Solomon Lew: the rag trader who fought Coles Myer to a standstill

Walk down Chapel Street in Prahran on a Saturday and you'll pass at least three brands that answer, ultimately, to a man who started out cutting deals in the Flinders Lane rag trade in the 1960s. Solomon Lew has never been the most visible figure in Australian retail. He's arguably the most enduring one. Sixty-odd years after he started, he still turns up to Premier Investments annual meetings and still, by all accounts, enjoys sparring with fund managers half his age.

I've spent a fair chunk of my career writing about Australian retail dynasties, and Lew is the one who never quite fits the obituary format, because he refuses to have his story finished. Gerry Harvey built an empire out of showroom floors and property; Lew built his out of contracts, stakes, and an apparently bottomless appetite for a boardroom fight. If you want a companion piece on the showman version of Australian retail, I wrote about Gerry Harvey and how he turned retail into a property empire. Lew is the other model: less furniture warehouse, more chessboard.

From Flinders Lane to a public company

Lew's family had form in textiles before he ever picked up a boardroom paper. He came up through Melbourne's garment manufacturing scene in the 1960s and 1970s, a trade built on tight margins, cash flow discipline and knowing your fabric suppliers personally. It's not a glamorous training ground, but it produces operators who understand stock turn and shelf space in a way that finance graduates rarely do.

By the early 1980s Lew had assembled interests that would eventually coalesce into what became the Coles Myer group's orbit, and separately, the vehicle that would carry his own fortune: Premier Investments. Premier's origins lie in clothing and textile manufacturing and wholesale, but Lew's real skill turned out to be something else entirely — buying stakes in listed retailers, agitating for change, and either winning control or extracting a handsome exit. It's a strategy some called shareholder activism decades before the term was fashionable in Australia, and others, less charitably, called something closer to corporate raiding. Both descriptions have some truth in them, and neither is the whole story.

The Coles Myer years

No account of Lew is complete without Coles Myer, and no account of Coles Myer is complete without Lew. He became a major shareholder and, from 1985, a director of the group, eventually rising to chairman in the early 1990s. For a period he was arguably the single most influential figure in Australian retail, sitting atop a conglomerate that spanned supermarkets, department stores and discount variety chains under one roof.

It did not end tidily. Lew's chairmanship became increasingly contested through the 1990s as tensions grew between him and other board members and major shareholders over strategy, governance and, according to contemporaneous reporting, the appropriateness of certain related-party dealings involving Premier and Coles Myer entities. These matters were the subject of extensive board and regulatory scrutiny at the time, including inquiries by corporate regulators into transactions between Coles Myer and companies associated with Lew. It should be said plainly: these were investigations and allegations aired at the time, not criminal convictions, and Lew has consistently maintained his conduct was proper. The upshot, regardless of how you read the underlying disputes, was that Lew was voted off the Coles Myer board in 2002 after a protracted and very public falling-out with fellow directors and major institutional shareholders.

It was, by any measure, a brutal way to exit a company he'd helped shape for the better part of two decades. I remember the coverage at the time treating it as something close to a Greek drama — the founder-adjacent figure cast out by the professional managers and the index funds who'd come to see him as yesterday's model of governance. Whether that verdict was fair depends rather a lot on who you ask, and I'd say the truth sits somewhere between "visionary merchant ousted by bean-counters" and "overdue governance correction." Neither camp tells the whole story, and I'm generally sceptical of anyone who claims it does.

Building Premier into something that outlasted the fight

What's often missed in the Coles Myer retelling is that Lew didn't need the board seat to keep winning. While the Coles Myer saga played out, Premier Investments was quietly becoming one of the more effective specialty retail operators in the country. Premier's stable has, over the years, included stakes in and control of brands like Just Jeans, Jay Jays, Portmans, Dotti, Jacqui E and, notably, Peter Alexander and Smiggle — the latter two becoming genuine growth engines well beyond their original footprint, with Smiggle in particular expanding into markets in the United Kingdom and parts of Asia. Premier also holds a long-standing and substantial stake in Breville Group, the kitchen appliance maker, which has been one of the more consistently profitable parts of Lew's broader portfolio and a useful illustration that his interests were never confined to apparel.

The pattern across all of it is consistent: buy well, run tight, and don't be sentimental about underperforming assets. Premier under Lew's chairmanship has had a reputation, well documented in analyst notes and annual report commentary over the years, for squeezing costs harder than most listed retailers, for negotiating landlord rents with more resolve than most tenants manage, and for sitting on large cash reserves rather than chasing every acquisition going. That conservatism has occasionally frustrated growth-hungry commentators, but it's also meant Premier weathered retail downturns — including the 2020 pandemic disruption to bricks-and-mortar trading — in considerably better shape than plenty of its peers.

The demerger and what comes next

In more recent years Premier has moved to separate its apparel brands (Just Jeans, Jay Jays, Portmans, Dotti, Jacqui E) from its higher-growth Peter Alexander and Smiggle businesses, a restructuring flagged well ahead of execution and consistent with Lew's long pattern of reshaping the corporate structure around whichever assets are actually performing. It's the sort of unsentimental portfolio management that has defined his approach since the Flinders Lane days — hold what earns, cut what doesn't, and don't get too attached to the shopfront.

Lew, well into his own eighties, remains chairman and the controlling shareholder of Premier, and continues to be a visible and often combative presence at annual general meetings, sparring with proxy advisers and occasionally with his own board over executive pay and strategy. Reports over the years have periodically flagged tension between Lew and various chief executives over the degree of autonomy given to operating management, a dynamic that has played out publicly more than once. It's a governance style that would probably not survive scrutiny at a business school case study, and yet the numbers, over a very long run, have mostly backed him.

A verdict, cautiously offered

The honest assessment, I think, is that Lew is one of the last of a particular breed of Australian business figure: the merchant-financier who never quite decided whether he was a retailer or an investor, and who turned out to be formidably good at both. He's not a folk hero in the mould of Gerry Harvey, and he's certainly no cautionary tale like Christopher Skase — whose Qintex collapse I've written about at length, the empire that dissolved in the sun — because Lew, whatever the boardroom carnage, never lost control of his own company. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Founders who get thrown out of one empire and quietly rebuild another, on their own terms, are rarer than the mythology of Australian business tends to admit.

Whether history remembers him primarily as the man who lost Coles Myer or the man who built Premier into a genuinely durable retail group is, I'd argue, still an open question — and one Lew himself, characteristically, shows no sign of wanting settled while he's still in the room.

For more on the founders, feuds and dynasties that built and occasionally broke Australian business, visit the Tycoons & Dynasties hub.