Frasers Group CEO Michael Murray 谈 Matches、Harvey Nichols 与 Hugo Boss 计划

October 5, 2026

Frasers Group CEO Michael MurrayPhoto: Thomas Chéné

Tonight, at a luxury hotel in the 8th arrondissement, Frasers Group CEO Michael Murray is hosting a cocktail party during Paris Fashion Week. The event will celebrate Frasers Group Luxury, a new division of the business comprising Flannels, The Webster, and recently acquired British department store Harvey Nichols. The portfolio also includes Boss, which Frasers is hoping to acquire: The group just upped its stake to 47.89% in August, and Murray was recently made chairman of the board.

It’s the first time Frasers has held a luxury event at Paris Fashion Week, but as the group continues with brand acquisitions, Murray is keen to underline its elevated positioning. The 500-strong guestlist, he says, will include leading luxury CEOs who partner with Frasers across its retail portfolio, franchisees and partners from across Europe, and industry insiders in town for Paris Fashion Week.

The soirée also intends to elucidate Frasers Group’s luxury strategy, amid scrutiny and negative press about the group and its activities in recent years — notably over e-tailer Matches, which Frasers acquired and then placed into administration in 2024. Hulcan, the luxury group which purchased the Matches IP and brand Raey from Frasers, now counts Frasers as an investor.

At the event, Murray will also communicate the group’s plans for Harvey Nichols, which it acquired for an undisclosed sum on August 13, prompting speculation on its future. The Harvey Nichols team will be present including CEO Julia Goddard. Like when Frasers bought Matches, the deal prompted calls from some industry figures for Frasers to address outstanding payments owed to Harvey Nichols’s suppliers before its administration.

Murray took over as CEO from his father-in-law, Frasers Group founder and majority shareholder Mike Ashley, in 2022. At 36, Murray’s one of the youngest executives in the FTSE 100. While scores of luxury retailers have faltered in recent years, Frasers Group (which comprises the luxury division, the sports division, including Sports Direct, Everlast and Slazenger, plus real estate and financial services) has grown under his stewardship, mainly due to international expansion.

The group reported an 8.7% revenue increase to £5.3 billion for fiscal 2026. However, amid Murray’s ambitious investment strategy, adjusted pre-tax profit fell 4% to £538 million. The group didn’t provide guidance for fiscal 2027, citing uncertainty around its takeover offers and the scale and timing of future investments. The group’s Premium Lifestyle business, which includes, Flannels, Cruise, Van Mildert, Jack Wills, House of Fraser and tailoring label Gieves & Hawkes, alongside the newer luxury acquisitions, represented 18.3% of the group’s revenue in fiscal 2026.

A few days before the cocktail, Murray and I met in Paris’s Hotel Costes to unpack the Matches acquisition and liquidation, his intentions for Boss and his plans for Harvey Nichols, some of which he has never discussed before.

Vogue: First of all, tell me about Monday’s event. Why did it make sense for Frasers to host something like this at Paris Fashion Week for the first time?

We want to give clarity on what we’re doing. We bought The Webster about a year ago. We recently bought Harvey Nichols. We invested in Hulcan, which is the owner of Mile, which bought the Matches IP and Raey from us, and we sit on their board. This is a good moment to bring the pieces together and share how positioning each part of the jigsaw puzzle plays.

We’re quite excited about what we’re building and how we can share the synergies between the different businesses, but create a really strong, robust operational backbone beneath them. I think that’s what many of the businesses we’re looking at in fashion [are lacking]. They’ve got great positioning, but potentially not the correct operating model like the logistics, supply chain, capital, credit risk with brands — that’s what we take care of.

Vogue: Last time we spoke, it was clear you were looking for white space and opportunity in the challenged luxury retail market, and that’s why you acquired The Webster in the US. Let’s talk about Harvey Nichols. [Frasers Group owner] Mike Ashley told the Financial Times the retailer was in a “death spiral” prior to the acquisition. Why was it a compelling proposition, despite that?

When a business is losing £40-50 million a year, it’s in a death spiral. We saw an opportunity with Harvey Nichols because it is very different from Flannels. Flannels is for a more aspirational customer, it’s focused on regional markets, and more male-led. Harvey Nichols is female-led, it works with a large array of brands beyond the major luxury brands, and has 200 years of heritage, which means it has value internationally. Flannels is more of a domestic name, so 95% of Flannels sales are in the UK.

Vogue: What is your plan for Harvey Nichols? And what will happen to the stores?

We haven’t announced it yet, but we actually bought the Edinburgh building. We bought the Manchester building. And so we will refurbish them. You wouldn’t rent a house and then put a new kitchen in or a new bathroom in. So our mantra is always to invest in real estate as well. We will refurbish Manchester next year.

