M&S’s fashion and food transformation has defied retail gravity

When Michael Marks and Thomas Spencer threw open the doors of their first shop in 1894, the pair’s Penny Bazaars famously bore the slogan “Admission Free”, encouraging customers to browse without any obligation to purchase anything.

It might feel counterintuitive, but more than a century later, the message has stuck, as I found walking around all 100,000 sq ft of the super stylish renovation of the Marks and Spencer Pantheon Oxford Street store. There is a crackle in the air following this major upgrade. The womenswear displays are more akin to the sort you might find in Harvey Nichols, and the produce presentation is what you’d expect to see in an upmarket food hall in Whole Foods or Selfridges.

I didn’t even mean to buy anything. But of course, like the 56 per cent of M&S customers who walk in with no intention of making a purchase, I couldn’t help but pick up a few bits (underwear, a raid on the deli counter and, of course, a Gin in a Tin).

But this isn’t M&S as we have traditionally known it to be. Here, I’m among a melting pot of generations: Gen-Zers perusing rails of slip dresses that look like they could be from Miista, millennials sizing up smocks that resemble those at DÔEN. A fashion editor I know is considering a broderie shirt similar to those at BODE, while a chic fiftysomething of my acquaintance is picking up a pair of high-vamp ballet flats that look like just the ones I’ve been eyeing up at Soeur, where they retail for £325. The M&S version cost £58.

Downstairs, the atmosphere shifts to that of a Provençal marketplace: a vast food hall decked out with wooden barrels heaving with fresh piles of shiny fruit and veg. There’s a rosé wall, aisles devoted to delectable picky bits, and a tall honey tower. On top of this, the Pantheon features two new upper floors, showcasing menswear, beauty, lingerie, childrenswear, and homewares. You could easily lose a few hours in the place – and I do.

Celebrating 100 years in the fashion industry, M&S could have spent this year bathed in nostalgia, hoping that would be enough to remind its customers why they loved it so much. But instead of looking back, it has changed tack, and the boldness of its ambition to appeal to new customers while not scaring off its stalwarts is paying off.

While this has meant working on its online shopping offer, M&S isn’t abandoning the high street, and it is clearly rewarding the shoppers who still make the effort. This new go-to destination, a bricks-and-mortar shopping experience, makes that effort worth their while.

Four shiny new lifestyle stores and a series of catwalk shows are appealing to the style set, too – a group that might previously have dismissed M&S as the go-to for sensible underwear and affordable cashmere. Now, it has become the place to get a high fashion fix at high-street prices.

Like Zara, M&S is now doing weekly drops of clothes that talk to the trends, and this affordable luxe has extended to its food and homeware. It recently recruited the UK’s first “Tommelier”, Lydia Aaron, to offer her advice to shoppers on which tomatoes to pick for which meals, and there are frequent nods to viral food fads, like the Big Daddy Pistachio Bar, a twist on the Dubai chocolate trend. Last year’s strawberries-and-cream sandwich sold more than 1 million units in just five weeks. Today, 50 per cent of UK households shop with M&S Food.

In the homeware section, you’ll find Tom Kerridge – a stainless steel frying pan for £30 is this summer’s most coveted item – and Kelly Hoppen’s collection, which includes £59 table lamps that wouldn’t look out of place in Soho House, and £25 candles that resemble the likes of Diptyque. In fact, interior designer Hoppen helped to curate the layout of her namesake items on the shop floor of the new Pantheon, and they are displayed more like museum artefacts than supermarket household items.

Leading the way in all this is savvy CEO Stuart Machin, who joined the company in 2022, set on transforming it into a sartorial and lifestyle juggernaut. Suffice to say, he has succeeded tenfold; M&S now sits happily at the vanguard of contemporary trends across the board, having topped YouGov’s Best Brand Rankings in the UK for the last four years. The company has been rewarded in profits, too, with 2025 food sales reaching £9bn – almost doubling since 2009. Last year, M&S made £1.8m from sales of its £10 bras alone.

