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Selfridges Retail Limited (Trade name Selfridges and occasionally Selfridges & Co.) is a British department store chain. It was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1909. The historic Daniel Burnham-designed Selfridges flagship store at 400 Oxford Street in London opened on 15 March 1909 and is the second-largest shop in the UK (after Harrods). Other Selfridges stores opened in the Manchester area at the Trafford Centre (1998) and at Exchange Square (2002), and in Birmingham at the Bullring (2003).
During the 1940s, smaller provincial Selfridges stores were sold to the John Lewis Partnership, and in 1951, the original Oxford Street store was acquired by the Liverpool-based Lewis's chain of department stores. Lewis's and Selfridges were then taken over in 1965 by the Sears plc, owned by Charles Clore.subscription required Expanded under the Sears Group to include branches in Manchester and Birmingham, the chain was acquired in 2003 by Canada's Galen Weston for £598 million. In December 2021, the Weston family agreed to sell the majority of Selfridges Group for around £4 billion to a joint venture between Thai conglomerate Central Group and Austria's Signa Holding.White, Georgia (24 December 2021) Selfridges confirms sale to Central Group and Signa Holding, Retail Gazette. Retrieved: 29 December 2021. The acquisition was completed on 23 August 2022. However, after Signa faced financial difficulties and declared bankruptcy, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) acquired Signa's shares in Selfridges, becoming a co-owner alongside the Central Group.
Either Selfridge or Marshall Field is popularly held to have coined the phrase "the customer is always right".
In 1909, after the first cross-English Channel flight, Louis Blériot's monoplane, the Blériot XI, was put on display at Selfridges, where it was seen by 150,000 people over a four day period. John Logie Baird made the first public demonstration of moving silhouette images by television from the first floor of Selfridges from 1 to 27 April 1925.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the roof of the store hosted terraced gardens, cafes, a mini golf course and an all-girl gun club. The roof, with its extensive views across London, was a common place for strolling after a shopping trip and was often used for fashion shows.
During the Second World War, the store's basement was used as an air-raid shelter and during raids employees were usually on the lookout for incendiary bombs and took watch in turns. A Milne-Shaw seismograph was set up on the Oxford Street store's third floor in 1932, attached to one of the building's main stanchions, where it remained unaffected by traffic or shoppers. It successfully recorded the Belgian earthquake of 11 June 1938, which was also felt in London. In 1947, it was given to the Science Museum.
The huge SIGSALY scrambling apparatus, by which transatlantic conferences between American and British officials (most notably Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt) were secured against eavesdropping, was housed in the basement from 1943 on, with extension to the Cabinet War Rooms about a mile away.
In 1926, Selfridges set up the Selfridge Provincial Stores company, which had expanded over the years to include sixteen provincial stores, but these were sold to the John Lewis Partnership in 1940. The Liverpool-based Lewis's chain of department stores acquired the remaining Oxford Street Shop in 1951, expanding the brand by adding Moultons of Ilford, purchased from rival chain R H O Hills and renaming the store Selfridges. In 1965 the business was purchased by the Sears plc, owned by Charles Clore. Under the Sears group, branches in Ilford and Oxford opened, with the latter remaining Selfridges until 1986, when Sears rebranded it as a Lewis's store. In 1990, Sears Group split Selfridges from Lewis's and placed Lewis's in administration a year later. In March 1998, Selfridges introduced new branding in tandem with the opening of the Manchester Trafford Centre store and Selfridges' demerger from Sears.
In September 1998, Selfridges expanded and opened its first department store outside London. A anchor store at the newly opened Trafford Centre in Greater Manchester. Following its success, Selfridges announced they would open an additional store in Greater Manchester. A store in Exchange Square, Manchester city centre opened in 2002 as Manchester city centre started to return to normal following the 1996 Manchester bombing.
A store soon followed in 2003 at Birmingham's Bull Ring.
Plans for expansion and additional stores continued soon after. Desired locations included Leeds, Liverpool, Dublin and Glasgow. The company purchased a site in Glasgow in 2002 and announced a new 200,000 sq ft Scottish flagship store was due to open in 2007. The following year all expansion plans were put on hold as the company began negotiations to sell the business. The Glasgow site was eventually sold off in 2013 and no plans to open any future stores has been announced - as of 2023.
