John Lewis(1836–1928)

John Lewis was born at Shepton Mallet in Somerset on the twenty-fourth of February 1836, son of a Welsh-descended baker. Orphaned at seven, he was raised by his aunt and apprenticed at fourteen to a draper at Wells. He worked his way through the West Country drapery shops, took a buyer's job at Peter Robinson in Oxford Street in 1856, and by 1864 had saved enough to take a lease on a small shop at 132 Oxford Street, opposite his old employer. He opened the doors in May of that year and stood behind the counter on the first morning himself.

The Lewis method, worked out in those first years and held to without deviation for the next sixty, was simple and uncomfortable for the trade around him. He bought for cash, kept his margins narrow, refused to use a credit system, and put the unsold stock on the floor at the marked price every morning rather than wait for the season's end. The Oxford Street trade in the 1860s ran on long credit, padded ticket prices and rebated discounts; Lewis ran the opposite. His prices undercut the West End drapers by a margin the trade thought could not be sustained, and the trade was wrong. Within a decade he had taken the lease on the buildings either side of number 132, and by 1895 he held the whole frontage from Holles Street to Old Cavendish Street.

In 1905 he bought the lease of Peter Jones in Sloane Square, the elegant Chelsea house his old employer had founded, and ran the two shops as a single buying operation. His elder son John Spedan Lewis, then twenty, was put in to manage Peter Jones in 1914 with a free hand to experiment. What Spedan did at Peter Jones over the next decade became the central act of the family story: he discovered, going through the firm's accounts, that the three Lewises drew between them an annual profit roughly equal to the total wages paid to the entire workforce of two thousand people. He concluded that the arithmetic could not be defended and set out, against his father's settled opposition, to share it.

In 1929, the year after his father's death, John Spedan Lewis transferred his controlling shareholding into an irrevocable trust for the benefit of every person who worked in the firm, in perpetuity. He set up the John Lewis Partnership as a constitutional democracy of employee-owners, with a written constitution, an elected Partnership Council, a confidential weekly newspaper in which any partner could anonymously challenge any director, and a profit-sharing bonus paid each March to every partner from the chief executive to the cleaner. No other firm of comparable scale in Britain had been organised on those lines before; very few have managed it since.

The Partnership today operates the John Lewis department stores and the Waitrose supermarket chain, employs over seventy thousand partners across the United Kingdom, and has paid a partnership bonus in almost every year since 1929. Its written constitution, drafted by John Spedan Lewis, has been a model for employee-ownership trusts across the English-speaking world. The Oxford Street shop, opened by the Shepton Mallet draper in 1864, remains the flagship of the firm. The Lewis name in modern British commerce carries the weight of both the cash-and-no-credit method of the founder and the trust constitution of the son.