Discover King’s Lynn is excited to introduce the Business Spotlight feature to our website! Each week Discover King’s Lynn will be shining a light on a local, town centre business to highlight the wide array of talent we are lucky enough to have here in King’s Lynn.
We will be asking each featured business a series of questions so you can get to know a little bit more about what they do and who they are.
This week, we were fortunate enough to speak with Andy Lightfoot, Store Manager of Marks & Spencer.
M&S has been a part of Kings Lynn’s high street for around 120 years. We cover many bases offering clothing, hospitality and of course our food hall. We also offer other services such as click and collect, order to home, flower and event cakes, and travel money.
We love being based centrally as it puts us right at the heart of the community and helps us to provide for a really diverse cross section of society. We have our regular customers who visit us daily on foot, our in-town professionals visiting us for lunch, our families who do their weekly shop with us and sometimes people just meeting up for a coffee and cake (Pre-COVID); there are so many different types of customer we cater for. This makes it unique and a great opportunity to appeal to an entire community.
M&S was founded over 130 years ago when the Jewish immigrant Michael Marks came to the north of England from his hometown of Slonim, Belarus. He arrived with little money and spoke poor English. Beginning as a pedlar, he soon owned a market stall in Kirkgate Market, Leeds. Tom Spencer decided to invest £300 and so on 28th September 1894 Marks and Spencer was born. The new stores were called “Penny Bazaars” keeping the penny price slogan.
With some other similar brands sadly departing King’s Lynn town centre, M&S is now a bit stand alone in what we offer. We are an incredibly well-known brand and our heritage and history do a lot of the groundwork for us in bringing the customer through our doors. Our iconic products and high levels of customer service give the customer peace of mind and encourages them to return to us regularly. Many customers talk about their families shopping with us for generations and it’s important that we try and maintain the high bar that is expected at M&S.
Currently, 75 people work at Kings Lynn M&S and we’re a close-knit community in our own right! There are quite a few colleagues who have worked in the store for many years and this creates a great atmosphere of loyalty, knowledge, and experience. Our two longest-serving employees have each completed 44 years of service! Customers recognise colleagues and interact with them as they have done for many years. Take our bra fitting service for example – our fitters have fitted daughters, mothers and grandmothers all from the same family! The team in M&S Kings Lynn strive to deliver what the customer wants, representing the brand but at the same time trying to make the store feel comfortable and local.
I have worked for the business for 13 years. I think my biggest love of the job is the customer. Retail is about providing a service for a customer to the best of your ability and ensuring that customer leaves your business with what they want, presented how they want and also with a reason to return. Having a customer tell me how much they love the store and how long they have been shopping with us is one of the most rewarding parts of the job.
We are collaborative, sticklers for detail and obsessed with giving our customers what they want. We don’t always get it right and the things out of our control – such as product availability or style or taste – are harder to influence. However, what is in our control – atmosphere, communication, cleanliness, and safety – are areas of work we take very seriously.
The future looks strong with a clear exit strategy from COVID. We will eventually open all our trading space as currently the top floor is closed including our Customer Café. We are under no illusion that retail is evolving and we will need to change with it. We need to accept more customers are shopping online. However, there is still a big demand for a physical store and will continue to strive for excellence as we navigate through 2021.
I am hoping that we see some rejuvenation and an injection of reasons to come to Kings Lynn. The high street is no longer just a row of shops, it has spaces between those shops that could be used effectively to offer unique and attractive experiences for visitors. As we steer our way out of COVID and into the “new normal”, it would be good to see the return of events and attractions to the town centre so society can engage and interact with each other and hopefully pop into the shops while they are here!
That agility and pace are skills that may be underestimated. We had to move quickly in how we traded throughout 2020, whether that was closing trading footage, furloughing colleagues, keeping our customers and of course colleagues safe, and being aware of the effects of 2020. Every colleague and every customer has had or is having their own “COVID journey”, so being mindful of that was a big learning. How to help and guide people through their personal, emotional circumstances also gave valuable learnings.
Mine would be Jack Daniels and coke!
Marks & Spencer in King’s Lynn is open through Lockdown for essential items, Mon – Sat (8am – 6pm) and Sunday (10am – 4pm). You can keep up to date with your local M&S team by following their Facebook page here.
Check back next week to see who Discover King’s Lynn will be shining the spotlight on next!
Please note, the ideas and opinions expressed within this article are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the ideas and opinions of Discover King’s Lynn, the King’s Lynn BID.