For the London store, we are in talks with the Cadogan estate who own the freehold of Knightsbridge because we’re prepared to invest significant sums of money in that building as long as we can get the right terms with the landlord. We want to do something truly remarkable in London and bring it back to its former glory. [As for] the rest of the stores, Bristol and Leeds will be converted to Flannels.

Vogue: After acquiring Harvey Nichols, you were clear that the business would require ‘significant restructuring’. And in September, it was reported Frasers made redundancies across the business, notably among staff from the Bristol and Leeds stores that are becoming Flannels. Why was this a necessary part of the turnaround?

As with any integration of this scale, some review and rationalisation were inevitable as the new operating model takes shape. The [conversion] of the Bristol and Leeds Harvey Nichols stores to Flannels is part of the broader luxury strategy, allowing us to retain a presence in these locations while aligning them with the Flannels proposition.

Vogue: What is Harvey Nichols’s international value?

We’ve already got Harvey Nichols stores in Riyadh, Dubai, Doha and ⁠Kuwait. And we’re looking at expansion opportunities through franchise partners, celebrating that 200 years of heritage from the UK, and sharing that with the Middle Eastern markets. And then there are opportunities such as Georgia and India, where we’ve got franchise partners who want to open big Harvey Nichols stores.

Vogue: Naturally, people make comparisons between the Matches acquisition and the Harvey Nichols acquisition. They’re both iconic British retailers that people feel strongly about. What is the difference between these two investments?

The main difference is that Harvey Nichols is a physical retail business. Matches’s business model was very difficult. Free postage, free returns, low margin, huge overheads. When you cut it all back, there was not a lot there. Rather than try to be a huge business with £500-600 million in revenue, they should have focused on the VIC customer and kept the business smaller and kept the overheads proportionate to serving that consumer. But they bloated the business model up to the point where it was virtually impossible to turn it around without closing down and starting again. Now I think when Joe [Wilkinson] and Mario [Maher] relaunch the business under Hulcan, it will be more focused on the VIC. The overheads will be proportionate. They understand the digital market and how to grow something profitably.

Vogue: In terms of the Matches situation, you said in our previous interview that you made a mistake and learned some lessons. What lessons have you taken into the Harvey Nichols acquisition?

The biggest lesson is that online pure-play businesses are very difficult. If you don’t have a store, you have to spend fortunes on digital media. And as soon as you switch that off, unless you’ve got a very unique proposition, the sales just come straight down. So the biggest thing for us was to stay focused on our core competency, which is retail first and digital second.

With Harvey Nichols, we went in a lot more prepared. We’ve done the integration already. We did it through August when sales were low [to minimise operational disruption]. We understand a lot of the brands [in the Harvey Nichols assortment], and we [are evaluating] what brands make sense, what don’t. We’ve done multiple integrations now on the back end, from The Webster to sports retailers like Holdsport in South Africa and XXL, Scandinavia [both acquired in 2025]. So we’re just a lot more equipped to deal with Harvey Nichols than we were in the past.

Vogue: Why did you decide to sell the Matches IP and Raey to Joe Wilkinson and Mario Maher’s Hulcan, and then invest in their company?

That’s learning from your mistakes. Pure-play is not our expertise. We like bricks and clicks. We like online-to-offline, multi-channel. That’s where we believe we’re good. Joe and Mario built an unbelievable business with [membership luxury off-price platform] Mile. They understand the next generation of savvy digital consumers.

I wasn’t prepared to give up on Matches totally. I just understood that we weren’t the right people to take it forward. So the idea was, if we give it to Joe and Mario at Hulcan, we’ll then put some money into their business so they can grow it. They know what they’re doing. We’ll support them, and maybe we’ll learn something for our other businesses.

Vogue: A year on from The Webster acquisition, what changes have you made there? What should people know about the strategy?

The first phase was to protect the existing business. For any stores that were significantly loss-making and didn’t have a chance to return to growth or return to profitability, we said, let’s close them down and focus on the core estate. We’re committed to opening a brand new flagship in Bal Harbour — arguably one of the most luxurious malls in the world — in November. We acquired the South Beach real estate property, and we’ll invest in that store next year. And we also acquired the Soho New York building, and we’ll invest in that store. The strategy there is to have the key flagship locations in key cities, but then create more of a scalable Webster store format, which can maybe go to second-tier cities, which hopefully will start to launch next year.

Vogue: Now, moving on to Boss. You’ve made it very clear that the intention is to own Hugo Boss. You raised your stake in August [to 47.89%]. Why are you keen to acquire the brand? And thinking about Frasers’s luxury picture, why is it important to have the Boss brand within the stable?

