“Online Stores” dropped from Angela Ahrendts’s title, but she is still Apple’s retail boss

Angela_Ahrendts_2

Apple’s boss of online and physical retail stores, Angela Ahrendts, no longer has “Online Stores” in her official title. Instead, Apple is now referring to her role simply as “Senior Vice President, Retail” to better reflect its efforts to simply retail branding. Her reworded title along with a tweaked job description is live at the Apple Leadership webpage.

The change occurred over this past weekend. This is a purely cosmetic change: her responsibilities have not shifted and she is still in charge of all things retail at Apple.

Here’s Anhrendts’s bio page on Apple’s website before the change.

angela ahrendts

You can clearly see that her official title used to be “Senior Vice President, Retail and Online Stores”.

And this is what her updated bio page now looks like.

Angela Ahrendts SVP Retail new bio page

The “Online Stores” is nowhere to be seen in her title, she’s now simply “Senior Vice President, Retail”. Her job description has been tweaked slightly as well to reflect the official title change.

From the description, we can conclude that her responsibilities have not changed the tiniest bit. She continues to be responsible for “strategy, real estate and developed and operations” of Apple’s brick-and-mortar/online stores and contact centers.

Interestingly, the previous description made no mention of her being responsible for retail strategy.

The following paragraph relevant to her duties has been added to her refreshed bio page:

Since joining Apple in 2014, Angela has integrated Apple’s physical and digital retail business to create a seamless customer experience for over a billion visitors per year with the goal of educating, inspiring, entertaining and enriching communities.

The development is likely part of an internal company streamlining that began in August when Apple stopped using the “Store” titling” for retail locations. Apple Stores are now referred to as, say, “Apple Regent Street” instead of the previous ”Apple Store, Regent Street” nomenclature.

While visible on Apple’s website and marketing materials, the renamed store names are yet to show up in the company’s official Apple Store shopping application for the iPhone and iPad.

Source: Apple