Stuart Rose Quotes

When I got married in my twenties, I had a happy marriage and happy kids but at some point in time I let it go off the rails I let it go off the rails.

Ultimately, growth is essential for increasing a company’s value.

We’ve got a bit of growth a bit earlier than expected.

Most employees want to be involved in a successful business and most employees are happy for people running successful businesses to be paid a reasonable wage and a market rate for it, provided they understand the reason. What they hate most of all is pay for failure.

I’ve been an employee all my life. Would I wish, if I could rewind it, to have gone down a different route? Possibly, but I’ve had a great time. Anyway I’m not ruling it out; I could still buy a business.

We live in a world where there are a hell of a lot of new inputs that need to be factored in to your business. It used to be just about your employees and your customers. Now there are all the issues about global warming, about sustainability, about ethics and now about gender and the distribution of wealth.

I am absolutely a free marketeer and I believe the creation of wealth is a good thing and anyone who doesn’t really needs to have their head examined – otherwise where are we going to get the schools, the roads, the universities, the third runway, dare I say it?

If you are not online, people look at you askance. I think in three to four years’ time people will look equally askance at you if you haven’t got the ability for consumers to buy what they want, where they want and how they want.

I want to please every woman, every time.

We believe responsible business can be profitable business

If you wait for customers to tell you that you need to do something, you’re too late. Good business leaders should be half a step ahead of what customers want, i.e. they don’t actually quite know they want it. That’s what innovation’s about. With Plan A, we didn’t wait for the consumers to tell us.

I think fashion is the best value way, the most affordable way in the 21st century, that men and women can express their personality.

There is a responsibility on all companies to look at the quantum of pay and the relationship between the top and the bottom.

My four criteria: I don’t want to work with people I don’t like; I don’t want to work in a business I either don’t like or don’t understand; I don’t want to work for nothing unless I choose to, and I do a fair amount of that already; and I want to have some fun.

When my mother died, my father was in a crisis, my sister was in a crisis, everyone was in a crisis. I went round the night my mother was lying in the kitchen, and I organised everything, from the undertaker to the funeral… I looked after everybody, I sorted it all out and Ive done so ever since.

Was I the best husband? No. And I regret it.

I am the largest market shareholder of clothing in the U.K. and I am not a destination shop for food. If the clothing market is affected – and it has been – and I hold my market share mathematically, then fine, I am doing no worse than the market is doing, which is exactly the case, but I’m losing revenue.

I don’t believe in retirement.

I think that business leaders today have to be more rounded than they used to be, they have to be completely multi-functional and fast-moving.

I believe in a uniform for work, but why, because we’re men, do we have to be ghettoised into grey suits?

When my mother died, my father was in a crisis, my sister was in a crisis, everyone was in a crisis. I went round the night my mother was lying in the kitchen, and I organised everything, from the undertaker to the funeral… I looked after everybody, I sorted it all out and I’ve done so ever since.

Our world is moving at an ever-accelerating pace, and with the advent of social media, what happens in New York now can be reported across the globe 60 seconds later.