John Lewis is making a YouTube talk show. Gift List will run six episodes before Christmas, with guests discussing the best and worst presents they have given or received, clips cut for other platforms, and more episodes if the response is good. The audience the British retailer is chasing is not only human. Outgoing managing director Peter Ruis says the share of John Lewis customers who search for products through large language models such as ChatGPT has gone from 0.3% a year ago to 2.5% now, and those models tend to favour third-party advice and fresh material when they assemble an answer. The show is built to be the kind of source they quote.
There is a template inside the group. John Lewis expects to repeat the success of Dish, the podcast produced by its sister chain Waitrose, which is the cheapest possible proof that a retailer can make something people listen to without it reading as an advert.
The mechanism behind the decision is straightforward. Shoppers increasingly ask ChatGPT and Gemini to find products and recommend them, and the same shoppers are influenced by what they see on Instagram and TikTok. Because the models reach for outside commentary and recent publications, retailers are having to rebuild their promotional calendars around material that looks like editorial rather than marketing.
Reacting quickly to trends with short social video has become as significant for the chain as the festive television campaign and the "never knowingly undersold" pledge. Those clips can feature influencers or experts, and the trigger for one can be almost anything in the culture: the opening of the Bayeux Tapestry exhibition at the British Museum, which could lift interest in cross-stitch, or a Harry Potter series arriving before Christmas.
The trading backdrop is less comfortable than the media plan suggests. Ruis pointed to strong recent sales and said refreshed cafés, sports departments, social media promotion and a recent "explosion of toy sales" leave him optimistic about the run-up to Christmas. Over the summer the chain recorded its best ever sales of garden furniture, fans and air conditioners, though he said it is unclear whether the summer "Burnham effect" will hold, and that with inflation rising people will not spend without limits. Fuel costs, he added, are pressing noticeably on household budgets. Details of the first-half results are published next week; he described the summer as a period of winners and losers but with "decent momentum", because customers still had money to spend.
He also expects the chancellor's Budget announcements next month to land in a critical period for retail, and would like to see additional support for business on commercial property rates.
The number under all of this deserves more scrutiny than it is getting. At 2.5%, roughly one customer in forty is finding products through a language model. That is a rounding error in this year's trading and an eightfold increase in twelve months, and which of those two facts you weight determines whether Gift List is foresight or an expensive hedge. What is notably absent is any measure of the other end: Ruis gives a share of customers who search that way, not a share of sales that came from it, and nobody has said what a successful episode of Gift List would look like in numbers. There is a second problem the announcement does not address. The models are said to prefer third-party authors precisely because those authors are not the seller — and a show commissioned, produced and branded by John Lewis is not a third party. The strategy assumes a model cannot tell the difference, or will not be trained to.
Ruis himself is leaving within days, after nearly three years as managing director. He announced the exit unexpectedly last month, citing a wish to move on to new projects, and has not disclosed what those are; he says there is no disagreement over strategy between him and the relatively new chairman Jason Tarry. His reasoning was that there is never a right moment to go, but that it is better to leave a "winning team" at its peak, with new plans already set for next year, than to wait for a bad patch.
His parting argument is that John Lewis should not be read as a traditional department store dependent on clothing and beauty, the way Harvey Nichols is — a company bought out of administration last month by Mike Ashley's Frasers Group. John Lewis, he noted, sells a third of all prams in the UK, along with garden furniture and current technology products, categories Harvey Nichols does not touch.
So the executive whose reading of the shift justifies the spend will be gone before the first episode goes out, and his successor inherits a small media operation pointed at a distribution channel that cannot yet be measured, aimed at models that may learn to discount exactly this kind of content.