The Salesforce
Retail Leader
of the Year

Carl Cowling,
Chief executive,
WHSmith

Interview by Hugh Radojev. Photographs by Erroll Jones｜March 30, 2023

How Carl Cowling piloted WHSmith to new heights

As WHSmith chief executive Carl Cowling wins the Salesforce Retail Leader of the Year Award, we meet the man who led the high street and travel specialist to not just survive but thrive following the pandemic

Just three short years ago, when countries locked down as the pandemic took hold, WHSmith was grounded. But chief executive Carl Cowling has piloted the famous name to new heights. The 230-year-old retailer has increasingly flown its domestic nest and become an international travel retail powerhouse with a presence from Dallas to Dubai, providing shoppers with far more than a newspaper or thriller to read in-flight.

The lack of turbulence along the way has been remarkable. At the outset of the pandemic, few retailers looked to be in a worse spot than WHSmith. With more than 1,100 stores predominantly on high streets and in domestic and international travel hubs, the effects were severe.

For the year ending in August 2020, WHSmith swung to a £69m loss after group sales plunged 33%. As revenues collapsed overnight, the retailer faced what could have been an existential threat.

Cowling, who had taken the reins of the business less than a year before, faced a daunting situation. “It was a rollercoaster, those first 12 months,” he acknowledges.

He had to quickly master the art of remote mass communication. “Prior to Covid, I think I’d used Microsoft Teams or Zoom a handful of times,” he remembers. “During that first lockdown, we had to get used to a whole new way of doing all of our communications.”

That was particularly important because, due to the mass store closures, WHSmith had a lot of furloughed staff. “I spent a lot of time talking to both the shop and head office colleagues who had been furloughed. I was conscious we needed to work hard to make sure that the people who were being furloughed felt valued,” he says.

While WHSmith’s high street and travel stores were shut, hundreds of branches with Post Offices and inside hospitals still needed running as their services became more essential than ever.

“At the very beginning of Covid, a lot of my focus was on making sure staff in those stores had PPE and then working out all the one-way systems and social distancing,” he remembers.

He also needed to address matters at a corporate level. “We had the equity raise with our shareholders because the first lockdown was very open-ended. If you’re a retailer and you’re not having any revenue, you have to shore up your finances pretty quickly,” he says with some understatement.

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“WHSmith is an amazing brand. We have always been big in travel but we’re now very much a global travel retailer”

Travel focus

At the same time, Cowling was pushing ahead with the retailer’s ambitious international travel growth plans, even though no one knew when, or even if, mass train and air travel would return.

The building blocks of an increasingly international travel strategy had been put in place when WHSmith first acquired American travel brand InMotion in 2018. Cowling was at the helm when it bought another American travel and casino locations specialist Marshall Retail Group (MRG) in 2019.

He credits that unwavering focus on expanding the travel arm as the reason why WHSmith did not just get through Covid-19 but came out the other side a bigger and better business.

In the 20 weeks to January 14, 2023, WHSmith group revenues jumped 41% and travel sales soared 77% year on year. Compared with pre-pandemic figures, group sales were up 20%, while travel sales soared 48%.

“What we’re doing with WHSmith is transitioning from what’s traditionally been called a news, books, convenience store model, into a one-stop shop for travel essentials,” he says.

“WHSmith is an amazing brand. We have always been big in travel but we’re now very much a global travel retailer.”

While Cowling is humble about his own efforts during this time, he won the admiration of his peers including the judges of this award.

One says: “Carl’s definitely had his hands full, not just getting WHSmith through Covid, but rebounding this quickly. He continued to invest in his store formats in places like airports at home and further afield, and he’s been very brave with some of the decisions he’s made.”

The store that best encapsulates Cowling and WHSmith’s ambition is at Heathrow Terminal 2. Refurbished in 2021, the branch epitomises WHSmith’s current direction – the entire wall of one of the head office boardrooms is covered in a picture of it.

