This Valentine’s Day, Retail Week looks at the retailers that have formed long-lasting unions be it through mergers, acquisitions or partnerships.

Tesco and Booker

Tesco stunned the market when it shelled out £3.7bn to acquire wholesale giant Booker in 2017 – and the businesses have gone from strength to strength since joining forces.

Tesco and booker merger

The deal has given Tesco a sizable footprint in the growing foodservice market. Booker already supplies the likes of Wagamama and Carluccio’s and is now in the process of snapping up Best Food Logistics, which counts KFC, Pret A Manger, and Burger King, among its customer base.

Tesco has also leveraged Booker’s proposition by stocking larger pack sizes of ambient goods such as tea bags, pasta and rice in some of its larger supermarkets.

At its half-year results in October, Tesco said it had delivered synergies “ahead of plan” and was “confident” of hitting its cumulative targets of £140m by the end of 2019/20 and £200m by 2020/21.

During that six month period, Booker’s sales increased 2.4% on a like-for-like basis to £3.1bn while Tesco’s edged up 0.1% to £22.4bn, underscoring the scale of the turnaround overseen by boss Dave Lewis.

Sainsbury’s and Argos

Jaws dropped when Sainsbury’s boss Mike Coupe made an audacious advance for Argos back in 2016 but almost four years later and the union is strong.

Sainsbury s Nine Elms Argos shopper

Argos attracted Coupe because of its strength in general merchandise and multichannel prowess, particularly its market-leading logistics,which would complement Sainsbury’s own strengths and would allow it fend off the threat of Amazon.

Coupe’s plan paid off. Since the 2016 acquisition, Sainsbury’s has proven the most resilient of the big four and Argos – or Sainsbury’s Argos as it’s now known (the retailer has opted for a double-barrelled name since hitching up) – has helped prop up performance.

The deal has brought many synergies. Some Argos stores have shut since the acquisition and it has opened 300 shop-in-shops inside Sainsbury’s stores. The retailer had predicted making £120m in cost savings within three years of the deal completing but revealed in 2018 that this would exceed £160m.

The real marriages made in retail

Chrissie Rucker OBE and Nick Wheeler

The White Company founder Chrissie Rucker OBE and Charles Tyrwhitt tycoon Nick Wheeler are retail’s most entrepreneurial power couple.

The pair met at a party in their twenties when Rucker worked in PR for Clarins and Wheeler was a few years into his new venture, Charles Tyrwhitt, which launched in 1986 when he was still a university student.

Rucker was inspired to follow her boyfriend’s entrepreneurial lead when she was redecorating his house and found it near-impossible to find high-quality white linens on the high street.

With the help of a £6,000 inheritance from her grandmother, Rucker launched The White Company at just 24 years old.

Since then the two businesses have gone from strength to strength. Charles Tyrwhitt sales were just shy of £200m last year while The White Company sales hit £273m.

Home is a country mansion in Buckinghamshire, where the couple spend most of the week working together in their shared home office to run both businesses.

The retail power couple has four children and is worth an estimated £452m, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.

Mark Neale and Michelle Feeney

Another real marriage formed in retail is that of Mountain Warehouse founder Mark Neale and his wife Michelle Feeney, former chief executive of self-tanning brand Saint Tropez.

Feeney and Neale met while she was helping to launch make-up titan Mac. She was based in New York and the pair endured two years of transatlantic dating before the beauty lifer returned to London in the early 2000’.

Feeney went on to lead businesses such as St Tropez and PZ Cussons’ beauty division before setting up her own brand, Floral Street, in 2017.

The brand has one store (just a stone’s throw from the iconic street itself in London’s Covent Garden) and supply partnerships with John Lewis and Harvey Nichols.

In the intervening years, Neale has stuck with his own business venture Mountain Warehouse, which he founded in 1997 and now operates 400 stores across nine countries, with plans to open a further 50 this year.

Tamara and Simon Hill-Norton, founders, Sweaty Betty

Tamara Hill-Norton founded Sweaty Betty aged 28 after being unimpressed with the activewear available for women, which she found dark and boring.

