Straight From Stuart July: out of Q1 and into the summer. Lots done, but lots still to do. And lots to lose!

Hello and welcome to my latest?Straight From Stuart?newsletter here on LinkedIn.

I haven’t sent any updates recently as it’s been a busy time with lots of company communications, including our full year results and AGM.?

After closing out the first quarter of the financial year, we're now firmly in Q2 - so it felt like the right time to share an update on our recent progress and the key things on my mind as we approach the height of summer.

Recent activity

As I write this, I’ve just finished our latest Straight to Stuart LIVE event where we hit the milestone of 10,000 ideas submitted into the scheme. A huge milestone and a brilliant LIVE session, focused on how we can reduce waste across M&S. Colleagues submitted some great ideas, including:

1)???Introduce recyclable paper bags to help customers reduce plastic use. This is a YES and it’s something we’re launching very soon. Look out for more details in September.

2)???Improve our food packaging to reduce the number of products arriving to stores damaged. We've made great strides on food packaging but I agree it is still an area for improvement. The team are on it! We're going to empower stores to fix simple issues themselves and create a monthly tracker to track all live packaging issues.

3)???Remove size pips from clothing hangers to reduce plastic. We had a great debate on this during the session. I’m concerned about the prospect of removing them completely as they definitely play a role in the customer experience, but it’s one Richard Price and the team are going to take away and look at.

Here is a snapshot of key activity and achievements since my last update:

• Recent performance: we’ve made a strong start to the summer and our performance is on track, with both Food and Clothing & Home outperforming the market. I must call out C&H in particular who are continuing to make good progress - a huge well done to the team. However, across M&S, I've been clear that we should all stay ‘positively dissatisfied’ with our performance as we still have some big challenges to face into and we’re only as good as our customers tell us today.
• Grocer of the year: for the first time in our history, M&S Food was crowned Grocer of the year at The Grocer Gold awards. A huge well done to every colleague in our Food business. This should now give us confidence to continue our strong momentum, and deliver all the things we’re great at – the M&S magic.
• Hosted our AGM: The AGM is our opportunity to engage our huge shareholder base, and this year we did it digitally. Click here to watch it back.
• Straight to Stuart LIVE: as I said, we’ve just finished our latest LIVE event, where Mark Lemming , Monique Leeuwenburgh , Lucinda Langton , and Victoria McKenzie-Gould joined me to discuss colleague ideas for reducing waste. A great way to round off our #ReduceOurWaste campaign, during which colleagues submitted 400+ ideas!
• Accelerated store rotation: recent activity includes new stores in Leeds White Rose, Stockport and Purley Way, with more projects to complete over the summer. Important steps forward in our store rotation plans..

Looking ahead

We’ve just closed the first quarter of the financial year and are now firmly in Q2. Here’s what’s on my mind:

• Trading summer the best we can: our immediate priority is delivering excellent availability in Food. I can’t stress this enough. This means our central team getting the right stock to stores; and our store teams ensuring shelves are filled, providing they’ve got the stock.
• Getting ready for Christmas: preparations are now underway for Christmas and we should all have an eye on the upcoming 'golden quarter', as we like to call it. I’ve already had a sneak peek of our brilliant Christmas marketing campaigns in both Food and C&H.
• Acting on feedback: as you'd expect, I meet regularly with colleagues all over M&S. I recently hosted a brilliant check-in with a group of store managers and I also met with national BIG, who do a great job of representing the views of our 65,000 colleagues. From these sessions, what’s clear is we need to make life much easier for our store teams - from the way they're set up, to the way we communicate to them - and this is something Sacha Berendji is going to look at.

We've made some good progress, but there's a long way to go yet. As I keep saying to the team - lots done, lots to do, lots to lose.

In my next newsletter, I’ll share an update on each of our strategic programmes. Until then, our focus is helping our customers to have a great summer.

Stuart