By Christmas 2021, M&S will serve online customers from Castle Donington, Bradford and through its stores which act as micro-fulfilment centres. M&S said the re-engineering of its supply chain, including the extension of Bradford to permanently improve online capacity, is an important enabler to M&S’s MS2 division. The creation of the MS2 division reflects the shift to online shopping driven by the pandemic. M&S online sales rose 34% in the first half of the financial year, with app downloads in 2020 up over 200% and it now has over 10 million Sparks members. M&S opened its Bradford Distribution Centre in 2010 – a carbon neutral building which achieved a BREEAM (the leading environmental assessment method for buildings) Excellent rating. The Bradford site currently delivers both clothing and food to M&S stores in partnership with logistics experts XPO. The new investment will use existing vacant space within the centre to create a new online warehouse for M&S.com, supporting the retailer’s Castle Donington online warehouse and in-store pick model. The investment in Bradford follows a successful trial over Christmas where Bradford’s colleagues manually picked products from the existing automated distribution centre to service online orders. At its peak, the site was dispatching 14,000 items a day. 300 new jobs will be created.