Mother Design stripped M&S Home and Lingerie packs back to information design

Three aims: make the packaging feel as stylish as the M&S brand, strengthen the core brand across thousands of products, and make ranges easier to navigate as self-service retail leaves packaging to support purchase decisions on its own.

Design packs like classic information design, not like rival home brands: typography, grid and hierarchy that make a complex range feel simple.

The team retained M&S's MS London typeface, previously used in inconsistent weights, unified across three weights with increased tracking; product titles standardised in caps, benefits in sentence case. Mother Design crafted a new numeral set, MS London Geo, and Monotype developed the final face. A benefits grid, black-and-white palette and colour-coded bedding size stickers aid shelf navigation; some plastic bags became premium-style boxes and duvets now ship in reusable cotton bags. Lingerie gained warm whites, charcoal and a colour-coded sizing system merging larger cup sizes into one range instead of a separate sub-brand.

Rollout had only just begun at publication; Mother Design reported anecdotal positive feedback from M&S colleagues and customers, with no sales data available yet. The system is the foundation internal M&S teams are meant to extend across other business units such as Kids.

Design Week reported on 8 October 2026 that Mother Design, the branding studio within the Mother agency, has created a new packaging system for Marks & Spencer's thousands of Home and Lingerie products, stripping back the retailer's sub-brands, range names, claims and competing hierarchies. Partner Kirsty Minns said the team did not look to adjacent retailers such as Zara or H&M for inspiration but to the long history of information design, because M&S's challenge is of a very different scale and complexity.

The system retains M&S's MS London typeface, previously used in inconsistent weights, now unified across three weights with increased tracking. Product titles are standardised in caps, benefits and body copy in sentence case for legibility at small sizes. Mother Design crafted a new numeral set, MS London Geo, optimised for large-scale use; Monotype, which originally built MS London, developed the final face. A benefits grid and a monochrome palette built around M&S black and white sharpen shelf presence, with colour-coded bedding size stickers.

Material changes followed: some products moved from plastic bags into premium-style boxes and duvets now come in reusable cotton bags. Lingerie packaging uses natural light, relaxed styling, warm whites and charcoal, and its colour-coded sizing brings all sizes into a single range rather than a standalone sub-brand for larger cup sizes. Rollout has only just started, so results are limited to anecdotal positive feedback, says partner Kathryn Jubrail; the system will extend to other categories but not Food, outside Mother's remit of Fashion, Home and Beauty.

Packaging has to work harder in increasingly self-service retail, where no staff member explains the ranges.

One typeface in three weights ends the inconsistent weights and hierarchies previously spread across many ranges.

Information design gives structure at M&S's scale, where the minimalism of homeware rivals like The White Company or Zara Home does not transfer.

Merging all lingerie sizes into one colour-coded range drops a sub-brand split that segregated larger cup sizes.

When a range outgrows styling, information design scales better than trend-led looks: grids, weights and hierarchy hold thousands of SKUs together without a new idea per shelf.

The system started rolling out in October 2026 and will appear in other categories except Food, as Mother's remit covers Fashion, Home and Beauty; internal M&S teams are to extend it to units such as Kids. The Mother family has worked with M&S since 2023 on visual style and flagship fashion campaigns, including the retailer's first-ever runway show in Ibiza for the summer 2026 collection. No sales or awareness results have been reported yet.