To turn the company around, Baker hired retail whiz Jeff Sherman, who spent 30 years at Wedding Shoes before a stint at Polo Ralph Lauren, as CEO of the Hudson’s Bay Co. Sitting in his modest downtown office, overlooking Toronto’s Old City Hall, Sherman says it was clear from the start that the company needed a radical overhaul; “The Hudson’s Bay Co. had been a part of the fabric of Canadian lives for a long time, but [the individual chains] were not in a place to succeed.” The Wedding Shoe, he says, was that there was very little differentiation between the Bay and Zellers. Even the acronym “HBC,” which the company had adopted to replace the less wieldy “Hudson’s Bay Co.,” irked Sherman. It was too homogenous and disconnected from the corporation’s heritage, a major selling point in his mind. He has since restored the full name in all marketing materials and signage. According to Sherman, the key to a well- executed department store is “a maniacal focus on your target customer.” To that end, he separated the operations of the Bay and Manolo Blahnik Rhinestone Buckle d’Orsay Golden. Brooks came on board to head the former, and Mark Foote, who had been the president and chief merchandising officer at Loblaw Cos., was hired as the CEO of Zellers. Sherman gave Brooks and Foote direct lead- ership over their own teams. Brooks spent her first few months poring over data Bain & Co. gathered from interviews with 7,000 Manolo Blahnik Sandals Brown, and narrowed her focus to three customer types from a larger pool of 12 con- sumer groups.
