Marks & Spencer

• Date Founded: 1884
• Industry: Retail Stores
• Corporate Headquarters: London, England
• Type: Public

Marks & Spencer, headquartered in London, England, is a large, multinational British retailer specializing in the sale of apparel, home goods, and luxury food items. Known as M&S, Marks, and even affectionately as Marks & Sparks, the company operated nearly 1,500 stores in sixty-two countries in 2024, employing over 66,000 people. In 2023, the company announced its plans to open additional stores within the United Kingdom (UK), which was included in its five-year rejuvenation plan. M&S opened new locations or rejuvinated existing store fronts in over a dozen locations across the UK in 2023 and 2024. The company revealed plans to open a total of thirteen new locations by the end of 2025.

Known as a retailer of quality British goods, M&S operates on its five core corporate principles: quality, value, service, innovation, and trust. M&S offers customers its own in-house brand of home products, apparel, and food.

History

Founder Michael Marks emigrated from Belarus to England. He arrived with little money and speaking almost no English. He began his business in 1884 as a peddler of small wares such as buttons, sewing needles, woolen socks, and mending thread. He soon had an open market stall that he named Marks’ Penny Bazaar, with a sign that read, "Don’t ask the price. It’s a penny." Legend has it that Marks, who still spoke very little English, used the sign to prevent haggling over prices, but it proved an innovative approach that invited even customers with very little money to shop with confidence. By 1894, Marks had a dozen market stalls. Needing capital to expand, he partnered with Thomas Spencer, a cashier with a wholesale company, who invested £300 for half ownership of the business that they named Marks & Spencer.

The partnership successfully combined Marks’s talent for marketing and customer service with Spencer’s experience in warehouse management and accounting. When M&S opened its first shop, the signage welcomed shoppers with a sign stating, "Admission Free," to encourage shoppers to browse at a time when most stores displayed their merchandise within glass cases and did not welcome unfamiliar shoppers. By 1903, there were thirty-six branches of the Penny Bazaar. The founding partners formed a limited company, and within five years, sixty shops and stalls bore the Marks & Spencer name.

Neither man lived to see the growth of the business very far into the twentieth century. Spencer died in 1905 and Marks in 1907. Losing both founders left the company in turmoil, with sons Simon Marks and Tom Spencer both under the age of twenty and reliant on their fathers’ executors, who assumed the helm. By 1915, after a successful court battle, Simon Marks emerged as chairman of Marks & Spencer.

In 1924, Simon Marks visited the United States to learn how American retailers were modernizing their business practices to cater to an increasingly affluent shopper. To fund his expansionist and modernization vision, Marks took the company public in 1926, and invested the new capital to build larger and more visually attractive stores.

The four tenets of Simon Marks’ leadership were to offer the customer a wide range of value-for-money, store-brand products; present the merchandise in innovative product displays; employ a knowledgeable, congenial staff; and develop an innovative supply-chain management team.

Throughout Simon Marks’s tenure, M&S continued to expand across the United Kingdom. In homage to his father, Marks introduced the St. Michael store brand. In 1948 he introduced, with great success, the first self-service food store that offered shoppers the opportunity to pick items from the shelves rather than rely on a clerk to retrieve the goods for them. M&S formally implemented a broad, no-quibble exchange-and-return policy in 1953, a policy that was especially popular with apparel shoppers because there were no dressing rooms for customers to try on items. Changing rooms were introduced in the 1970s.

Simon Marks remained chairman until his death in 1965. In the following decades, M&S continued to expand in the United Kingdom, and in 1975 it opened its first stores in continental Europe.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, M&S remained highly profitable, and in 1997, it became the first UK business to report annual pretax profits exceeding £1 billion. However, stiff competition from other retailers that outsourced their goods to countries with cheaper labor threatened M&S’s commitment to the principle that it would be the supplier of quality British goods.