“Heathrow Terminal 2 is the perfect example of what we’re trying to achieve,” says Cowling. “We’ve got a huge range of health and beauty, a pharmacy and a big range of tech accessories. Customers love that – rushing through an airport or train station and having all of the essentials they need under one roof.”

“Carl’s definitely had his hands full, not just getting WHSmith through Covid, but rebounding this quickly. He continued to invest in his store formats in places like airports at home and further afield, and he’s been very brave with some of the decisions he’s made”

Retail Week Awards judge

Integrating technology into the offer harks back to Cowling’s retail beginnings at electricals retailer Comet, where he worked in the summer holidays while studying economics at university.

Cowling joined Dixons in the early 2000s and he credits his time there as being hugely formative to the retail leader he’s become today.

“Electricals has always been very hard retailing,” he observes. “I came up in an environment where you had to look after every pound. You had to have such a strong customer proposition to keep your head above water.

“I think back to my days at Dixons, particularly the pace of decision making, of execution, of getting things right and right the first time – the Dixons that I remember back in the day was good at that. All of what I know about retail I learned first-hand back when I was young.”

The Dixons/WHSmith connection runs deep. One of his predecessors, Kate Swann, who is widely credited with reviving WHSmith two decades ago, was also a Dixons alumnus.

Cowling says: “I have worked with some great retailers. A lot of great retailers came through Dixons.”

After leadership stints at Comet and Carphone Warehouse, Cowling joined WHSmith and ran both the high street and travel arms before being promoted to chief executive five years later, hand-picked by the retail’s board over a strong list of external candidates as they felt he was best placed to push on with WHSmith’s growth plans.

And push on he has, particularly overseas. WHSmith and its brands are now in 32 countries across Europe, Asia and Australasia, and expanding.

In Spain, the retailer opened its first store there in Alicante six years ago. It now has 52 stores dotted across Spanish airports. WHSmith has achieved that even when, as Cowling points out, post-pandemic travel numbers remain well down on 2019 levels.

“Air travel is still a way off full recovery. I think as we get into this summer, there will be more capacity in airports and more capacity in airlines. We’ll see passenger numbers improve.

“I don’t think they’ll get to 2019 levels this summer, but we’ll get to being down by high single digits versus 2019,” he says.

“Even if some people do tighten their belts and think differently about their holidays, there will still be a lot of growth to go for.”

“We’ve still got a great high street business. WHSmith has and always will have a unique place on British high streets. We’re the hub of the high street”

Carl Cowling

For all Cowling and WHSmith’s successes since the pandemic, the retailer has still faced criticism.

Some have also been critical of Cowling for moving away from the brand’s high street roots, where its stores have been accused of looking tired and run down.

Cowling counters: “We’ve still got a great high street business. WHSmith has and always will have a unique place on British high streets. We’re the hub of the high street because we bring together lots of things – the Post Office, stationery, books. Often we’re on streets where there are few other retail propositions, so we can be a bit of an anchor.”

But he is clear on where the future of the business lies. He says: “It doesn’t make sense to us or to our stakeholders to invest in the high street when we’ve got this great proposition in travel. That’s where our focus is and that’s where the growth of WHSmith will be.”

Cowling is ambitious on that front. WHSmith occupies about 12% of the US airport retail market space – a figure he wants to grow to 20% in the next four years. He also sees huge potential in Europe where WHSmith’s market share is in the single digits.

“We plan to very aggressively win and open shops across the world,” says Cowling. “And we’re still winning business in this country. We’ve just opened a new brand [Curi.o.city] in Gatwick Airport, more focused on local souvenirs and a fashion offer. We hope to open a few more in the UK, so there is a lot going on everywhere.”

The world has become almost unrecognisable from how it was in 2019. Under Cowling’s leadership, so has WHSmith. With its increased focus on international travel, the sky really is the limit for the brand – which is a testament to Cowling’s leadership in some of the toughest times.