In 2003, the chain was acquired by Canada's Galen Weston for £598 million and some of his other investments, which included Brown Thomas and Arnotts in Ireland, Holt Renfrew in Canada and de Bijenkorf in the Netherlands, became part of Selfridges Group. Weston, a retailing expert who is the owner of Loblaw Companies in Canada, chose to invest in the renovation of the Oxford Street store—rather than to create new stores in British cities other than Manchester and Birmingham.
In October 2009, Selfridges revived its rooftop entertainment with the pop up "The Restaurant on the Roof" restaurant. In July 2011, Truvia created an emerald green boating lake (with a waterfall, a boat-up cocktail bar and a forest of Stevia plants). In 2012 the Big Rooftop Tea and Golf Party featured "the highest afternoon tea on Oxford Street" and a nine-hole golf course with "the seven wonders of London" realised in cake as obstacles.
In August 2020, during a difficult time for UK retail, Selfridges offered luxury pieces for hire to millennial and socially conscious clients. The store partnered with HURR, an online fashion rental platform, offering hire of 100 items from over 40 fashion brands for up to 20 days at a time.
The Weston family put the Selfridges business up for auction in July 2021, with an estimated value of £4 billion. The sale includes all stores including the flagship Oxford Street store and worldwide outlets. In early December 2021, the family was reported to be finalising the chain's sale to Central Group.
On 24 December 2021, it was announced that the majority of Selfridges Group had been sold to a joint venture between Thai conglomerate Central Group and the Austrian Signa Holding for around £4 billion.
In 2024, Thailand's Central Group partnered with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) to co-own the Selfridges Group. After Signa's bankruptcy, PIF acquired its shares, leaving Central Group with a 60% stake and PIF with 40%.
The London store was built in phases. The first phase consisted of only the nine-and-a-half bays closest to the Duke Street corner, and is an example of one of the earliest uses of steel cage frame construction for this type of building in London. This circumstance, according to the report of a contemporary London correspondent from the Chicago Tribune, was largely responsible for making possible the eventual widespread use of Chicago’s steel frame cage construction system in the United Kingdom:
Also involved in the design of the store were American architect Francis Swales, who worked on decorative details, and British architects R. Frank Atkinson and Thomas Smith Tait. The distinctive polychrome sculpture above the Oxford Street entrance is the work of British sculptor Gilbert Bayes.
The Daily Telegraph named Selfridges in London the world's best department store in 2010.
The Birmingham store, designed by architects Future Systems, is covered in 15,000 spun aluminium discs on a background of Yves Klein Blue. Since it opened in 2003, the Birmingham store has been named every year by industry magazine Retail Week as one of the 100 stores to visit in the world.
Since 2002, the windows have been photographed by London photographer Andrew Meredith and published in magazines such as Vogue, Dwell, Icon, Frame, Creative Review, Hungarian Stylus Magazine, Design Week, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times, WGSN as well as many worldwide media outlets, including the world wide press, journals, blogs and published books.
Harry Selfridge developed close relationships with the media to ensure that his store and its opening were properly publicized. The opening week ad campaign relied mainly on unpaid promotions in the form of news articles in newspapers, magazines, and journals. As time progressed, Selfridge took the more traditional form of marketing by writing daily columns under the pen name Callisthenes. Overall, however, one of the most effective marketing tools proved to be the opening week cartoons focusing on the grand event. Selfridge enlisted the help of thirty-eight of London’s top illustrators to draw hundreds of full page, half page, and quarter page advertisements for eighteen newspapers.
The marketing continued on opening day itself. Touted as “London’s Greatest Store,” Selfridges immediately became a cultural and social phenomenon. From the store's soft lighting to the general absence of price tags to live music from string quartets, every detail of the opening was purposeful to draw people into the entire shopping experience and make each shopper feel unique. At Selfridges, shoppers entered another world in which they became "guests," as the store referred to them, and could purchase unique items that differed from the material goods sold in other stores.
Selfridges was also featured in the 2017 movie Wonder Woman as the shop where Steve Trevor takes Diana Prince to give her a more contemporary appearance to blend in.
The brand has worked with artists like Jaden Smith and others throughout its history.
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