1. From a Penny Bazaar to "St Michael" (1884)
Marks & Spencer began about as far from a Hong Kong department store as it's possible to get: a single market stall in Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1884, run by Michael Marks β a Jewish refugee who had left Bialystok, in Russian-occupied Poland, to work as a hawker in the English countryside. His stall's sign famously read, "Don't ask the price β it's a penny."
In 1894, Marks took on a business partner, Thomas Spencer, and the company slowly grew from open-air stalls into proper shops. In 1928, the company registered a brand name that would define it for the next seventy years: St Michael. For decades, almost everything sold in an M&S store carried that label.
2. Arriving in Hong Kong β First by Proxy, Then Directly
Long before Marks & Spencer ran a single store of its own in the territory, Hong Kong shoppers already knew the St Michael label β sold through the trading house Dodwell & Co., which held the local M&S franchise and operated stores under it, including one at Ocean Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui.
That changed in 1988. As part of a much broader push into international markets β the same year M&S entered the United States by acquiring the Brooks Brothers and Kings Super Markets chains β the company opened its first two directly-owned stores in Hong Kong, at the Ocean Centre shopping mall in Tsim Sha Tsui. For the first time, "Marks & Spencer" in Hong Kong meant Marks & Spencer itself, not a licensee selling on its behalf.
3. A British Food Hall in Every Corner
Clothing brought M&S to Hong Kong, but food kept it there. A successful trial of its "Food to Go" range across four shops led the company to open its first standalone M&S Food store in Wan Chai β its first international shop anywhere to combine fresh, chilled food with its usual ambient grocery range, complete with an in-store bakery and hot food counter.
Over the following decades, M&S spread across Hong Kong's shopping malls: Times Square and Windsor House in Causeway Bay, Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong, and East Point City in Tseung Kwan O among them β becoming, for many Hong Kong households, the reliable source for British biscuits, tea, and ready meals not found on local supermarket shelves.
4. Full Circle: Handed to a New Franchise Partner (2018)
In 2018, thirty years after taking direct control of its Hong Kong operations, Marks & Spencer sold its Hong Kong and Macau stores to Al-Futtaim Group, a long-standing Dubai-based franchise partner β the same kind of arrangement, in essence, that Dodwell had once provided decades earlier, just with a different company holding the licence.
Today, close to twenty M&S stores operate across Hong Kong under that franchise β a British high-street name that arrived here twice, once through someone else's shopfront and once through its own, and today sits, once again, in someone else's hands.
