ARCHIE NORMAN INTERVIEW
‘I wouldn’t shop here, Dad’: the comment that transformed M&S
As chairman Archie Norman has binned the frumpy knickers and slaughtered sacred cows. Now its share price has doubled and he wants to go global
ILLUSTRATION BY PETE BAKER
The Sunday Times
It wasn’t so long ago that complaining about Marks & Spencer was something of a national pastime. Middle England had grown weary of the drab shops, frumpy clothes and the tangible drop in quality from a retailer that was for so long synonymous with it.
When Archie Norman arrived as chairman in 2017, M&S had few answers to the threats posed by nimble online fashion retailers and sharper high street operators such as Next and Primark. Even its food business had gone off the boil.
Yet in 2023, five years after Norman warned that M&S had become a “burning platform”, the flames have been well and truly extinguished. With both food and fashion firmly in growth, M&S’s share price more than doubled to 273p this
