After spending the past decade in the doldrums, M&S’ turnaround is finally back on track and that is no small part due to its fast-growing online business.
In its last half year to 2 October, 2021, online clothing and home sales soared 60% year on year.
The man responsible for this stellar growth is Stephen Langford, who rejoined M&S in May 2020 after a nine year stint at George.com to lead its online home and clothing division.
Langford made his return as he was enticed with the prospect of working on M&S’ long-anticipated transformation. “We’ve talked as a business about transformation for a number of years and this was something that I could not resist to be a part of,” he explains.
However, little did he know when accepted the role that he would be responsible for the bulk of clothing and home sales by the time he started, which happened to be in the midst of the first lockdown.
“I was thrown right in at the deep end,” he laughs. “It was an exciting time to join because all eyes were on the performance of the online business.”
M&S had long struggled to grow its sales online, lagging behind adept multichannel rivals such as Next and John Lewis, which made trading in an environment when many of its clothing stores were closed potentially perilous.
However, Langford’s division came through and online sales started motoring.
A different M&S
M&S is a very different place to the retailer Langford left in 2011, he says.
“I’m seeing a lot of the same faces but a lot of new thinking, and fundamentally there are a lot of different approaches that the business has taken,” he says.
To finally get its turnaround on track, M&S has embraced new ideas and ways of working and the pandemic has been a catalyst for this.
In fact, within weeks of Langford’s arrival at M&S, it launched its ‘Never the Same Again’ strategy, aimed to draw on learnings from the crisis and capitalise on the opportunities to drive itstransformation in a changed consumer environment.
It has also introduced MS2, a division that brings together its online, data and digital capabilities that enables it to “trade at a faster pace with range and availability adapted to the online model”.
The division is led by Langford and M&S chief digital and data officer Jeremy Pee and is tasked with turbocharging digital growth at the retailer.
“We seek to challenge the way that the rest of the business is thinking and bring different approaches to solving problems. As an organisation we want to focus more on outcomes rather than outputs,” he explains.
Langford says the division is “a key part of the reason why we’ve got great momentum in M&S online”.
A middle-aged Asos?
So what has Langford done to transform its online fortunes? One of the big things he has worked on is adding third-party brands to M&S fashion offer.
The retailer first introduced contemporary womenswear brand Nobody’s Child – which it bought a 25% stake in last year – to its website in October 2020 and has since added a further 40 labels including Jigsaw, Sosander, Ben Sherman, Joules and Hobbs to its website. It is fast becoming the online destination for fashion-conscious forty somethings.
So, is M&S now a middle-aged Asos? When Retail Gazette poses this to Langford he stops to contemplate before deciding that is not the retailer’s intention.
“We’re focused on the curation of our range. This is not about seeing how much stuff we get out in front of our customers,” he says.
Langford also insists he is not concerned about cannibalising M&S’s clothing sales by putting these new brands in front of its shoppers.
“Ultimately, customers can go anywhere to buy the other brands, but they choose to come to us because we have something unique to offer them,” he explains. “Our focus is on complimentary and not competitive.
“The ability for us to be able to create more of a one-stop-shop experience online for our customers is pretty attractive, and a win-win. We have a careful selection of brands that we believe fit with our brand credentials, and therefore we can provide our existing customers a better experience.
“We want customers to choose us as their number one online destination for clothing, home and gifting.”
READ MORE: Review: M&S Live – will its attempt to get down with the kids pay off
Improving operations
However, it’s not just great product that is powering M&S’ online growth. Langford has worked hard on the operational side of things to make shopping with M&S online as slick as possible.
Stock availability has been a big focus. “We recognise that availability is always a very emotional point for our customers, and we’ve put a huge amount of effort into how we improve our online availability,” Langford says.
“We’ve looked at how we can give our customers access to more of the stock across the M&S network so we’ve introduced in-store fulfilment. Online customers can now access stock not only in our ecommerce distribution centre in Castle Donnington but also in over 200 of our stores.”
The retailer has also improved the speed, convenience and consistency of its delivery, including in-store.
“The collection experience in our stores needs to be faster and more convenient. The returns experience, whether it’s in store or via post, needs to provide faster refunds for customers and effectively be friction free. They’re the areas that we’ve really dialled in on,” he says.
However, M&S.com needs to be more than efficient. Langford has also strived to make its on-site experience inspirational.
Langford says: “We ask ourselves how we can recreate the shopping experience in our stores that the customers love.”
Live shopping is one way Langford and co are doing this. In late January, the retailer launched M&S Live, a live streamed show where shoppers can watch experts showcase the retailer’s latest ranges and ask them questions during a live weekly broadcast.
Each episode is completely shoppable so customers can buy the products as they watch. The retailer said the move was “the latest example of M&S embracing new opportunities in retail to be more relevant, more often for customers”.
Langford explains: “Live shopping is an example of how we’re trying to find ways of providing more inspiration for our customers, more reassurance about products, being able to communicate better what the attributes are, and what we love about the product that we’re ultimately trying to trying to sell.”
Retaining the pandemic online customer
All the initiatives that Langford has invested in are clearly paying off as online sales have soared since the onset of covid.
M&S now has many customers that didn’t shop online pre-pandemic and, reassuringly for Langford, as we begin to return to normality they are still shopping this way.
“A lot of those customers have returned to stores, but continued to shop across the across both channels,” he says.
Langford is focused on retaining those customers by making it as easy and convenient to shop across all of its channels.
“We look at how we can ensure that our collections are equally as slick as the in-store checkout experience,” he says. “Going forward, there’s a lot of focus in tech investment to make it more seamless for our customers to move across our channels.”
By combining a growing roster of exciting new brands with an easy, seamless shopping experience, M&S could finally – after a decade of trying – emerge as a multichannel force to be reckoned with.
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