Boohoo boss orders return to office, saying staff shouldn’t be ‘sat in bed wearing grey tracksuit bottoms’
Boohoo boss Dan Finley has called for an end to working from home for employees who insist they should not “sit in bed in gray tracksuit bottoms” while working.
The CEO of the Manchester-based major retail brand has been leading the restructuring of the company since 2024 and said: Times believes that remote working can negatively impact the business.
All 1,500 head office staff are expected to be in the office five days a week, Mr Finley said, adding that the city should be “celebrated” and staff should “live and breathe” it.
She believes working from the office is especially important for a fashion company, as the job requires wearing the products sold, testing them and observing trends.
The businessman, who left JD Sports to head Boohoo Group, which includes brands such as Pretty Little Thing and Debenhams, says younger employees benefit from being physically present in the office.
They can use this experience to learn from colleagues, collaborate and build relationships that are difficult to do from home, he said.
“My job is to turn this business around, get this business back to growth, get the share price up and deliver value to all shareholders,” he said.
Founded in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and Carol Kane, the company experienced a boom in growth during the pandemic period, when online sales increased exponentially.
During the quarantine, many people switched to remote working, and hybrid working has become a common option for many office workers.
A survey by the British Chambers of Commerce last year found that almost half of all businesses in the UK want staff to return to the office full-time in line with pre-pandemic arrangements.
“We are seeing a clear shift towards more firms requiring full onsite working, but it is certainly not a uniform picture,” BCC policy director Jane Gratton said at the time.
Average office attendance in the UK has been over 40 per cent every week this year, according to the ReTurn report published by Remit Consulting in May this year.
However, a significant segment of the population that enjoys the flexibility of working from home is resistant to a full return to working from the office. A review of 1,930 articles about working at home in 2024 found that it can have huge health benefits but can also lead to antisocial hours and being overlooked for promotion.
The research, conducted by the National Health and Care Research Institute Emergency Preparedness and Response Health Protection Research Unit in partnership with the UK Health Security Agency, King’s College London and the University of East Anglia, found that workers ate healthier, felt less stressed and had lower blood pressure when they were able to work remotely.
