Marks & Spencer Store Designer Quits

Charles Jaggard, head of store design for Marks & Spencer, has left the London-based retailer after 22 years on the job. A company spokesperson said Jaggard had been “made redundant last week as part of a marketing restructuring.”

Jaggard's team of four designers had been slimmed down to just two positions. Each of the four had to apply for the two new jobs and the top job went to Justine Manley, who joined Marks & Spencer three years ago and had been heading the food hall design team. While the core clothing business of M&S has been in decline for the past three years, the food business has been posting healthy gains in sales and profits. Manley's most recent project has been the new suburban Simply Food convenience stores. Jaggard himself applied for the top job but, said the company, “wasn't successful.”

The ailing British retailer, which also owns U.S.-based Brooks Brothers apparel stores and Kings Super Markets (both of which it is in the process of selling), had been making the updating of its stores — which have been criticized as “dowdy reminders of shops in the former Soviet Union” – a crucial part of a strategy to win back disillusioned customers who now prefer to shop in more modern surroundings. Last year, Jaggard masterminded the group's roll-out of 23 concept stores that were supposed to shape the future look of the chain and boost business. But the plan backfired when sales made through the concept stores failed to reach the levels of the old outlets.

Earlier this year, Jaggard hired three retail design firms — Din Associates, 20-20 and Fitch — to come up with new plans to modernize the womenswear, menswear and footwear departments. They were briefed to come up with blue-sky ideas to overhaul the M&S image, but their projects have now been cancelled. “It is all on hold,” the company says.

M&S has now taken what it believes are the best ideas from the concept stores and is rolling them out nationally in a cheaper “renewal” program. It intends to revamp two-thirds of its 12.5 million square feet of selling space within nine months. Only two stores have so far been completed.

Marks & Spencer is still the UK's largest seller of clothing, but it has been forced to sell off operations around the globe in order to salvage its 300 or so Marks & Spencer stores in the UK. To that end, the company has been actively courting bidders for its more than 220 Brooks Brothers clothing stores in the US and Asia and its 25-store Kings Super Markets chain in New Jersey. It is also closing its catalog business.