Ron Johnson, former Apple retail boss who left in 2011, is working to start a high-end, on-demand delivery service for gadgets and is hiring some former Apple employees to help, The Information reports. The move to found a new company follows Johnson's failed stint at JC Penney as CEO, when he was fired after not turning around the struggling retail giant.
Apple's original Senior Vice President of Retail quit his job at Apple last year for a CEO position with J.C.Penney, only to be fired rather infamously after revenues dropped sharply following his attempts to apply sprinkles of Apple magic and overhaul the retailer's shopping experience.
Johnson recently participated in View From the Top Talk at Stanford Graduate School of Business and shared a few anecdotes from his time at Apple while revealing that he "was not a good student" at Stanford.
I've embedded the video right after the break...
Former Apple SVP of Retail, Ron Johnson, lasted barely a year on the job. After the struggling department store chain reported a $13 billion annual decline in revenue, the board ingloriously booted Johnson whose greatest sin was trying to change way too many things at the same time, namely insisting on his shop-in-shop concept.
The irony of it: the boutique store approach could have easily breathed a new life into JCPenney's garage sale concept and stood a good chance of reinvigorating the firm's fugly brick-and-mortar locations.
Figuring the best thing to do at this point is wash its hands of this whole Ron Johnson adventure, JCPenney yesterday begun airing a new television commercial. Titled 'It's No Secret' it's a pathetic attempt at apologizing for chickening out of Johnson's vision for the company. The video is right past the fold...
Apple's former SVP of Retail Ron Johnson just got booted as the CEO of JC Penney over dismal earnings and for failing to sprinkle a little bit of Apple's magic dust to fix the retailer's depressing mid-range brick-and-mortar department store biz.
And in a fitting twist of fate, it just so happens that Apple, where Johnson spent a decade refining the retail experience which is epitomized in the Genius Bar concept, has been struggling to find a suitable replacement to Johnson for nearly two years now.
We're asking you to take a moment, asses the situation and make an educated guess as to whether Tim Cook should make an offer to Johnson or just ignore him in order not to send the wrong kind of message, that people can leave Apple on a whim resting assured the company would always take them back...
Ron Johnson, 54, Apple's former SVP of Retail and the guy largely attributed with turning the beleaguered computer maker into America's greatest retailer at the turn of the century, nearly two years ago left Cupertino to take the job as president of the mid-range department store chain J.C. Penney.
He was supposed to apply some of Apple's secret magic sauce to JC Penney's outdated retail stores. But alas, the company instead has continued to struggle under his leadership and has experienced its worst sales year in more than two decades. Johnson’s Apple experience obviously didn’t translate well to Penney’s customer base of bargain hunters. Hopefully, Tim Cook still has Johnson on speed dial...
Apple launched its first retail store(s) on May 19, 2001. It was the fruition of Steve Jobs' vision to improve Mac sales by giving consumers a top-notch shopping experience. Several analysts, of course, predicted the failure of the chain.
But as we all know, Jobs proved everyone wrong. Apple Stores have since exploded, and there are now close to 400 of them around the world, making more money per square foot than high-end jewelry stores. And here's how they did it...
Ron Johnson just can't escape his past as Apple's widely successful head of retail. He left Apple last November to join the struggling retailer J.C. Penney and apply some Apple magic to its mid-range department stores. Johnson was interviewed by Fortune's Jennifer Reingold and of course the inevitable questions of his work at Apple popped up, among the many other topics of conversations. Here's what came out of him...