Dr Martens has hired a global customer director and filed her under brand. Katie Morton joins on 26 October, reporting to chief brand officer Carla Murphy rather than to anyone commercial. That choice says the board has stopped treating soft demand as a sales problem and started treating it as a question about what the boot means. Morton spent more than seventeen years at Burberry and left it running online-to-offline, which is conversion work. Dr Martens has hired a conversion specialist and pointed her at desire.

The coverage treated this as a hire. It is an allocation. Under a commercial chief, a customer director works the funnel: the CRM file, the discount that clears the week. Under a brand chief she owns something slower: whether anyone still wants the boot at the price printed on the box. When Dr Martens rebuilt its executive team in April, it put general managers into its biggest markets and pointed them at the chief commercial officer. Morton did not go into that column.

The regional numbers explain the choice. Group revenue fell 2.9% to £764.9m in the year to March, and ecommerce revenue dropped 8.9%. Much of that was deliberate: Dr Martens pulled back clearance to protect price, accepting a smaller top line for a better one. The question was whether shoppers would follow the brand up.

In two regions out of three, they did. Full-price direct revenue rose 14% in the Americas and 15% across Asia-Pacific. In EMEA it fell 13%, with the company attributing the fall to consumers participating in clearance. Europe’s full-price mix went backwards by four points. America and Asia paid the asking price; Europe waited for the sale.

A strategy deck is written; a reporting line is conceded.

The seat Morton reports into is the one that produced the chief executive. Ije Nwokorie held the brand job here, with marketing and product inside it, before taking the top chair in January 2025. Putting the customer function there places it near the throne rather than near the till. A business that believed it had a conversion problem would have found her a desk closer to the money.

In July the company told the market that its FY27 objectives include lifting full-price sales in the UK and DACH markets. That is the EMEA number written forward. It is not a target promotional planning can hit; the discount is the thing that has to stop working. Morton joins with about five months of the financial year left to move it, and no authority over the markets that have to move.

The arrangement has an obvious failure mode. Insight without a price list is advice, and the discount is still set by people Morton does not report to. She can describe the European shopper precisely and change nothing about what that shopper is offered. Of the two available diagnoses, Dr Martens has chosen the flattering one. It is also the one nobody can be fired for failing to solve.