Weston’s Selfridges Group, which is Holt Renfrew’s parent.
When Derbyshire was with the forerunner to Selfridges, Wittington, he split his time between Canada, England and Ireland and concurrently served as chief talent officer for Wittington Fashion Retail Group and vice-president of Wittington Investments.
During this time, he was named one of the Canada’s Top 40 Under 40.
Weston then tapped Derbyshire to become Holt Renfrew president in January 2010.
“We were exposed to Mark before he became president and we were highly supportive of the appointment, as we are today,” said Isabelle Hudon, who has been on the Holt Renfrew board for seven years and is senior vice-president of Sun Life Financial Canada.
She praised Derbyshire’s extroverted personality and said that he loves walking the store floors meeting clients.
“He’s very down to earth,” she said. “He’s smiley and happy but always generous in asking short but perfect questions. He’s a good listener.”
Part of that ability stems from strong emotional intelligence, Hudon said.
“When I see him with his staff, he’s a leader but he doesn’t lead by authority,” she said. “Quite often we confuse leadership and authority. My favourite definition of leadership is to inspire people to follow you, and I think Mark is right on with that definition. I’ve never heard him raise his voice. He always has a smile.”
While some industry watchers say that Holt Renfrew’s strategy to spend $300 million over five years to refresh its stores is a response to the arrival of Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue, Derbyshire, told BIV that the tactic has nothing to do with looming new competitors.
“It’s completely separate,” he said. “We’ve always had lots of competitors. Are we now seeing different competitors? Yes, but our customers have always travelled the world.”
Derbyshire “regularly” meets with Weston, and he described Weston as being “very passionate about this business, and he has a strong point of view about the business.”
Derbyshire also regularly consults with the heads of presidents of other Selfridges Group companies, such as Brown Thomas in Ireland and De Bijenkorf in the Netherlands.
When he is not working, he devotes much of whatever time is left over to being a dad to three teenaged boys: Brock, Wilson and Carter.
Derbyshire, his sons and wife, Julie, live in the Greater Toronto town of Aurora on a three-acre property.
“We love everything from seeing our Leafs play, or the Raptors and the Blue Jays, to the galleries,” he said.
“There are so many great galleries and museums in Toronto – the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and others. There is so much greatness in the city. I also travel a lot for work and personally. Travel is a great way to see how people in the world see the world.”•
