The Team – Aldrich Group Ltd

Meet the team.

In Mark’s earlier career, he worked for Sir Richard Branson for 7 years, running Virgin Money, where he learnt to really focus upon the consumer and developed his digital skills. Virgin Money became the fastest growing privately owned company in the UK. Since then, he has led the growth & transformation of a broad range of consumer focused, multi-site and multichannel businesses – spanning the music industry, retail chains, garden centres, care homes and restaurants.

He has also taken on responsibilities in several social enterprises. Firstly Oomph!, which focuses on the wellbeing of the elderly, whereas a NED he is helping to raise investment & strategically expand their breadth of services. Secondly, through government, where he was asked to lead the body responsible for tackling the housing crisis – where he restructured the agency, established the strategy and secured funding from the Treasury to deliver an accelerated pace of homebuilding in the UK.

He is now leading the national charity Scope, which is focused upon delivering equality for disabled people in their everyday lives. Mark is keen to ensure he both now supports social enterprises in delivering change whilst continuing to help entrepreneurial commercial organisations to grow.

After acquiring the Robert Goddard business as a going concern with two stores in 2008, Oliver has been at the helm ever since and is now CEO of Aldrich Group, which was formed to structure the growing divisions of our retail business. Oliver has assembled an exceptionally talented and experienced team, all experts in their distinct business areas, to ensure that strong leadership continues to drive the expansion of the group at a record pace.

With a strong commercial head, Oliver is always strategically pointing the business in the right direction, making certain that the company remains an unrivaled fashion retail operator. He proudly maintains the “family feel” culture he worked so hard to build during the start-up phase of his ownership, whilst ensuring that there is a balance between corporate management and the advantages of a small and agile business.

He has worked tirelessly to make Aldrich Group an employer of choice, with market-leading employment packages and development prospects, always being the first to admit that his team are almost exclusively responsible for the success of the company.

David spent his early career in retail and other customer facing management roles in well known organisations including ExxonMobil, Vue Cinemas and WHSmith. He spent a period of time alongside this work to retrain and qualify as a Chartered Certified Accountant in order to move into a career in finance leadership.

After qualifying he worked in various finance roles before he joined Robert Goddard in 2017 to establish the finance function and bring all previously subcontracted finance work in-house, whilst playing a key role in developing the entire strategy of the group alongside Oliver and Mel.

David is proud of the systems established and training embedded to bring timely information to all levels from board to shop floor, and ensure people have the knowledge to put it to use to run their area of the business. Alongside this he’s introduced industry leading incentive and reward packages to drive the right behaviours and achieve growth and profit across the group.

Mel started working as a weekend part timer on the shop floor in 2007 for another clothing retailer whom Robert Goddard acquired in 2015 and after working to establish herself as an in-store leader, Mel moved to the newly formed AG Super to manage the start-up and growth of our first franchise operation.

Mel now works for the group overseeing all operations for all stores and brands and will take responsibility for working with new brands as we increase our franchise portfolio.

Mel is proud to combine first-class people and operational leadership skills to train and grow an ever-expanding team of key people running all of the day to day operations and using her wealth of experience of all levels of retail to inform strategy as a board member. She’s the ultimate advocate for us and our brands.

Kirsty previously worked for the UK’s largest Baby Goods retailer for 14 years, working her way up from the shop floor assistant, to Manager, to Buyer and then to Merchandise Planner.

She joined Aldrich Group in 2018 to develop the Merchandising function. She has since built a team of passionate people and implemented key processes around goods receipting, replenishment and sell-through analysis, ensuring always that the right product is in the right place at the right time, to keeping customers happy. Kirsty also regularly executes strategic promotional campaigns, designed to achieve results by balancing margin and age of stock.

Kirsty is really passionate about making the best use of data to ensure the business is performing optimally and has played a key role in developing reports used by the whole organisation, along with systems upgrades across the various group companies.

At a young age, Faye started her Visual Merchandising journey at the Fashion Retail Academy in London where she studied VM. After completing her two-year diploma, Faye secured a position at BHS and H&M as a Visual Merchandiser.

Faye started work in AG Super franchise as their area VM in 2019. After establishing herself within this role she progressed and was promoted to Head of VM for Aldrich Group.

Faye oversees all VM across the brands with a growing team behind her. With the expansion of brands, Faye has a key involvement in the opening of all new stores.

Mark Hodgkinson

Oliver Tookman

David Hallwood

Mel Rex

Kirsty Grief

Faye Jelliman