Anthony Brown

Anthony Brown is a Non-Executive Director. A retailer of more than 40 years, he has been in the senior management of national multi-site businesses in Britain and Australia since 2002, buying, integrating, restructuring, and selling them. He was Chief Executive of Beales, the department-store group founded in Bournemouth in 1881, from 2008 to 2013, growing it from 11 stores to 32, including the acquisition of 19 stores from the Anglia Regional Co-operative Society in 2011, and returned as Chief Executive in 2017, leading its management buy-out in 2018.

Retail Director of BHS from 2002 to 2008, he was Interim Managing Director of Peacocks and Jane Norman within the Edinburgh Woollen Mill Group in 2013, and from 2013 to 2015 Chief Operating Officer of 99p Stores, appointed to lead the operational restructuring of the family-owned chain of some 250 stores through to its £55m sale in 2015. He was Group General Manager, Brands, of Specialty Fashion Group in Sydney, the ASX-listed owner of six fashion brands including Rivers and City Chic, from 2016 to 2017; Chief Executive of New Start 2020, which traded department stores under the Beales name from 2020 to 2025; and, alongside it, from 2022 to 2025 Chief Executive of G.R. & M.M. Blackledge plc, the owner of Bodycare, the health and beauty retailer of nearly 150 stores.