This scale of elevation is also felt within the company’s fashion offering, which feels more tapped into the zeitgeist than ever before. The woman behind the transformation is Maddy Evans, who has been head of womenswear since 2019, joining from Topshop, which makes a lot of sense when you look at the company’s trajectory both aesthetically and also strategically – Topshop gained cult status as the affordable, stylish brand for the masses who also happened to be in the know.

There have been viral items here, too, like those now-sold-out £30 hiking cord sandals that looked just like Miu Miu’s, which cost £690, and a £280 leather funnel-neck jacket that could easily be from Acne, which sells similar styles for upwards of £2,000. Then there’s the suede loafer in chocolate brown, which recently sold more than 36,000 units in a single week. Last year, collections with 16Arlington and Bella Freud made two of the UK’s most coveted designer brands accessible to the masses, while a vintage-inspired capsule collection in partnership with Sienna Miller gave M&S that highly coveted It-girl stamp of approval.

Earlier this summer, there was a catwalk show in Ibiza hosted by Gen Z influencer Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg (a livestream of the show was watched by 26 million people), and the brand will be hosting its first catwalk show at London Fashion Week in September.

A lot of what M&S is doing right now defies the assumed laws of retail science. Take its £350 tailored suit offering, which invites men to a dedicated section in the Pantheon store for a bespoke fitting, where everything from the buttons to the fabric can be customised. The order-to-arrival process takes three weeks. Meanwhile, M&S is starting to become known for its quick turnaround on trends, such as its Nineties edit, packed with timeless Carolyn Bessette Kennedy-inspired pieces off the back of the incredible success of Disney+’s Love Story. Think crisp white shirting and simple slip dresses.

So, the question must be: will M&S be able to sustain the quality at such good prices in the long term?

The clothes are produced around the world, with M&S’s interactive supplier map featuring facilities at 770 sites, including locations in Iceland, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. In May, the company announced its acquisition of a 437,000 sq ft fashion distribution centre in Lichfield. Formerly owned by ASOS, the new site is set to help bolster the company’s womenswear and menswear capacity, while boosting efficiency, still reducing costs, and improving margins, all while bringing the brand closer to its goal of doubling its online fashion business. The site is set to become fully operational in 2027, and will employ 600 people.

The company’s latest ESG report states that it designs products to last longer, uses 100 per cent more responsibly sourced cotton, and outlines its clothing recycling and resale programmes as part of its “Another Life” initiative. Such measures represent significant sustainability efforts, although the extent to which they offset the environmental impact of a large-scale, trend-led retail business remains open to debate.

Similarly speedy is the culinary innovation. An idea can go from around the table to supermarket shelves within months because, unlike other supermarkets, M&S works with dedicated “Fortress Factories” that don’t produce items for any other retailers.

There are more than 10 around the UK, all operated by longstanding suppliers that can turn food products around at a quick pace. One of the most prominent fortress factories sits within Park Cakes in Oldham, which is a particularly special site given that its relationship with M&S dates back more than 80 years. It’s also where Colin the Caterpillar is made – when a gluten-free variation was created there and released earlier this year, more than 10,000 units were sold within the first five days.

One of the key initiatives under Machin’s leadership that has been integral to M&S’s more recent success is the “Straight to Stuart” scheme, which encourages all staff to submit their ideas for new products. That’s how the brand started selling stoma-friendly underwear in 2024. As one of the 200,000 people in the UK living with a stoma, Hannah Gadsby struggled to find underwear that fitted her properly. Having worked at the company for 17 years, she pitched the idea to Stuart, and 18 months later, M&S became the first high-street retailer to offer stoma knickers both online and in 15 stores.

Then there’s the sense that the work is never quite done. The Pantheon store operates around a “test and learn” model, whereby customer habits are tracked through the regular deployment of mystery shoppers as well as staff and shopper feedback.

Putting the customer at the heart of your business is a tenet long abandoned in a cut-throat retail high street, where every scrap of profit is being fought over in a cost of living crisis. But equally, it could be argued that these strategies have contributed to the high street’s demise. Abandon your customer, and your customer will abandon you. Marks & Spencer has learnt that lesson in spades. As the CEO says, it is a store with “25 years of catching up to do”.

Still, the Pantheon is undeniably a big step forward, forming part of a million small steps that have clearly made a real difference to the way we shop.