Green declares war on Marks

PHILIP GREEN launched his assault on High Street rival Marks & Spencer with a multimillion pound advertising campaign at the unveiling of his new Bhs autumn collection.

Green's offensive came as a triple blow for Marks, which has been forced to rubbish talk of a profits warning and which lost its clothing supremo Yasmin Yusuf just days after her much-anticipated Limited Collection went on sale.

Marks shares fell 2 3/4p to 352p though the company insisted it was not about to sound the earnings alarm. That is still well short of the 400p a share, or £9.1bn, which Green offered for the retailer in the summer.

After losing that battle, the billionaire shopkeeper promised Marks' chief executive Stuart Rose a fight this autumn. Marks already faces stiff competition from the supermarkets - and recently lost its clothing crown, by volume of sales, to Asda.

Green has also pledged to spend £35m to promote its Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Burton stores which will attack Marks on yet another front.

Green mapped out his vision for Bhs with the first TV advertising campaign in a decade. It will cost £3m and will be accompanied by a series of billboard posters urging customers to 'feel Bhs'.

He also weighed in with a £20m pre-Christmas facelift for the 50 top-performing stores and wants to squeeze another £250m of sales from existing floorspace.

Five new Bhs stores will open in the current financial year and Green and his team are looking at a further 10 to 14 High Street sites.

The autumn collection, meanwhile, is designed as a value-for-money range to blow Marks' more expensive collections out of the water.

It was unveiled amid flashing disco lights, screaming music and dry ice while the models were greeted by the over-enthusiastic whoops and cheers of hundreds of Bhs managers.

In the calm before the floor show, Green told those workers that Bhs still held a 'special place in his heart' and that he had not been prepared to over-pay for M&S. 'We would not jeopardise the business, any other business or for that matter anybody's livelihood just for an ego trip,' he said.

Green's offensive could not have come at a worse time for Marks. Yusuf's exit 'by mutual consent' after three-and-a-half years as creative director of womenswear was expected. Asda's Kate Bostock arrives shortly as head of womenswear.

Yusuf is expected to receive a pay-off adding to what is already a fairly large redundancy bill. Former chairman Luc Vandervelde, departed chief executive Roger Holmes, clothing director David Norgrove and ousted stores boss Vittorio Radice each received substantial settlements before heading for the revolving door at Baker Street.

Marks would not comment on the compensation issue and simply said Yusuf was leaving to resume her career as a solo designer.

Rose said: 'Yasmin has made a significant contribution to womenswear. She has improved our design capability, developed our approach to top to toe dressing and played an important part in launching Limited Collection.'

Yusuf said she wanted to develop her own clothing line adding that she had been at Marks during a 'fascinating period'. She had transformed the fashion range at High Street retailer Warehouse before heading to Marks in April 2001.

There she was charged with the difficult task of giving a new cutting edge to Marks' more staid design and her Limited line of women's clothes met with critical acclaim at its launch last week. But according to some observers, her posh skirts and blouses are not exactly flying off the shelves.

Her departure was not entirely unexpected and will not be mourned in the City where she has been labelled 'NBG' - a City colloquialism for 'no bloody good'.

Evolution Beeson Gregory analyst Nick Bubb said: 'The timing of the news coincides with the first results of the new autumn range and we must confess that the clothes weren't exactly flying off the rails when we had a quick look around the Marble Arch store.'