Selfridges History
Earlier company descriptions, brand line-ups, store counts and photographs from the history of Selfridges, kept for historical reference.
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The Company Description of Its Time
Selfridges is the London department store that taught Britain how to shop for pleasure. Harry Gordon Selfridge, an American who had made his name in Chicago retail, arrived in London in 1906 and opened his Oxford Street store determined to import a new idea of what a shop could be. The filing describes a retailer conceived as theatre: Selfridge's mission was to put entertainment value into shopping, to draw crowds with spectacles and win their custom with service, pioneering ideas - the perfume and cosmetics counter moved to the front of the store by the entrance, window displays unveiled like stage sets from behind silk curtains - that department stores everywhere still use. The famous maxim 'the customer is always right' is popularly credited to him.
John Lewis, Sears, Weston - and What Came Next
The ownership record the profile keeps runs like a history of British retail itself. In the 1940s Selfridges' provincial stores were sold to the John Lewis Partnership, and in 1951 the Oxford Street store itself was acquired by Lewis's. In 1965 the store was taken over by the Sears Group, headed by Charles Clore, under which Selfridges expanded beyond London to Manchester and Birmingham. In 2003 it was acquired by the Canadian businessman Galen Weston, whose family held it for nearly two decades of celebrated reinvention.
The filing's final item is a 2016 one, and a telling one: 'Bright New Things,' the store's sustainability talent platform, scouting design talent whose work put environmental and social benefit at its core - nine candidates selected with the Centre for Sustainable Fashion, in the fifth year of the Bright Young Things program. Since that entry the store has changed hands again: the Weston family sold Selfridges Group in 2021 to Thailand's Central Group and Austria's Signa; after Signa's collapse, Central took majority control and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund acquired a 40 percent stake in October 2024. The Oxford Street flagship and its three sister stores trade on, under ownership as international as the crowds on its pavement.
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