Try on your John Lewis shoes at Waitrose

SHOPPERS buying John Lewis clothes and shoes online will be able to try them on at their local Waitrose, the companies’ boss said yesterday.

The John Lewis Partnership, which owns both chains, will install changing rooms in supermarkets to allow flexible shopping.

It is hoped the plan will make it easier for customers to shop locally and avoid travelling a long way to its department stores.

The firm has rolled out a widespread ‘click and collect’ scheme, which allows customers who order online to pick up their John Lewis shopping from Waitrose.

If customers do not want to keep the items they try on, they can return them for a refund there and then. The idea is just one of a string of radical plans to revive the company’s fortunes after eight John Lewis stores were closed and 1,300 staff made redundant during lockdown. Bosses are downgrading women’s fashion to focus on John Lewis’s home department, financial services, and shopping technologies such as virtual reality home styling.

The chain will convert empty stores into ‘affordable’ private homes, and expand into horticulture, which has boomed as people spend more time in their gardens during lockdown. It is also trialling furniture rental, and is considering a scheme where customers can claim £3 gift vouchers for each item of clothing they return to stores to be recycled or donated to charity. Yesterday the firm’s chairman Dame Sharon White, who took over in February, told The Times CEO Summit that the firm is ‘massively expanding click and collect’ and that although department stores remain a ‘one-stop-shop for everything’, many shoppers are looking for places to shop closer to home.

‘We are setting up fitting rooms in a Waitrose store,’ she said. ‘You can try on your shoes so it just becomes a little bit easier and flexible.’