News May 2, 2025 0 Comments

CEO Ashley Buchanan Fired From Kohl’s After Joining For A Couple Of Months

It’s surprising to see any CEO get sacked. This is made more interesting by the fact that Ashley Buchanan just joined Kohl’s a couple of months ago. Just a couple of months into his tenure here. We’re seeing a lot of detail from this board investigation talking about how he pushed the company to do business with this vendor that he had a personal relationship with.

We don’t yet know this nature of the personal relationship, but that he directed multi-million dollars of business to the vendor. It’s a really tough time. for Kohl’s to go through this. The stock has already been down 50 percent this year. What are the challenges the company is navigating as it looks for a new permanent replacement.

I mean the company replaced its CEO because they weren’t doing very well. And then as soon as the Ashley Buchanan took over they decided to cut 10 percent of their corporate staff. Sales are already low. You’re trying to do a turnaround right as the economy is starting to crater.

Consumer demand is going down and macroeconomic environment is clearly terrible. So it is not good news for this company. But the stock of course went up because I think it shows the board seeing something, saying something, doing something about it. It moved quickly.

It's surprising to see any CEO get sacked.

It moved quickly. And Katie points out, 12 straight quarters of revenue declines. Clearly, they had to bring in somebody. They thought this guy was the superstar, obviously, because they paid him $20 million for this year. He’s going to lose some of that money. Yeah, I mean, I haven’t quite looked at if they’ve disclosed yet how much he’s going to lose or if they’ve come out with that yet.

I mean, that’s a… Might be the shortest tenure of anyone ever. I’m going to have to check. He’s the Liz Trust of retail CEOs. Yeah. So, I mean, as we keep talking about, you just think about the retail landscape overall right now. Kohl’s, it seems like, has some pretty idiosyncratic issues, to put it mildly. But give us a lay of the land.

When you think about the overall landscape, obviously, I have to imagine every C-suite right now is trying to figure out tariffs. Yeah, I mean, we’ve had a really early read into earnings so far this season. Every single company has talked about the macroeconomic environment some saying a bigger impact some saying a lesser impact.

But you’re seeing McDonald’s today we saw JetBlue we’re seeing GM all these companies saying the consumer backdrop is bad people are starting to spend less prices are going up this is going to get even worse and what we’re going to have some more data on jobs coming up to see how that’s going to translate so it’s not a great time for you to be losing your CEO.

I will say they put their immediately named their interim board member Michael Bender to step in. He is a long track record of retail history. He has had a number of jobs in retail and so you know maybe maybe maybe they’ll pull it out. Let’s see.