Debenhams this week revealed it is revising its promotional strategy as first-half profits plunged owing to excessive discounting. Retail Week speaks to boss Michael Sharp.

Why are you cutting the number of promotions Debenhams runs?

It’s clearly a strength so we can’t, and neither would we want to, move away from our promotions. The issue is that we need more light and shade in the calendar so that some of the smaller events don’t dilute the bigger events.

Might your customers resist the change?

Our customers are telling us that they love the main promotions. They see them as offering value for money. But the smaller events, they don’t see them as adding great value.

Are you prepared for sales to take a hit?

I expect to see no material impact on sales but an improvement in margin. Since Christmas we’ve been less promotional around beauty and focused our efforts on our loyalty programme Beauty Club, and we saw a very good performance on beauty.

You’ve said that 10% of your space is inefficient. Why are you opening new stores?

There are a number of markets where we don’t trade, where we could. Places like Watford, Kingston, Brent Cross, Cribbs Causeway. Just because you’ve got too much space in Basildon doesn’t mean you wouldn’t open a store in Brent Cross.

Clearly we need the right deal and we’d need to configure them for the multichannel world. They need to be smaller on average going forward because the internet is growing.

You’re ramping up your multichannel spend. Why is this only happening now?

It has come into greater focus because of what we learnt over Christmas in terms of [customers wanting] convenience. The reality is that we’re behind others in the marketplace. Next is clearly the leader and they started the journey a long time before us. We’re on track for our £600m [online sales] target, we just need to get there quicker.

Why did Sports Direct buy a stake in Debenhams?

You’d have to ask them that. We’ve specifically talked to them about the sportswear opportunity at Debenhams.