On Tuesday, the Apple Company mentioned that the retail chief Angela Ahrendts would resign from the company in April after working for nearly 5 years on the post, this is the third exit of an employee and head of the retail department was brought in from outside the company.
The large tech company which is widely known for its long-serving of top key executives did not mention the reason for the exit. It is probably because Apple is trying to check the decline of a sale of its iPhones.
Ahrendts is one of the highest paid executives of Apple; she joined the company in 2014 before which she was working as a chief executive for fashion retailer company Burberry Group Plc.
During her term in office, the Apple stores were restructured with an emphasis of the Apple’s request; the company redesigned stores as a luxury brand and also opened locations in costly districts like walled glass store near Chicago’s Michigan Avenue during last season.
Some questionable steps were taken by Ahrendts, like taking off the formal Apple Genius Bar from the stores for technical service and rather establishing more of casual service centers. The launching of Genius Grove of indoor plants during the flagship of Apple at San Francisco location has created few complaints related to customer service.
Some remote companies selling accessories have been cut down by Ahrendts such as phone cases in the Apple stores, assigning the space to Apple retail more costly, accessories.
Apple had learned long over the outsiders to support them to run the stores since the former CEO Steve Jobs knocked Ron Johnson in 2000 to create Apple’s retail activities. After a decade later, during his time of departure they had a chain of Apple stores that were the enemy of the shopping industries, which created sales per square foot that competed with luxury jewelers.
Concisely Apple used British retail executive, John Browett to run its retail stores just before recruiting Ahrendts. During her 5 years tenure as retail chief, she managed only a decent growth over the number of locations, during the Apple’s fiscal year 2014 there were 437 stores which were expanded to 500 stores as of now, only a slight growth although she redesigned many older locations.
During Apple’s fiscal year in 2018, Ahrendts created $26.6 million which is more than the Apple CEO Tim Cook but equal to the remuneration regarding other senior executives. The tenure of Ahrendts was quite short as compared to other executives like service chief Eddy Cue, marketing chief Phil Schiller or Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams all of them have worked with Apple Incorporation for more than 20 years.
Apple announced the human resource chief Deirdre O’Brien as the senior vice president of the Apple Retail + People so as to replace Ahrendts. O’Brien has been working with the Apple for more than 30 years.
In the previous month, Apple revealed for the very first time about the decline of iPhone sales during the holiday season ever since the launch of the devices were more than a decade ago. Warnings were also issued to the investors that the sales for the quarterly year seem more likely to be lower than the Wall Street expectation.
