When iconic London retailer Planet Organic faced closure last year, its founder, Renée Elliott, staged a dramatic rescue bid. Now she is busily restoring the brand’s values and mission.
London-based Planet Organic has been a trailblazer for organic and wellness retailing since it launched in 1995. But in 2023 a risky expansion plan hatched by new managers and shareholders plunged the business into administration. With the iconic retailer facing imminent closure, Planet Organic’s founder, Renée Elliott, staged a dramatic eleventh hour rescue bid. It was successful, saving the majority of stores and hundreds of jobs.
One year on, the business has been stabilised and is set to return to profit in 2025. Just as importantly, Elliott and her team have been restoring Planet Organic’s founding values and placing organic once again at the heart of its food offer.
At this year’s Natural & Organic Products Expo (NOPEX), Elliott delivered a powerful updating of the Planet Organic story, telling a packed audience that she was savouring a “second chance to deliver the Planet Organic vision”.
As she took to the stage, Elliott said she wanted to tell the “whole truth” about the Planet Organic business. The comment hinted that this would be an unvarnished account – and so it was. Because as well as plentiful life-affirming and exuberant highs, this was a story punctuated occasionally with astonishing lows.
An American, Renée Elliott first travelled to England in the early 1990s after finishing university, taking a job in publishing. It was during these years working in Britain in her mid 20s that she properly got to know herself, and became sure she wanted to lead “an alternative life”. But she was still unclear about what form this would take. Back in the US, a simple event crystallised all her thoughts.
“Around this time I went into an organic supermarket in Boston and I thought, okay, now this is what I want to do. It just made so much sense to me. Here was a manifestation of the wellbeing ideas I had been been developing, where physical wellbeing is foundational for all wellbeing. And I decided that I wanted to take organic from the niche it had been in the UK into the mainstream. And my mission became to support health through community and support the Earth’s biodiversity.”
Fast forward to 1995, and the opening of the first Planet Organic store in West London. Elliott readily admits that when she was setting up the store, in Westbourne Grove, she really didn’t know what she was doing in business terms. She also had to work very quickly to establish her working style, which would be strongly influenced by her mother.
Elliott describes Planet Organic’s business ethos as values-led, and commercially driven
“My mom was worried about how I would fare in a male dominated world. But she actually advised me to use my femininity to my advantage. This was something I naturally wanted to. But in this way my mom was giving me permission to do it. She gave me license to be myself, to create an authentic business.”
Values-led, commercially driven
Elliott describes Planet Organic’s business ethos as values-led, and commercially driven. “Sure, there are tensions between those two, and that’s OK. But together they inform the decisions we make and how we make them.”
Elliott said she wanted Planet Organic to “set the highest standards in the industry”. These values were “non-negotiable” she said, and were often rooted in her personal ethics. “In the end, it’s about trusting yourself, your mind, you body. Listening to the small voice – your intuition, your gut instinct, whatever you call it – when it says, do this, don’t do that. And, actually, you have all the answers. The biggest mistake I made professionally was when I didn’t listen to that voice.”
Self-belief and a commitment to organic and sustainability values propelled Elliott and Planet Organic to a string of industry firsts. Planet was the UK’s first organic supermarket, it opened the first organic juice bar, the first organic certified fresh meat counter, the first sustainable fish counter and was first with non-plastic corn starch carrier bags.
Commercially, Planet Organic was a success from the start. In the first year of trading, the business delivered sales of £1.2 million, doubling that to £2.4 million in year two, and £3.6 million in year three. That early success “felt fantastic”. But Elliott knew challenges would arrive sooner or later. She prepared herself by asking “how will I behave in those situations?”.
Very soon, Elliott would find out. Because around this time she suddenly found herself confronting an almost unthinkable challenge. “One day, my business partner said to me, ‘I think you can go now’. I thought to myself, what? This is my baby! I was shocked. Shocked that I really did not see this coming.”
