About DW

Darren Williams started Williams Harding Consulting (Formerly DW Exec) in January 2018, after leaving Unilever. He lives in Central London.

Darren, known as DW, started a Retail career ‘by accident’ having been told by his late Mother to find a career after a few false starts on leaving school. He began his career in the late 1980’s at Radio Rentals, the once mighty electrical chain and spent five happy years there. Four years in fashion retail followed, and then five years at the iconic and trailblazing brand, Orange. It was here he first advanced from store into senior management.

Regional Management at Costa coffee came next and then some time in Private Equity before joining Argos taking the lead of the London Region and a turnover of £250M. 

He is often recognised for his time at Hotel Chocolat and led the retail division of the luxury chocolate business through a 5 year period of sustained and exceptional growth from 27 to 85 stores and 4 countries. He was known for his leadership, his deep understanding of the customer, and the belief that the business simply had to be better than all the rest. There was industry recognition for its ‘happiness’ programme as well as ‘Speciality Retailer of the year’ at the Retail week awards in 2012.  

DW was also the Commercial Director at Paul UK, and then moved onto work with Unilever in bringing the T2 brand to the Northern Hemisphere, where in 2.5 years as Country Director the business achieved recognition breakthrough, a UK/USA estate of almost 30 stores and an industry that recognised T2’s store experience as a leader in its field, again demonstrated by a further Retail week award.

At Williams Harding, now in its sixth year, DW has been fortunate to work with a number of brands across retail, hospitality, events and PR, and details of those can be found on the ‘who we work with’ page.

Client work is balanced by giving back and the belief that business simply has to be a force for good and our work with our charity partners and volunteer roles can be found here.