Product range. A motley range of all product categories imaginable from products for home and garden to beauty products to apparel, footwear, and accessories to toys to electricals. John Lewis boasts a brand array of over 2,500 labels. Together they make up quite an eclectic mix in terms of style. Mass market labels that target middle-aged customers (Oasis and the like) dominate the apparel department. That said, John Lewis have no shortage of more sophisticated items by All Saints and Whistles, for example. The furniture offered by John Lewis is mostly minimalist in form and appearance. The range of home furnishings and accessories is all-embracing and covers everything from exemplary bad taste items to affordable yet original ones.
Originality. John Lewis is one of those catholic department store chains that try to be a one-stop destination for just about everything. As a rule, John Lewis stores are located in ginormous multi-storey buildings with beauty and homeware departments on the ground floor, while apparel and footwear occupy the rest of the space above. The stores also combine a variety of merchandise in one open space. John Lewis also operates a full-fledged online store.
Chic. From its very beginning, John Lewis fostered growing customer base and sales, at the cost of somewhat neglecting on-trend designer fashion. This is however that very case when Hegelian notion that quantity transforms into quality does hold true, so there's always a good chance for you to stumble into something worthwhile.
Pricing. John Lewis offers £2,000 double wardrobes, £30 fancy lotus flower ceiling lights, £160 cashmere turtleneck jumpers, and so on: something for every budget with the most of the ranges on the lower side, especially during clearance sales season. To sum up, if you can't afford shopping at Selfridges, John Lewis would be a perfect substitute for you.
Corporate history highlights. John Lewis opened his first, then drapery, shop in on Oxford street, London, in 1864. In 1914, John Spedan Lewis, his elder son, introduced a novel profit distribution system and in 1928 founded John Lewis Partnership, an employee-owned enterprise that continues to this day as the third largest UK private company. John Lewis Partnership is completely owned and managed by its workers with no outside owners. The cooperative enterprise of this kind keeps the employees motivated to generate more profit and nurture the responsibility of the trust that make decisions on behalf of all employees. Perhaps, this is the most salient corporate feature of John Lewis.
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