Michaels Stores

David Boone became CEO of Michaels in February 2025, replacing Ashley Buchanan who left for Kohl's in early 2025 after just four months (exited on suspicions of directing company business to romantic partner). Boone previously led Staples Canada and held senior roles at Loblaws and TD Bank.

Leadership read: Apollo's private ownership didn't just reduce Michaels' reporting obligations, it removed the quarterly-earnings constraint that had kept the previous strategy anchored to incremental digital improvement. Boone's move to capitalize on the Party City and Joann liquidations required rapid supply chain reconfiguration, new in-store equipment installation, IP acquisition at bankruptcy auction, and localized merchandising authority pushed to regional managers, all within months. That is a fundamentally different operating model than the one Michaels ran under its prior CEO, and it was enabled less by strategy than by governance structure: a board reachable by phone, no public market to convince. This is one of 12 leadership change signals we have tracked across sectors in the last 90 days. The more instructive comparables are Conagra's incoming CEO arriving with an explicit mandate for bold portfolio action, and Generac's international restructuring paired with a leadership transition, both cases where a CEO change is the visible marker of a pivot in operating logic, not just personnel. The retail-specific pattern is sparse in the related signals set, but the broader shape, PE-backed operator installing a commercially experienced leader after a governance failure, is consistent with what Apollo needed here. Companies at this stage of brick-and-mortar reinvention under private-equity ownership face concentrated demand for operations and supply chain leadership capable of executing category expansion at speed, commercial leaders able to manage opportunistic IP and vendor acquisition, and regional merchandising talent who can translate localization mandates into margin-positive assortment decisions rather than complexity overhead.

curated · 2026-07-17 · context →