Womenswear remains a top performing category for ‘Brands at M&S’, with sales up 18% on last year and making up 49% of total sales

What started as an experiment 4 years ago at Marks & spencer, today is the top contributor to sales.

Four years ago, M&S (marks n spencer) started a small experiment by creating a platform for womenswear, featuring third party brands.

By third-party I mean, these brands were external to M&S and were not their private or in-house labels.

Today, that experiment is contributing 49% of total sales and more than 300 brands are in that platform.

Womenswear is the top performing category for the retailer.

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M&S also experimented with their “Brands at M&S” Popup stores which is highly successful.

I loved the name of their pop-up i.e. Nobody’s child (check out their ecommerce site, by the way, M&S owns a majority stake in the brand now)

-??????????? Attracted new customers who never shopped at M&S

-??????????? Gave an opportunity to showcase third party labels along with theirs

-??????????? Created brand Visibility and affinity with the fashion which the 141 years old retailer was losing out.

-??????????? Important point here is the new customers were not attracted by M&S but by new unknown designer brands which complemented M&S collection and sales were encouraging.

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My learnings:

Beauty stores should take a learning from this M&S experiment and create an avenue for the new brands in the fragrance and cosmetics, skincare genres to showcase their collections.

The place could become highly Instagramable place, (something like Sephoria event done by Sephora in the Dubai’s coke arena but lacked the innovation in terms new Brand introductions.)

Watch my video, wherein I answer Q&A of one of my followers.

"Product innovation leading to strengthen the product".

Question of the week:

What experiments are the middle eastern fashion retailers doing to reinvigorate your brand personas and overall sales?

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