Transforming M&S Clothing & Home into a multi-brand retailer

When a major retailer shifts from being a classic clothing, home and food brand to one that wants to lead these categories into the future, it needs to drastically evolve its business model. That’s exactly what M&S set out to do post-pandemic: extend the reach of the brand with new propositions, such as selling 3rd party clothing labels, and introducing new payment offerings to give customers more ways to purchase.

Digital was at the centre of making these changes possible, ensuring customers could access them seamlessly while colleagues could support them effectively. My role was to make sure this happened.

Delivering 3rd Party Brands from a Standing Start

One day, I was handed a 90-page strategy document outlining M&S’s ambition to sell 3rd party brands over five years. It came with big revenue targets and a long list of changes needed across the business — from eCommerce to logistics to buying. What it didn’t include was how to make it all work.

M&S had sold only its own brands for 95 years. Systems, processes, and ways of working were all designed for that purpose — not for selling other people’s products. We had to start from scratch and run two tracks in parallel: one to get us trading quickly, and one to reorganise the business for scale.

In the short term, my teams optimised selling platforms, product information management systems, and back-end logistics to enable stock to be contracted, purchased, and sold through different commercial models. Working closely with buying, eCommerce, logistics, finance and legal teams, we went live fast. Within months, we were trading at over £10m projected annual revenue. It was scrappy, but it worked.

Solving the Long-Term Challenges

To make this sustainable, we had to solve three bigger challenges:

1. Embedding 3rd party sales as a core part of the business.

2. Convincing customers to see M&S as a destination for more than just M&S brands.

3. Moving the increased volume of stock efficiently through the network.

We tackled each in turn:

• Customer experience: We optimised online platforms to surface 3rd party brands within existing journeys without cannibalising high-margin M&S sales. Using test-and-learn experiments and analytics tools like Amplitude, we tracked performance against metrics such as basket size, units per transaction, and lifetime value.

• Operations: We streamlined internal processes to cut the time from contract agreement to sale from months to weeks. This meant rethinking service design and enabling brands to self-serve in M&S systems. We introduced improvements across pricing, loyalty, product information management, goods receipt, accounts payable, store operations, and returns.

• Scalability: To scale quickly, we explored models like drop-ship and marketplaces, choosing technology solutions that allowed M&S to stay flexible and pivot between models as the market demanded.

  
  

The Outcome

Within the first year, the new proposition was trading at a projected £150m annual revenue. M&S successfully integrated new acquisitions such as Jaeger and The Sports Edit, while also improving operations to expand into other 3rd party propositions like Opticians and Beauty. Importantly, we stayed on track with the ambitious strategy set out in that original 90-page document.