It may be 2025, but, somehow, smell-o-vision still isn’t a thing. If you want to test out Jo Malone’s delicious scents of lime basil and mandarin, pomegranate noir or pear and sweet pea, you’re going to have to go to a real-life store to do it.
So, while other brands shut up shop and prioritise online stores, the fragrance brand, owned by Estée Lauder, is committed to investing in physical branches. It’s aiming to open 12 new stores in small towns across the UK by mid-2025.
Jo Dancey, senior vice president at Jo Malone, told the Financial Times: ‘There was a level of pause though Covid... [but] we always believed [physical retail] was coming back, and now we’re full force into the investment.’
She added: ‘People are more local than they’ve ever been before, and that is something that we’re tapping into. We’re also going to spaces where there isn’t necessarily another retailer.’
The locations of the new stores haven’t been set in stone and we don’t know exactly when they’ll appear. But we can tell you that towns in the running include Wilmslow, Farnham, Market Harborough, Leamington Spa and Chichester.
The new stores will bring Jo Malone’s number of UK stores from 37 to 45. It hopes to boost that even further to 51 by mid-2026.
UK high streets in 2025
There’s a bunch of other new openings to look forward to as we go into 2025. Nando’s is opening 14 new restaurants, Gail’s is opening 40 new bakeries across the UK, Co-op is opening 75 new shops, Aldi is launching 30 new supermarkets, Sephora plans to launch 20 new UK stores and UNIQLO recently opened its first Scottish outlet.
Sadly, we’ll also be saying goodbye to some high street favourites. From Homebase to WH Smith, here’s the full list of UK high street closures confirmed for the next 12 months.
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