Go back to 2009, and Marks & Spencer (M&S) looked to be in some trouble as it announced the appointment of a new boss, Marc Bolland. The 150-year-old British retailer was still the biggest clothes seller in the country, and its (relatively upmarket) food sales were healthy. But the problems were mounting, reflected in a slide in general merchandise (including fashion) sales, and indeed in the company’s reputation for value and quality.

Mr Bolland responded with a three-year plan, including a major investment into becoming an omnichannel retailer. Results still look shaky—in the three months to June 2014 clothing sales fell by 0.6%, with online sales down by 8.1% following a lightly marketed relaunch of the company’s website. But the future looks much brighter, with a drive into omnichannel promising not just an increase in online sales but also a much broader, more modern, in-store experience.

In many ways the core problem was one of identity: in fashion, M&S was unsure whether it was competing against new arrivals such as Primark, appealing to a young, price-sensitive audience, or against the more upmarket John Lewis department store, appealing to richer, older folk. The search for younger, trendier buyers on top of the traditional older clientele fed a plethora of sub-brands, which simply confused shoppers. The quality of both merchandise and stores was mixed, with some heavy discounting to appeal to the youngsters. The product range and supply chain were both too complex. And the website was outsourced to Amazon, based on an old platform ill-suited to modern retailing.

Mr Bolland has spent heavily on sorting out the problems, refreshing the product range and the stores to reinvent M&S as a mid-priced competitor to John Lewis—accepting that the average age of M&S customers is around 50. As part of this the company has spent some £150m launching its own website and moving towards omnichannel. On the company’s own figures, only 6.7m of its 34m annual customers shop with M&S both in-store and online. Some 8.3m shop only in-store. And, rather remarkably, some 19m—56% of the total—only shop in-store with M&S, but shop with competitors online.#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title="">[1] If M&S can make its huge customer base shop online as well as in-store—and join things up to make it easier to buy items spotted in a shop over the website—then sales could surge.

To gear up for the launch of its own website, M&S recruited technical and online experts. “This gave us internal development capacity,” says Amanda Glover, senior corporate PR manager at M&S, adding that it is now easier to update, extend and upgrade the new platform. M&S also appointed a single person to take charge of omnichannel retailing. The website went live at the start of 2014, after having learnt some lessons from online specialists such as eBay, including the use of newsletters and collections to grab customers’ attention and loyalty. Initially, the results were disappointing, with online trading falling after a slightly clumsy relaunch. The new website was only lightly marketed, and existing customers had to re-register on the new site, causing confusion and a short-term fall in usage.

Nonetheless, the new website works well enough; it can be easily updated and developed and is central to M&S becoming more convincingly multichannel as it gears up for a genuinely omnichannel future. Distribution has been rethought, with e-commerce orders (including "click and collect") from a single giant warehouse as part of a wider rationalisation of the company’s fragmented distribution chain. And some flagship stores are embracing multichannel, with assistants wielding tablet computers so that they can use the website to offer in-store customers a wider product choice and kiosks to allow people to self-serve online.

This development has not turned M&S into a state-of-the-art omnichannel retailer yet—there is no sign of beacon technology to guide people around purchases and the store, for example, and many of the smaller stores use only parts of the new approach for lack of space. But enough has been done to forge a multichannel future for M&S, including the use of online technology to increase international sales in markets (for example, some of the smaller EU countries) where it lacks a store presence.