Mary Portas

Widely recognised as the UK’s foremost authority on retail and brand communication, Mary Portas has wide-ranging expertise—as a business woman, an advertising executive, a retail expert, a broadcaster and a consumer champion. The British media crowned her “Queen of Shops”. Mary is also the founder of Portas Agency, a creative communications agency in London that specialises in fashion and retail. Alongside her work with Portas, Mary has embarked on a number of projects, from leading efforts to re-create British clothing manufacturing to re-imagining charity shops as profitable community hubs. Tasked with finding solutions to the long-term decline of Britain’s high streets in 2011, she offered the government twenty-eight separate recommendations, many of which are bearing fruit.