london – British high street tycoon Sir Ralph Halpern, who helped transform the country’s booming retail industry in the ’80s and ’90s, died on August 10 at the age of 83.
He was instrumental in founding Topshop in the mid-’60s and was chief executive officer of the Burton Group from the late ’70s to the early ’90s, which owned Miss Selfridge, Dorothy Perkins, Wallis and the department store Debenhams. And there was Harvey Nichols.
Halpern was born in Austria to Jewish parents who fled the Nazi regime in the 30s to emigrate to England with no luck. His mother, Olga Halpern, was a fashion designer in Vienna and his father, Bernard, was a retailer and banker.
The family lived in north London, moving from Belsize Park to Hampstead. Halpern attended the private school St Christopher’s in Hertfordshire, which has a completely vegetarian diet for students and staff, thanks to funding from the Theosophical Society. Notable alumni of the school include restaurant critic AA Gill, The Rolling Stones manager Prince Rupert Lowenstein, and professional golfer Neil Coles.
Halpern began his career in fashion at his father’s textile firm and then joined the department store Selfridges as an apprentice for £5 a week.
He left the company to join Peter Robinson, a chain of department stores owned by the Burton Group that did not exist until the late 70s. Halpern rose through the ranks from managing the Burton branch in the north of England and then moved to London as merchandise manager at Peter Robinson, where he met Joan Donkin.
Jenny Halpern and her father, Sir Ralph Halpern, attend an event at Winfield House in London on September 13, 1989.
Tim Jenkins / WWD
The couple married in 1967 and divorced in 1999. They have a daughter, Jenny Halpern Prince, founder and CEO of PR agency Helper.
“Our father left an irreplaceable mark on the spirit of entrepreneurship and on the UK retail landscape. And he did it in a very special way, in a very special way,” Prince said in a statement. And his mantra of JFDI (just f-king do it) has been instilled in our culture at an all time helper. He was my hero and he will live on forever through me and my family.”
As CEO, Halpern built the Burton Group as the dominant force on Britain’s High Street. The group rode the wave of Britain’s economic boom as a result of deregulation of the stock market and reported quarter-on-quarter profits and sales growth. The smooth-talking, dapper Halpern ruled Burton with a firm grip, slyly shunning criticism at press conferences with the occasional arrogant smile as the executive team praising him on the front line on his success. I will sit
In the mid-80s he called on business tycoon Gerald Ronson, one of the “Guinness Four” in the Guinness stock-trading fraud scandal, which led him to buy Debenhams in a £566 million deal, which Mohamed al- Fayed’s House of Fraser. group. Debenhams also owned the department store Harvey Nichols, a competitor to the Al-Fayed House of Fraser, which was owned by Harrods. Halpern helped revitalize Harvey Nichols, firmly establishing it as the second major department store in the British capital after Harrods; The then less glamorous Selfridge was definitely in third place.
Halpern was one of the highest-paid CEOs in the UK – he was the first to earn more than £1 million a year. The market value of the Burton Group grew from £50 million to £1.8 billion over the course of three decades.
Even a scandalous affair and extravagant headlines could not slow him down. In 1987, Halpern was caught in an affair with 19-year-old model Fiona Wright, who sold her account of romantic entanglement to Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspaper News of the World. The tabloids happily revealed several innocuous details about the affair, including Wright rubbing Halpern’s anti-baldness cream on her head and bragging about her love life by saying that he would “five times a night”. It was only a matter of time before the tabloids started referring to Halpern as “Five Times a Night Burton’s boss”.
During that impromptu affair, Halpern was living with his former secretary, Laura Bloom, whom he married in 2003 and divorced in 2007. He and Bloom were in the tabloids again in the year 2000, when they had a child, Sammy, when Halpern was 61 years old. ,
Despite the affair, Burton’s shareholders continued to support Halpern as the group’s profits and sales continued to grow strongly. A year before the affair, Halpern was knighted by then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his services to the retail industry.
However this run did not work out. Burton began to struggle with other competitors such as Next, and in 1991, the board pushed him into early retirement at age 50 as the cost of Burton’s estate skyrocketed. He left with a £2 million golden handshake and was succeeded by American executive John Horner. The new CEO sold Harvey Nichols and went on to tighten up Burton’s operations, including changing its name to Arcadia Group in 1998, turning Debenhams into a separate listed company. Horner would eventually be ousted in November 2000 by his former mentor, Stuart Rose. In 2002, Arcadia was acquired by Tina Green, who made her husband Philip its president.
Halpern’s business acumen marked an important era in the British retail industry – one that was at its peak with peers, such as Primark founder Arthur Ryan; George Davis, founder of Next; Sir Richard Greenbury, who took Marks & Spencer in their first £1 billion profit, and Habitat creator Sir Terence Conran.
Halpern is survived by his daughter Jenny, son Sammy and grandchildren Charlie, Sambelle and Marcus.
Originally published at Pen 18