Over the next decade, M&S faced a major restructuring of its retail assets as well as a turnaround effort aimed at resurrecting the M&S core principles. To bring M&S back to the fundamental principles espoused by Simon Marks and to lure back a broad range of customers, it improved staff training; empowered store management teams; reacted to customer demand; engaged in celebrity advertising; sought innovative, easy-care, high-performance textiles; and developed three lines of apparel ("Good," "Better," and "Best"). At the same time, in 2000, the company also did away with the St. Michael label in favor of keeping the house brand simply labeled as Marks & Spencer. In time, these efforts restored the company’s profitability.

However, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, M&S struggled amid an international downturn in the retail industry as stores struggled to compete with online vendors such as Amazon. In 2016, new CEO Steve Rowe announced a five-year turnaround program aimed at cutting down the company's clothing business, which had been decreasing in its share of revenue for some time, and focusing more on its food business. In addition to announcing that several stores had been marked for closure or downsizing, by 2018, the company had begun working on streamlining its technology, particularly for increased online shopping.

The early 2020s saw M&S continue to navigate wider changes in the industry and new challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic, which spread globally by March 2020, had a particularly devastating impact on in-person sales due to a number of factors, including store closures and other public health measures that halted in-person shopping along with an economic recession that impacted many consumers. From 2020 to 2021, M&S experienced a 90 percent drop in profits.

To help confront the COVID-19 pandemic, the company continued to downsize its retail operations, closing fifty-nine stores and cutting 7,000 the future. A partnership with online grocer Ocado, along with government aid, helped the company offset some of its financial losses during this time. In mid-2022, Rowe stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Stuart Machin, who planned to work alongside assistant CEO Katie Bickerstaffe. The end of 2022 was a financial success for the company, which parlayed its momentum into the announcement of a five-year, £500 million investment in restructuring the company’s stores. In January 2023, M&S announced its strategy to reinvigorate the brand by closing smaller stores and opening larger stores with a greater selection in specific UK locations. The company also commited to hiring 3,400 new employees in an effort to make up for some of the jobs lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Impact

During the 1930s, M&S introduced a series of management and personnel practices that positioned it as a leader in retailing. Simon Marks introduced a pioneering inventory control method by developing perforated merchandise tags with two identical halves. One half was torn off at the point of purchase and dropped in a box that was sent to the central office at the end of the day. This information was used to track inventory and direct merchandise replenishment.

The cultivation of direct relationships with manufacturers, especially textile mills, allowed M&S to cut out the wholesaler middleman, lower prices, and increase its influence on material standards. M&S created its own textile laboratory and employed scientists to develop new materials and test garments.

In 1934, the company appointed a director of staff welfare. Under her direction, M&S employees had access to subsidized hot meals, staff restrooms, and hairdressing services. Pension plans, medical and dental care, employee discounts, and even camping holidays for staff were gradually introduced as benefits for M&S employees.

As M&S began to pull away from its commitment to UK sourcing of most products and to find suppliers around the globe, it launched a campaign, Look Beyond the Label, to assure customers that materials were ethically sourced and workers afforded minimum health and safety standards.

Announced in 2007, M&S’s Plan A initiative was a one-hundred-point plan designed to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, broaden its sustainable sourcing, eliminate landfill waste, improve the lives of the workers in its supply chain, and help customers and employees live healthier lives. A five-pence charge for plastic bags was introduced in 2008, resulting in an 80 percent reduction in bag requests and raising £500,000 for the Groundwork UK charity. Groundwork UK is a charity that works to improve the lives of people in the UK, particularly in disadvantaged communities. Groundwork works with communities and businesses to create greener, healthier, and more equitable communities.

In the 2020s, Marks and Spencer has focused on significantly reducing their environmental impact by sourcing sustainable materials like 100 percent responsibly produced cotton, committing to using only recycled polyester in their clothing, actively reducing plastic packaging, promoting their "Shwopping" clothing recycling program, and collaborating with organizations like World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to ensure ethical sourcing practices across their supply chain. Through their Plan A initiative, the company also commited to strive for a net-zero carbon footprint by 2040.

Well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the company logo remained the simple M&S initials in various fonts, with periods in which it reverted to Marks & Spencer, ultimately returning to M&S but underscored with "EST. 1884" in black ink.

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