Staples chief executive is exiting less than a year after ownership change
Staples Inc. chief executive Shira Goodman is leaving less than a year after private equity firm Sycamore Partners acquired control of the Framingham-based office products supplier.
The company has not yet made a public announcement, but The Wall Street Journal obtained a letter to employees saying that Friday would be Goodman’s last day and that a new CEO would be named in coming days.
Mark Cautela, a Staples spokesman, declined to comment to the Globe.
Goodman originally joined Staples in 1992 from consulting firm Bain & Co., which had worked with Staples to develop its delivery business, now a major focal point for the company.
She’s a protege of former chief executive Ron Sargent, who stepped down after a deal he engineered to buy smaller rival Office Depot fell apart in 2016 amid antitrust concerns. Goodman was briefly an interim chief executive before officially getting the job in September of that year. At the time, Staples was still a publicly traded company.
New York-based Sycamore reached a deal to buy Staples in June 2017 for nearly $7 billion. At the time, Sycamore chief Stefan Kaluzny had expressed confidence in Goodman’s leadership. By that point, Staples had annual revenue of about $18 billion, and the company had pared back its retail empire to about 1,500 stores.
Goodman had been trying to increase the company’s focus on business customers by bulking up its sales force to target mid-sized companies.
“I know I speak for all our associates in acknowledging and thanking Shira for her years of dedicated leadership and wishing her the best in all future endeavors,’’ John Lederer, executive chairman of Staples’ delivery business, said in the employee letter.
Lederer, a former CEO of US Foods, joined Sycamore in September as senior adviser, roughly a week after Sycamore completed its purchase of Staples.
Sycamore said Lederer’s role included serving as executive chairman of Staples and its newly independent US and Canadian retail operations. The corporate structure was broken into three pieces as part of Sycamore’s acquisition: North American delivery, US retail, and Canadian retail. At the time, the three groups continued to work closely together out of the Framingham headquarters.
