A department store group with four UK stores, including the Oxford Street flagship in London, selling fashion, beauty, food and homeware.
Selfridges is a luxury department store group. Its UK stores sell fashion, accessories, beauty, homeware, food and more from many brands. The Oxford Street flagship is the second-largest shop in the UK after Harrods, and is known for its window displays. The group runs food halls, restaurants and beauty halls, and is known for ideas such as bringing the perfume counter to the ground floor. In 2010 the Daily Telegraph named the London store the world's best department store, which is a press view rather than the company's own claim.
It was founded by American Harry Gordon Selfridge, and the Oxford Street store at 400 Oxford Street opened on 15 March 1909. He set out to make shopping a leisure activity, moving the perfume counter to the ground floor. In April 1925 John Logie Baird gave the first public demonstration of moving silhouette television images from the first floor, and a Bleriot monoplane was displayed in 1909. The store also housed a secret speech system in its basement during the Second World War. Selfridge himself relied on marketing, and accounts credit him or Marshall Field with popularising the phrase the customer is always right. The Oxford Street building was designed by Daniel Burnham. In the 1940s the provincial stores were sold to the John Lewis Partnership, and the Sears Group bought the business in 1965 before it demerged in 1998.
We did not find a mission statement on the pages we read, so we are not quoting one. What the sources show is a long tradition of theatre and showmanship, from the windows, now photographed by Andrew Meredith since 2002, to the store's own events. In 2009 it stopped selling foie gras after protests from animal welfare campaigners. The roof once hosted gardens, cafes, a mini golf course and an all-girl gun club in the 1920s and 1930s. A television series, Mr Selfridge, aired from 2013 to 2016, and the store appeared in the film Wonder Woman in 2017.
In the UK it has four stores: Oxford Street in London, two in Manchester at the Trafford Centre (1998) and Exchange Square (2002), and one in the Bullring in Birmingham (2003). The group was sold in 2022 to a joint venture, and as at 2024 Central Group holds 60 percent and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund 40 percent. Planned stores in Glasgow, Leeds and Liverpool were not built.
Roles include sales and customer service, visual merchandising and window design, buying, beauty, food hall and restaurant teams, events, marketing, and online and technology teams. We did not find an employee figure in the sources we read.
Website: www.selfridges.com
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