Blog

Bringing the infarm urban farming (r)evolution to the UK with Marks & Spencer

Just under a decade ago, my co-founders and I started to experiment with growing our own fresh produce. We had just moved to Berlin, bought a 1955 Airstream trailer, outfitted it with DIY growing shelves and started experimenting with indoor farming.We...

The Big Exchange

In the summer of 2011, a group of Huddersfield mums (me included) decided to act on something that really matters to us and really matters to our local community – our children getting off to a good start at school.The action came about because...

Protecting the Magic and Modernising the Rest: Food Store Renewal Trial Underway at Hempstead Valley

Stuart Machin, M&S Food Managing Director In Food we have a far-reaching plan to protect the magic of M&S – our market-leading quality, our famous innovation and exceptional sourcing, whilst modernising the rest, particularly our supply...

Suggest to Steve: How my idea to help customers reuse at Market Place came to life

Working on the Deli counter at the M&S Moortown store in Leeds, I have the opportunity to chat to our customers daily and a topic that regularly comes up is plastic packaging and the actions we’re taking at M&S. It became apparent that...

Extending Easy Dressing - Introducing DreamSkin®

I love heading up Kids’ Product Development Technology at M&S, a role that means I’m always working hard to create new everyday products for the wardrobes of our customers’ kids. And just because it’s everyday products, it...

How our love of data made a difference

This week we hosted our 5th annual Charity Data Dive that saw colleagues across our business put their heads together to help four community partners answer some of their big data questions. This is the third data dive I’ve organised with my...

M&S Celebrates Pride

Four years ago, on a sunny July day, I had the pleasure of being part of M&S’s first Pride March in London. It was a brilliant day and I met so many amazing people with their own story and reasons for being there. Since then M&S's LGBTQ+...

New wave of tech start ups helping to put digital innovation at the heart of M&S

The way we shop is changing. Retail is changing. M&S is changing. And as we transform our business, there are new kids on the block at M&S. We are working with a new wave of start-ups and entrepreneurs that are helping our colleagues...

M&S style inspiration service Tuesday wins Drapers Award

I work within the Tuesday team at M&S. Tuesday is an outfit inspiration service created to help our womenswear customers with all of their wardrobe needs – whether it’s help with trying out a tricky trend or an updated work wardrobe. We...

Consumers’ quest for convenience – embrace digital first or risk getting left behind

At M&S we’ve focused on becoming more relevant, more often, to our customers who are increasingly shopping online and in particular using mobile devices to do so. Retail is changing and changing faster than ever before. Therefore, being at the...

A Circular Economy success story worth hanging around for

As a packaging professional, I’m not afraid to admit that plastic can be a minefield, with conflicting messages and signals meaning customers often don’t know where to start. Our goal at M&S is to only use plastic where there is a clear...

Water for All: Dialling up collaboration

Since World Water Day in 2018, we have seen another year of extreme weather events, from large parts of Europe experiencing exceptional heat and drought through the summer of 2018 to Kerala suffering its worst flooding since the 1920s. Aside from shorter...