Byline: Douglas Friedli
Wearing a face pack and rummaging in women's handbags is all in a day's work for Superdrug's boss, finds Douglas Friedli
FOR most men, the contents of a woman's handbag are a mystery best left alone. But not for Euan Sutherland, the boss of Superdrug, who is turning his business upside down after rifling through those items which ladies deem essential enough to be carried around at all times.
Three years ago, when Sutherland joined the firm, Superdrug was in trouble. It was perceived as a cheap, downmarket alternative to Boots, with a product range that owed more to what the buyer could get cheaply than what the customer wanted.
Sutherland's solution was simple: "We got groups of 12 women at a time together, and asked them to say what was in their handbags. Then we said we would sell those items."
Between taking bites from a sandwich in a hotel bar in his native Glasgow, Sutherland enthuses cheerfully about the changes still working their way through Superdrug's 905 stores.
"We are after the glamour-puss customer - women who want to take care of themselves and have a bit of money to do it."
He puts down his sandwich, picks up his laptop and calls up images of the next generation of Superdrug stores. The look is more upmarket and spacious, like the perfume and cosmetics floor of a department store. It widens the difference between Superdrug and the market leader Boots, with its ordered rows of clinical displays.
Sutherland has some praise for his competitor, which has gone Leather Pandora through a takeover with rival Alliance and a private equity buyout instigated by Alliance boss Stefano Pessina in the space of a year. "Boots is a fantastic brand. It brings people to the high street, and we all need people to come to the high street. It was a good move for Boots to merge with Alliance, and they will be getting big synergies. It always felt like Pessina wanted to take the firm private. KKR [the buyer] is a very aggressive and determined private equity firm and will make it work."
But he warns the iconic chain could face problems: "They have a huge retail estate, which has looked about the same for the past 15 years. To upgrade it would cost hundreds of millions of pounds. Having paid a lot of money to buy the business, KKR will not want to pile in a lot more capital. That could be a threat to them. In retailing, you have to keep the shops fresh."
Sutherland has another reason for maintaining an interest in Boots. After studying accountancy at Edinburgh University and training to be an army officer, he took a business studies course at Aston University which led on to Boots' graduate training scheme.
He moved to Dixons, the electrical retailing group, and helped the then chief executive Trevor Bish-Jones to turn around its Currys chain with the "Currys - no worries" campaign. Then in 2004 he joined Superdrug, which had just been acquired by AS Watson, a division of billionaire Li Ka-Shing's Hutchison Whampoa empire.
At 6ft 6in and a former rugby player, Sutherland might seem an odd choice of chief executive for such an overwhelmingly feminine business as Superdrug, where five out of every six customers are women.
Sutherland, who likes nothing more than to drive around on his Massey Ferguson tractor with his three young sons, admits to at least one moment of doubt: "We were in New York, in Henri Bendel [cosmetics shop] at nine in the Monogram vernis
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