The first will be that getting staff is easy at the moment, from which you might infer that a lot of design outfits are not as busy as they should be. The second is that Marks & Spencer has put new format development on hold.
This may or may not be the case and those charged with dealing with such things at M&S are pretty tight-lipped about what is happening. But it is worth pausing to consider whether such carping about rumoured inaction is entirely justified.
This is a retailer that has more or less reinvented its stores since Sir Stuart Rose became chief executive in 2004. Walk into its shops today and you are likely to see louvred ceilings, slick-looking fixturing and graphics shouting “Your M&S”. As a slogan and in-store mantra, the latter seems to have been around forever, but is in fact still relatively new and is emblematic of the changes that have been wrought.
There is also a consistency of approach that means you know what you are in for when you pass through the entrance of an M&S branch. As is often the case in retailing, novelty has value, but novelty combined with a sense of familiarity breeds content.
And shoppers still appear to be giving the thumbs up. M&S has done what it has done well and, for detractors, it might be useful to cast the mind back to a time before Simply Food shops were a staple of well-to-do high streets or the store modernisation programme got under way.
Things were drab. The dreaded “Lutons” – M&S speak for a piece of centre-floor equipment that seemed to define the term Stalinist – were still very much in evidence. Today, almost no trace of that era remains. Only a small rump remains to be refurbished and, when the process is complete, M&S will still be among the high street’s mass-market design vanguard in terms of how it has managed to make a very large estate relevant to shoppers.
Which perhaps brings us back to the initial point. Store design can happen in fits and starts and is not contrary to popular opinion, like Forth Rail Bridge painting. What has been done has happened so quickly that if M&S chooses to take a rest for a year or two, it probably won’t affect its fortunes greatly. Cutting your cloth according to your means is sanity and what this retailer has done will stand it in very good stead for some time to come.
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