SEAN ELLIOTT PHOTOGRAPHY- M&S NEWCASTLE-69

Rob Slone was talking to Stephen Jones

The store is right in the city centre. Who is your typical shopper? It’s a proper old-school high street store. We’re iconic within the north east as Newcastle was the second ever M&S store to open. We’ve been here 93 years. We still operate the original market stall in town, which is unique. Our food hall is within the top 10 in the business. We don’t really have a single customer demographic. Some have shopped with us for 50 years, but increasingly we’re seeing more younger customers from the two universities.

You don’t have a car park. How does that influence trade? It means we attract more of a top-up shop customer. We offer a collect by car service from the back of the shop for anyone needing a full trolley shop. Peak trade tends to be towards the end of the day, with people looking for dinner for tonight. Our basket size is smaller than surrounding M&S stores, but we do more transactions.

Has there been any investment recently? Our food hall was renewed a couple of years ago. We have a much bigger and better fresh produce section which are our most popular lines. Our in-store bakery is number two in the business.

What have you made of the new Nutrient Dense and Only… ranges? They’ve brought so many people into shop, particularly the Only Ingredients range. They’re not just for January: as ranges they’re resonating permanently as more customers bring a health lens to what they are buying. Generally, M&S has become brilliant at innovation that taps into viral trends. The current viral line is a Speckled Egg Cookie, it launched just under two weeks ago and we sell about a thousand bags a day. We’ve literally had congregations of kids queueing to buy cookies.

Store staff were “a delight to deal with” and availability was 100%. What drives those standards? We have 300 colleagues, 150 of them in our food hall. We also bring in extra resource for matchdays at St James’s Park, which is just up the road. No two days are the same, which is what I love most about this shop. I’m high energy, and one of the points of difference I try to bring to work is fun. If you can balance that with also giving clarity over what colleagues need to deliver you get more buy-in. We have a good time but work hard at the same time. For availability, we work on coaching good stockpile accuracy and the importance of recording products correctly every single day.

You’re a familiar face from the Inside M&S documentary. Tell us about your career in retail. That was when I was manager at Silverlink in 2022. My friends joke that you could cut me open and I’d bleed M&S. I’ve been here 23 years in all sorts of roles and absolutely love it. I started working as a cards and wrap advisor in a one-off shop concept called M&S Lifestore. I spent a few years selling suits then moved into leadership roles through the graduate scheme. It was a bit of dream job to get when I landed here in June because of the size and status of the store. I’m responsible for the whole shop, which includes our food hall, fashion and beauty and our café. Even though it’s been a few months, it’s probably been my favourite job of my career so far.

What’s your biggest challenge as a store team? Making sure we are being relentless every day in order to maintain those high standards. As a city centre store, we are so busy, processing thousands of transactions a week, so if we take our foot off the pedal, even for an hour, it can take hours to pull it back.