And so began “a very difficult 15 months”, which ended in an 11 day High Court trial. Elliott recalled: “When the litigation started at Planet Organic in 1997, it wasn’t pretty. I said, I can do that, I can get down and dirty. But I thought, actually, who do I want to be? I don’t want to get down and dirty. So my motto became ‘grace and dignity at all time’. That’s because I never wanted to be ashamed about who I’d been, when it had been really hard.”
Elliott won the case in 1999. “Afterwards, I asked my husband Brian Elliott to come in to run the business with me, because I didn’t trust anyone. And we had to bring in investors to buy out my outgoing partner. That was the beginning of a difficult 10 year journey for us.
Self-belief and a commitment to organic and sustainability values propelled Elliott and Planet Organic to a string of industry firsts
“But we did great things, we had fun, and we got amazing press. Our media attention was always bigger than our one store. People would ring from all over the world, and ask how many units we had. And I would say, just the one store! There was a lot of energy around at the time. We opened four more stores over that 10 years. But, we were running the business with shareholders who didn’t understand Planet’s values. This wasted time and energy, and it was really unpleasant. And there was always this underlying tension.”
In 2009, another bombshell moment. “Planet’s shareholders made Brian redundant and pushed me out of the company. It was shocking and it was painful.” Elliott move to Italy for three years to recharge and regroup. In 2016, she said, she was “pushed out of the business completely”. And while Planet Organic continued to grow – opening stores in prestigious central London locations, and its first outlets outside the capital – it was also losing its sense of purpose.
At this point Elliott had started a second business working as a business mentor and teaching business strategy, applying what she’d learnt at Planet Organic. In December 2020, after “doing this happily for about seven years”, she heard about ambitious fundraising efforts at Planet Organic and a lot of industry and media noise about the company’s plans to accelerate expansion (the company told retail media it would quadruple its store portfolio in just three years and was developing a national distribution centre). But within just a few months something clearly had gone badly wrong.
“In March 2023 the CEO of Planet phoned me up and told me ‘I’m giving you half an hour’s notice, we’re going into administration’. And I thought, what? I had no idea what was going on, or happening. And then he added, ‘if we don’t get a buyer in two or three weeks, the business is going under’.
“Brian and I looked at each other and said, should we step in? And that was the decision we made. To join the fray, to bid for Planet. This was a year ago. To endeavour to build a brighter future, for us, for the company, for the team, our suppliers, our farmers, communities, the Earth. So with a small amount of money from us, we called on old friends and managed to raise the rest of the money. Happily, we were successful. At the last minute on the last day, the administrator called us. I put the phone on speaker, and he said to us ‘we’ve accepted your bid’. We looked at each other and said, here we go. Here begins the rollercoaster.”
Planet Organic is also re-committing to placing organic back at the heart of its food offer
On April 25, Elliott’s team bought Planet Organic back, acquiring the outlets, the brand, saving nine stores and the jobs of 250 people. And securing a second chance for the future of Planet Organic.
With the previous senior managers and shareholders gone, Elliott began re-establishing Planet Organic’s original values and mission. “This is really quite simple – but profound: To provide organic, natural, healthy products you can trust, to create a shopping experience that is friendly and engaging and informative. To conduct business in a fair, honest and responsible way to respect colleagues, our customers and farmers, suppliers and advisors.”
Planet Organic is also re-committing to placing organic back at the heart of its food offer (a position it had drifted from, and for which it had attracted some industry criticism). “There’s so much we want to do, there are so many ideas, so much excitement and energy to take planet forward,” Elliott told her audience. “We’re dreaming about what might come next. That might – note ‘might’ – be more stores, more countries, new services. We don’t know yet.”
The Planet Organic founder and retail trailblazer ended with a ‘thank you’. “I am eternally grateful to all the suppliers, farmers and brands who have stuck with us over the years. We are part of a remarkable industry, where relationships matter. I started a year ago with a new vision for Planet Organic. I thought then, and I think now, that values-led business is good business. Life is a journey, it’s not a destination.”
Author: Jim Manson, Journalist
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