Determined to change it, she teamed up with boyfriend (now husband) Simon, who was working as a management consultant, to start Sweaty Betty, opening their first store in Notting Hill back in 1998.

Now the brand has more than 50 stores and sales exceeding £50m.

Tamara describes Simon as the “business and finance brain” while she takes care of brand and product. She is creative director, while he was chief executive until last year when he stepped up to chairman following the appointment of Julia Strauss.

The pair have three children and split their time between London and West Wittering in West Sussex.

Walgreens Boots Alliance

The transatlantic health and beauty giant was created by a series of unions orchestrated by one of retail’s most ambitious matchmakers, Stefano Pessina.

Pessina burst onto the retail scene in 2006 to drive the merger of high street titan Boots with wholesale pharmaceutical giant Alliance.

Stefano Pessina at Retail Week Live 2015

The deal created Alliance Boots, a pan-European “pharmacy-led” retail and drugs distribution group, leveraging Alliance’s scale and Boots brand equity. The move made Boots the number one retail pharmacy player in the UK and gave the two groups extra muscle to buy pharmaceutical products at lower prices and pass the savings on to consumers.

It was a deal that allowed Boots to square up to the supermarkets, which had been muscling on its market share, and reduced Alliance’s exposure to the drug distribution market, which was under pricing pressure from European legislation.

But Pessina wasn’t done yet. He turned the marriage into a ménage à trois when he sold the business to US giant Walgreens in 2012, creating Walgreens Boots Alliance, a business he became the biggest shareholder in. 

Amazon and Morrisons

Amazon and Morrisons is less of a marriage and more of a civil partnership.

The supermarket was an ecommerce laggard and keen to catch up with its big four rivals online so in 2016 signed a supply deal with Amazon, which was keen to make waves in grocery.

Amazon Fresh Morrisons

The partnership saw Morrison supply 800 fresh, frozen and ambient products to be sold on Amazon Prime Now and Amazon Pantry.

Morrisons products now act as the core of Amazon’s grocery offer and the partnership seems to go strength to strength.

Originally only available in London, the Prime Now service, now named Morrisons at Amazon, has extended across the home counties, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Newcastle, Liverpool, Sheffield and Portsmouth, and is set to be rolled out in more locations.

Amazon customers can place same-day delivery orders for groceries picked and packed in their local Morrisons store, sometimes completed in less than an hour.

The partnership gives Morrisons a capital-light way to grow its online offer and gives Amazon credibility in fresh food.

Sports Direct and Flannels

Sports Direct founder Mike Ashley has made a reputation for himself with acquisitions that raise eyebrows across the industry – and snapping up a majority stake in luxury nine-store retailer Flannels in 2012 was no exception.

However, in the years since it has proved to be one of the retail mogul’s cannier acquisitions.

6 - Flannels Interior Press Release - Photos by www.theotzia.co.uk

Flannels has quietly gone from strength to strength under Sports Direct’s ownership and expanded into new locations.

Last year the business opened a multi-storey 18,000 sq ft London flagship in the West End, with £10m ploughed into the launch.

And the business shows no signs of slowing down with 45 Flannels across the UK and plans to open a further 16 by the end of the group’s financial year.

The success of Flannels and its loyal legion of fans has even inspired Ashley to drive the Sports Direct group’s whole proposition upmarket as part of its highly-publicised ‘elevation’ strategy.

Sometimes the right partner can make us want to be better people.

Pets at Home and Vets4Pets

Specialist retailer Pets at Home acquired Vets4Pets, which ran 93 veterinary practices, back in 2013 for £40m to bolster its existing in-store vets.

The partnership enabled Pets at Home to give a more rounded offer for pet-owners and paved the way for the retailer to focus on services, which continues to give shoppers a reason to come to store.

Peggy Pets at Home

Since then it has made a plethora of further vet acquisitions and has branched into pet grooming, adoption services and dog walking.

It’s these services that fend of the threat of online retailers and make Pets at Home ’Amazon-proof’, according to boss Peter Pritchard.

The strategy has proven successful. In its last half-year, pre-tax profits surged more than four-fold, powered by both its vets and services business. Revenues from its veterinary division jumped an impressive 19.6% over the half.