I’ve got to be careful here because I’m obviously the CEO of Frasers and I’m the chairman of Hugo Boss. So I wear two different hats. I’ll talk from a Frasers point of view: if you look at what we built in the sports business, we built strong relationships with Nike, Adidas, On, Hoka and The North Face, and we complement that with our own brands [like Slazenger and Everlast]. But those brands are more value-driven.

When we look at our luxury division, we’re building out a luxury retail ecosystem. What that enables us to do is then potentially invest in brands as well, and it allows us to be able to share the synergies of retail versus brands. We run over 1,200 stores across the world, and we run them very efficiently. We can bring that know-how to brands. A lot of brands are very good at brand building. They’re good at product. They’re good at marketing. When it comes to operations, I would say Frasers Group has got a degree in running retail efficiently. We can bring some of that know-how, so it becomes a one-plus-one-equals-three scenario.

Vogue: There are other investments. Frasers Group owns a 37% stake in Mulberry [after a rejected 2020 takeover bid when Ashley remained CEO]. And you upped your [economic interest] in Burberry over the summer to 4.16%, becoming the brand’s third-largest shareholder. What’s the strategy there? Why also have these small investments across a spectrum of luxury brands?

Well, Boss started as a small investment. Things always have to start small, right? And then some things develop over time. Obviously, our strategy on how we build strategic investments is commercially sensitive. A lot of factors are at play, but the underlying premise of any investment is: do we like the business, and would we be prepared to own the whole thing in the future?

Vogue: So you see potential for [acquisition] with Burberry, for example?

They’re doing an amazing job. They’re a brand that really recognized what was going wrong in the industry. They refocused on the British route. They brought out more affordable price points. I think they’ve done a very good job, and they’ve got a mark on the luxury industry.

Vogue: All these acquisitions and investments create a certain level of financial risk. I know Frasers Group felt that in fiscal 2026, [pre-tax adjusted operating profit was down 4%]. How will you mitigate that risk looking ahead and keep the business healthy, even though you have this really ambitious acquisition strategy?

We’ve got a very strong balance sheet. We’re very profitable. We generate a huge amount of free cash flow. So, a bad year for us is not like a bad year for Harvey Nichols, you know? We make £20 million less out of £500 million. We obviously keep an eye on our business to make sure it’s resilient. But we’ve got a very strong business that can weather much bigger storms than most of the retail businesses.

Vogue: There is a perception that Frasers Group can’t be luxury. Maybe it’s the Sports Direct heritage. Maybe it’s the Matches situation that attracted criticism. How do you respond to this negative perception of the group?

I mean, people say that, but we work with pretty much every luxury brand. We’ve got the best brand relationships. We work with everyone from Dior, Chanel, Gucci and Prada to Brunello Cucinelli. Ask any of our brands; we always pay on time when it’s our bill. I’m happy to pay my bill, but that person over there can pay [their] own. We invest in our stores. We invest in buying up other companies to keep businesses going, which would have otherwise met their demise and disappeared from the high street altogether.

Vogue: You work with these top brands across all your retailers?

Certain brands work better in certain different points of distribution. Some of the more women’s-focused brands work in Harvey Nichols; they won’t work in Flannels. Some of the brands The Webster works with won’t make it to Flannels or Harvey Nichols. We’re one of the biggest wholesale customers in the world for a lot of these businesses now, and I can’t remember the last time we lost a luxury brand that we wanted to keep.

But I think “Mike Ashley, Sports Direct” always gets a lot more clicks than Frasers Group Luxury. Look at what we’re doing. Look at the investment we’ve made. Look at all the retailers we’ve saved. Look at all the [capital] we’ve spent on refurbishing stores. It just sells more stories to be negative sometimes than it does to be positive. But that doesn’t affect us. We’ll just continue to invest. Events like our party on Monday will show [the work we are doing]. Every luxury brand will be there.

Vogue: So you feel it’s just media noise?

I look at the facts rather than the noise, and all signals are there. We’ve got unbelievable support from our brand partners, and we’ve built a business from a standing start. When we bought Flannels, it was £60-70 million in revenue and losing 5 million. We’re now well over a billion and significantly profitable. We don’t disclose the actual profitability of just the luxury division, but it’s significantly profitable. Otherwise, why would we continue investing? But I’m interested: what do you think is our challenge of why people don’t see us in that luxury [space]?

Vogue: I think it’s twofold. I think it’s Sports Direct [because it’s a value retailer] and it’s Matches. Those across the industry aren’t necessarily looking at PNL or at the intricacies of administration. They saw what happened with Matches, and so with Harvey Nichols, they think [designers] won’t be paid.

