Joules boss blames spreadsheet error for festive availabilities crisis
The boss of fashion brand Joules has blamed an error on a spreadsheet for the availabilities issue that cratered online sales over the festive period and forced the retailer to warn on profits for the year.
Joules chief executive Nick Jones, who only took the reins of the fashion brand from long-term boss Colin Porter towards the end of 2019, said the profit warning over Christmas was due to an error on a spreadsheet pulled together ahead of its end-of-year sales event.
“When we are planning and preparing for an event, as we do for every event, we pull a lot of information from a lot of different places. Those then get pulled together and put on to spreadsheets. On one of those spreadsheets, there was an error.
“We collectively looked at that as a team and we made what we thought was the right decision, but in the end, we left ourselves with less stock than we thought we would have from a consumer point of view.”
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