Among the panel “interviewing” John Lyttle to be chief executive of Boohoo were a quartet of lively Jack Russell terriers. “I must have met Carol’s dogs at least twice,” he says.
The unorthodox due diligence was deemed appropriate by Carol Kane, the co-founder of Boohoo, and Mr Lyttle given that he was undertaking that most delicate of management briefs: running a company where the founders are not only major shareholders, but still on the board. “We asked each other at the start: is everybody clear about what they want to do in terms of the next part of the journey. “We spent a good period of time really discussing that.”
Boohoo is one of British retailing’s success stories. It was started in 2006 by Ms Kane and Mahmud Kamani, whose family had emigrated to the UK from Kenya in the 1960s. It grew rapidly thanks to the teen appeal of its cut-price designs and its clever use of social media and influencer marketing. The company went public at 50p a share in 2014. Revenues were £100m that year; in the current period they are expected to top £1bn, and the shares now change hands for 260p.