Seeing the rows of No7 products in a store in Wall Street, New York shows how significant the 2012 Boots and Walgreens deal was.

Seeing the rows of No7 products in a store in Wall Street, New York shows how significant the 2012 Boots and Walgreens deal was.

Boots, the national treasure which seems to have a store on every corner of the UK, is set for the big time in the US. After Walgreens acquired a 45% stake in Alliance Boots in 2012 the two businesses are expected to merge next year to create a pharmaceutical powerhouse.

It is now set to have a presence on every corner in New York, as it rolls out its own brands such as No7, across the Big Apple through Walgreens and sister fascia Duane Reade stores, which pepper the roads across Manhattan.

Boots plans to bring the British beauty regime to America, hoping to give customers the care they may get in a department store but the accessibility they find in a drugstore.

Indeed, drugstores are different in New York. Walgreen’s Duane Reade stores are a mix of grocery with health and beauty. Its flagship 40 Wall Street store has a sushi counter and a juice bar alongside a coffee bar and fresh fruit and veg. Shoppers can even buy beer and frozen food, while around the corner customers can have their shoes polished and pick up a prescription, and now browse Boots products.

Boots has certainly come a long way from its beginnings in Nottingham in 1849.

But despite clocking up the air miles to New York, Nottingham remains the heart of the business. US analysts and journalists have marvelled at Boots’ ability to research, develop, manufacture and sell its products all in its founding City.

It is the work carried out at the Nottingham laboratories which had women queuing up in their droves who wanted to buy the Protect & Perfect serum when it launched in 2007 due to its youth-enducing properties. Shoppers queued from 5am and at one point were restricted to buying one pot each.

Boots is yet to reach these dizzying heights of brand awareness in America, despite selling products in the Empire State building’s Walgreens store, but as a British visitor it is satisfying to know that those tubes of magic serum have not lost their heritage.

It is only a matter of time before Boots puts Nottingham on the map as it irons out those tired wrinkles across the city that never sleeps.