Reinventing a legacy business starts with figuring out what people actually loved about it. When David Rawlinson took over Qurate Retail in 2021, he inherited QVC and HSN, two brands built around television shopping just as consumers were moving to streaming, social media and digital commerce.
Qurate was doing about $11 billion in revenue and reaching 14 million-plus customers across seven countries in 2023. Big legacy, bigger job.
His task wasn’t to kill television shopping. It was to figure out what actually made it work, then translate that for people who’d never turn on a shopping channel.
He Saved the Format by Refusing to Protect the Channel
Rawlinson stepped in during October 2021. Things got rough fast. Q1 2022 revenue dropped 14%, adjusted OIBDA fell 35%. A fire hit the Rocky Mount facility that December, and that one building handled roughly a quarter to a third of all QVC U.S. volume. On top of that, Qurate was sitting on about $7 billion in debt.
Enter Project Athens—customer experience, execution, cost-to-serve, portfolio cleanup, new growth bets. Then in 2024, QVC’s WIN strategy went further, putting “live social shopping” at the center of the whole plan instead of treating it as some side experiment.
The numbers moved. By 2024, QVC pointed to $508 million in annual adjusted OIBDA impact from Athens, with margin climbing from 8.8% in 2022 to 11.0%. Streaming-attributed sales rose 19% in 2025, and QVC picked up nearly a million new TikTok Shop customers in the U.S. that same year. But consolidated revenue still fell 8%, down to $9.23 billion, and adjusted OIBDA dropped to $771 million. So the engine got better. The balance sheet didn’t fix itself.
Two Rules Behind the Turnaround
Preserve the capability, replace the distribution.
Separate what customers actually value from the channel that used to deliver it. As QVC Group put it: “Live social shopping is a natural evolution for us.”
QVC didn’t reinvent itself as a generic online marketplace. It took the hosts, the demos, the storytelling—the stuff people actually tuned in for—and moved that onto TikTok and streaming.
Stabilize first. Build growth second.
Fix the operating economics before you scale anything. And if leverage is still choking the strategy, that’s a financing problem, not something operational fixes will solve. In the company’s words: “The first was stabilizing the Company… The second was establishing new growth platforms while reducing the Company’s significant debt burden.”
Athens added over $500 million a year in adjusted OIBDA impact. The later restructuring wiped out more than $5 billion of debt.
Knowing What to Let Go
Athens initially tried to revive Zulily. By May 2023, Qurate had sold it to Regent at a $64 million loss. That wasn’t just a portfolio decision. It showed Rawlinson was willing to stop spending on businesses that no longer fit the strategy.
The Network That Made the Pivot Possible
Backers: Gregory Maffei ran things as executive chairman. John Malone stayed on the executive committee until May 2025. When the company emerged from restructuring, Strategic Value Partners and Oaktree Capital put together a new $600 million asset-based lending facility.
Protégés: Rawlinson put Mike Fitzharris in charge of QVC U.S., handed HSN to Rob Muller, and tapped Mary Campbell to lead streaming and live video—all back in 2022.
Strategic access: board-level capital-markets know-how, restructuring capital, and operators who controlled both QVC’s legacy core and its emerging channels.
Steal This—Separate the Capability From the Channel
What do customers actually come to you for? Now ask whether the channel delivering it still makes sense.
QVC’s answer was storytelling, demonstrations and live interaction—not television itself. So it took those capabilities to streaming and TikTok.
Do the same with your business. Pick one capability, identify a new channel for it, and run a 90-day test with one clear metric for success.