Brands need to manage their own credit risk. I’m not going to name names, but some just keep looking at the world with the glass half full rather than half empty, and they keep shipping to retailers who can’t pay the bills, who’ve got credit risk, who are publicly losing tens of millions of pounds. Eventually, a car crash is going to happen. If no one buys the business, nobody gets anything. Not only have they lost the debt, but they’ve lost the opportunity to grow in the future. We come along, buy the business, and then we are expected to pay all their bills. How unfair is that? I say to the brands, look, please manage your own credit risk. Obviously, I want to be a good partner, but I can’t be Father Christmas as well.

Vogue: We often have conversations with designers about the payment issues across retail. One young designer I spoke with earlier this year said they had just been paid a retailer invoice years after it was due. I’ve heard similar stories from lots of smaller designers in particular, and it feels like they don’t get paid because the big dogs get paid first.

With the businesses we own and operate, you will never find a complaint about someone not being paid who’s contracted directly with us. There is always noise when we buy another business; we’re expected to pay the bills. But the stock’s gone; it’s been sold. The previous owners are using it to fund something else. We buy the business, and then we’re expected to pay for all the bills.

I think there’s a lot of education that needs to happen in the luxury industry. In the sports industry, you wouldn’t get this noise, but in the luxury industry, I think there’s a lack of understanding about credit risk, administration processes, and the risks involved.

Vogue: It will take time to prove you have good intentions with Harvey Nichols, for example.

I am excited about Harvey Nichols. I’m excited about the opportunity. Obviously, I want to build a strong, long-term partnership with the landlords because I want to make Harvey Nichols London amazing. I can’t do that without the Cadogan estate co-investing or selling the building, or so it’ll either be continued as it is, or it'll be something incredible.

Vogue: The Webster is almost a proof of concept, in terms of how you plan to handle luxury retailers you acquire henceforth. Where is that business going next?

We’ve seen the demise of the department store around the world, especially in America, and it’s been well documented. There will be pockets of opportunities from these old big department stores, which are underinvested and a bit depressing to walk around. The idea is that The Webster can come along with a much more fun, vibrant, creative, inspirational environment, with an amazing creative brand mix, and bring a lot of these luxury brands to regions where they may have been neglected in the past.

So I see that as a white space and opportunities in the future. That’s a good example [to respond to] ‘Frasers Group Luxury doesn’t understand luxury’. We buy The Webster; nothing changes. We continue to invest, acquire buildings, and end up with more brand partners than before because now they've got better credit. They’ve got the Frasers Group-like guarantees for brand suppliers, so they’ve got access to better products. So it really is nonsense.

Vogue: We’ve not talked much about Flannels. You mentioned earlier that the business has hit more than £1 billion in revenue and is very profitable. Where’s the avenue for growth?

I think there are opportunities in mainland Europe. There are a lot of boutique chains that are struggling there. I think there’ll be more opportunities in Europe to acquire small retail chains in the future, but hopefully chains without any credit risk — I don’t want to have that conversation again. A lot of brands will say to us, “We are worried about these chains, and we don’t want to have gaps in these markets. We don’t want to open our own stores, and these are big businesses for you to go and potentially acquire.”

Vogue: Looking at the Frasers elevation strategy, five years from now, what does success look like to you?

I think it’s already a success. So it all depends on market conditions. What we’re not going to do is force an expansion strategy for the sake of an expansion strategy. It’s all to do with where the opportunities land. We’re flexible. We’ve got a foothold in the US now. We’re in a good place. And obviously, then you’ve got our brand division. We’ve got Burberry, Boss, Mulberry. There’s potential for more, and depending on the market conditions, you could see more brands in that portfolio.

Vogue: What do you see the market conditions to be right now, and how do you think they’re changing?

It’s tough unless you’ve got a resilient balance sheet and a resilient operating model, and you can afford to weather the storm. I think you're in trouble if you’ve got rising costs and falling sales or flat sales; it’s marginalizing a lot of [businesses]. So I think there’ll be a lot of consolidation in the next three to five years. There are a lot of brands going into administration. There are a lot of people closing stores. There are a lot of brands downgrading their earnings. It’s not a pretty picture. But where it’s not pretty, there’s opportunity.

Lucy Maguire is Features Director at Vogue Business, writing and commissioning features across all verticals, with a focus on fashion industry moves, international fashion weeks, trends and consumer behaviour, alongside interviews with key designers, founders and executives. Lucy joined Condé Nast in 2017, as an intern at British Vogue, and ... Read More

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