At RetailX’s Autumn Festival 2025, we heard from Debenhams’ CEO, Dan Finley, on how the iconic British department store brand is reimagining itself, shaking off its ‘digital dinosaur’ past and transforming into an online multi-brand shopping destination.

In addition to tech roadmap innovation, bringing back popular designer collaborations and accelerating its global expansion, Finley outlined how discoverability is playing an increasingly key role in consumer engagement as shoppers’ buying journeys evolve.

Joined on stage by Pinterest’s UK MD, Beth Horn, they discussed how retailers can tap into off-site discovery, showing up more organically, less intrusively and in a more compelling, multi-dimensional way in customers’ search and consideration phases.

From ‘digital dinosaur’ to online destination

As one of the UK’s oldest retailers, having first opened in London in 1778, Debenhams has a long history of customer connections and over 200years of heritage on the High Street. However, disrupted by the rise of multichannel and online, Finley described how the retailer had “quickly become a digital dinosaur.”

Having brought the business out of administration with a vision to “reignite Debenhams” as a digital department store, the business has seen rapid transformation over the last three and a half years, and is now a marketplace-led business with an ecosystem of 15,000+ brands and partners.

The cachet of the Debenhams brand sits at the heart of this reinvention. “It’s a brand people love, trust and that everyone in the country knows, recognises and has a story to tell about,” Finley said, recalling how he bought his first shirt and tie for a uni interview from a Debenhams store in Preston.

“We’re the custodians of the Debenhams brand and its rich history and heritage,” he added, but now its focus is on reinventing itself for the future; “we’re catching up quick, and [we] want to be one of the world’s leading digital department stores.”

Horn, who started her career at Macy’s, which holds a similar legacy to Debenhams and a place in the hearts of U.S. consumers, agreed that emotional ties help heritage brands continue to connect with shoppers, who increasingly want “more joy” over purely transactional buying experiences.

“If I look at online retail in the last 20 years, we’ve solved for convenience, speed and utility. But we haven’t solved for the joy of shopping,” she said.

Dialling-up discovery: Making Debenhams retail’s Spotify

And, for Horn, delivering some of that joy lies in shoppers’ discovery experiences.

“One of the things that we’ve seen at Pinterest – and what really sets that experience apart – is we have tuned the platform to focus on delivering time well spent, not just time spent,” she said.

Rather than encouraging doom scrolling, it wants to keep the experience positive. And, instead of solely focusing on keeping users – or as she calls them, Pinners – on the platform, Pinterest wants to power discovery which “gets people off their screens and out into the world, having real-world experiences,” Horn added.

“I talk regularly about wanting Debenhams to be to retail what Spotify is to music; a destination you go to with absolute certainty that across fashion, home and beauty, we will have something you want to buy. But we’ve got to do that in a curated, personalised, inspirational and joyous way.”

Dan Finley, CEO, Debenhams

Finley said that in its efforts to make Debenhams the Spotify of retail, there’s an opportunity to “bring back some of the romanticism of in-store shopping” into digital through discovery. And, recognising that a lot of initial discovery and intent creation happens outside of a retailer’s owned channels, platforms or ecosystems, this lies in off-site discovery.

Discovery & intent is formed off-site

“So much inspiration and intent to buy develops off-site, away from your ecommerce platform,” he acknowledged.

“We want to be at the forefront of consumers’ minds when they’re searching and discovering products. Showing up much higher up in the funnel – in an unintrusive and complementary way – helps consumers feel you’re enhancing discoverability and supporting their buying journey. And that’s where Pinterest, in particular, has been an important part of what we’re doing.”

As a visual-first search platform, Pinners tend to come to Pinterest with a clear mission but an open mind, Horn explained. “People show up intending to discover something and with commercial intent, but before their decisions are made about exactly what they’ll purchase.”

Debenhams is also leveraging data and signals from Pinterest’s audiences to understand emerging trends faster, which in turn informs buying, selling, promotions and engagement. “We see this as a real opportunity to show up – and to show up at our best – [as well as] a great opportunity to test different content,” Finley added.