“I'LL MAKE BOOTS FAMOUS AROUND THE GLOBE”
"Je rendrai Boots célèbre à travers le monde"
L’histoire de Boots commence à Nottingham en 1849 lorsque John Boot, herboriste et chimiste autodidacte, ouvre sa première échoppe. Ce qui n’est au départ qu’une petite pharmacie va bientôt s’étendre et se diversifier dans l’ensemble du Royaume-Uni. Aujourd’hui, cette chaine, connue de tous les Britanniques, est dirigée par Stefano Pessina et il a de grands projets pour son enseigne.
Supposing Boots the Chemist could bottle and patent the secret elixir that keeps its billionaire boss Stefano Pessina in the pink, then it would be mobbed with customers wanting some of what he’s having. When I meet the 75-year-old Italian in a modest modern office tucked down an alley behind the Boots store in London’s Oxford Street, he has struck two major corporate deals in as many days and is thriving on it.
2. So, does a deal a day keep the doctor away? He laughs. Pessina says he doesn’t use any of his company’s anti-ageing creams, such as Protect & Perfect serum for men. ‘Maybe I need it.’ He doesn’t. He’s wrinkle-free. One reason for his unfurrowed brow, he claims, is that he never feels stressed. That’s despite being at the helm of Walgreens Boots Alliance, the multi-billion-pound global pharmacy empire he built with his long-term partner, Ornella Barra, at his side. ‘I am always calm,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what stress is.’
3. He met Barra, 63, now a senior executive at the company herself, back in the 1980s. Love blossomed over the spreadsheets when he took over her chain of pharmacies. They live in Monaco, though he is still married to his first wife Barbara, with whom he has two grown-up children.
RUNNING BOOTS
4. Pessina controls more than 13,000 stores in the UK, the US and continental Europe. He took over Boots in 2006 and then pulled off a pounds sterling 16bn merger with Walgreens in 2014. He’s now chief executive and the single biggest shareholder, with a 13.3pc stake. In the past few days he and Barra have signed a global partner-