How did a century-old company that nearly fell behind the times come back?
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
I just saw an ad for Marks & Spencer (M&S), and my first reaction was:
M&S still exists?
And it looks like it's been doing pretty well lately.
When I studied in the UK, you'd see M&S in almost every shopping mall and on every high street. It's a British retailer with more than 140 years of history, selling clothes, underwear, homeware, and food.
But honestly, I always thought of it as a brand for my parents' generation, or even my grandparents'.
So I looked it up.
The more I dug, the more I realised it's a classic, and very successful, turnaround company.
Revenue held, profit kept shrinking
It turns out M&S had been sliding since 2013.
Young shoppers went to Zara, Uniqlo and Next, and later to online brands like ASOS. M&S slowly lost market share, and slowly became a store everyone knew but fewer and fewer people wanted to walk into.
At the time it had close to a thousand stores worldwide. Many had been open for twenty or thirty years in great locations, but the lighting, layout and displays inside were stuck in another era.
The British press once described it like this:
"Walking into M&S felt like walking into the 1990s."
The financials are even more interesting.
From 2016 to 2020, revenue held at around £10 billion. On the surface, nothing looked wrong.
But profit before tax fell all the way from nearly £689 million to only about £50 million during the pandemic.
Revenue didn't drop noticeably, yet profit kept shrinking.
That is often more dangerous than falling revenue.
By the pandemic, many people genuinely thought M&S might become the next Debenhams.
What surprised me most is that after the pandemic, it came back step by step.
Growth returned in 2022. More growth in 2023. More in 2024. By 2025, profit before tax was back near £900 million.
Five years straight down. Four years straight up.
The share price won back the market's confidence, and M&S re-entered the FTSE 100.
Subtraction, product, and a flywheel driven by food
So I got curious.
What exactly did it get right?
At first I assumed the answer would be AI, digital transformation, e-commerce or marketing.
The more I read, the more I found it was none of those.
The real change was that it rethought its entire business model.
First, it started subtracting, aggressively.
Not adding more products, not opening more stores, but constantly removing complexity.
Closing underperforming stores. Cutting SKUs. Reorganising the supply chain. Reorganising the organisation.
It used to want to sell everything. Then it started focusing on what really mattered.
Second, it made its products good again.
It didn't try to become another Zara. It didn't try to out-cheap Shein.
It repositioned itself: reliable quality, modern design, reasonable price, so customers felt again that it was "worth buying".
But what impressed me most was food.
I always thought of M&S as a company that sells clothes.
I later realised it's more like a retailer that uses food to build a shopping habit, and then uses that habit to carry the whole brand.
You don't buy clothes every week.
But you do buy food. Ready meals, sandwiches, desserts, daily food...
Customers come back every week.
And when customers keep coming back, the brand never leaves their lives.
Food isn't just about selling food. Its job is to create frequency.
Clothing, home and beauty raise basket size and profit.
The whole business model starts to form a flywheel.
Food brings more footfall. More footfall brings more clothing sales. As profit rises, the company keeps investing in product, supply chain and brand. The products get better. Customers come back even more often.
And the flywheel starts turning on its own.
Another thing I think many people overlook is own brand.
For many retailers today, the biggest asset is actually traffic.
For M&S, the biggest asset is the brand.
Most of what it sells is its own product.
Buy underwear, and you remember M&S. Buy a sandwich, you remember M&S. Buy a ready meal, you still remember M&S.
The more products it sells, the stronger the brand gets.
The stronger the brand, the more often customers come back.
And the flywheel keeps turning.
Archie Norman: removing what blocks growth, one by one
But as I kept reading, I realised what I really admire isn't just M&S.
It's the man behind it.
Archie Norman.
People in British business have described him this way:
"When a great company is in trouble, call Archie Norman."
Most people successfully rescue one company in their lifetime, if that.
He has done it again and again, bringing companies back when others had already written them off.
After arriving at M&S, he said something that stuck with me:
"M&S does not have a God-given right to exist."
A company with 140 years of history has no natural right to keep existing.
If customers no longer need you, you'll disappear just the same.
There's another line of his I really like:
"Failing companies develop their own narrative. That narrative is your enemy."
A company that starts to fail slowly creates its own story.
The market is bad. The economy is bad. Competitors are subsidising. Customers have changed.
All of these may be true.
But once a company starts believing its own story, it stops changing.
Finally, what I like most is how he understands turnarounds.
He said:
"Turnaround is not about finding a new growth engine. It is about removing, one by one, the things inside the company that are preventing growth."
A turnaround isn't about finding a new growth engine. It's about removing, one by one, the things inside the company that are holding growth back.
After studying M&S, my biggest takeaway isn't how successful it became later.
It's that it was willing to admit the methods that once made it successful no longer worked, and then relearn, refocus and rebuild its own flywheel.
Many companies don't lose to their competitors.
They lose to the successful self they used to be.