We’re placing the glitz into WH Smith, says boss Carl Cowling

It’s a busy morning at Birmingham Airport and families with their roller suitcases are crowding the aisles of

WH Smith. Chief executive Carl Cowling moves deftly around them, showing me the best-selling books for the season.

The most popular read this summer has been Yellowface, by RF Kuang, a satirical thriller about the publishing industry. A biography about Taylor Swift has also been flying off the shelves.

But Cowling is also telling me about the importance to the group of its travel business – which includes WH Smith’s outlets in airports, train stations and, somewhat quirkily, hospitals. The division, he says, is ‘growing at a rate of knots’. Its sales now make up almost 75 per cent of the total.

As Cowling explains, the mission of WH Smith is now to be a ‘one-stop shop’ for the traveller.

For Britons of a certain age, WH Smith is synonymous with pencil cases, compasses and protractors when children were going back to school after the summer holidays.

But the group also runs stores devoted to tech under its inMotion brand, plus stand-alone bookshops. From its roots as a humble stationer and bookseller, the company has world domination in its sights and an empire that extends to Las Vegas.

Cowling, 50, is pursuing his goal supported by copious market research on people’s tastes in reading, snacking and souvenirs.

The Birmingham airport branch offers T-shirts with the Brummie catchphrase ‘alright bab’.

As well as sandwiches, the snacks include more adventurous fare such as kefir yoghurt and poke bowls.

For forgetful packers, there are expensive hair straighteners, as well as Cowling’s personal travel essential, ‘a good pair of headphones’. In Las Vegas, you can buy sequinned dresses and jackets for a glitzy night out.

The company now has about 100 shops in this city of fun and gambling, following the purchase of US travel firm Marshall Retail for around £325 million in 2019.

Many British brands have tried to break America and failed – but Cowling believes this focus on airport outlets is key to success.

America is not the only country abroad where you can pop into a WH Smith for the bits you need for a trip. There are now 762 branches at airports across the world.

And unlike the distinctive blue and white branded stores in the UK, casino and hotel stores are designed for their particular locations, blending in with their surroundings.

Airports and Las Vegas are a long way from the company’s beginnings. Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna opened up their first newsagents in Mayfair, Central London, in 1792.

The firm expanded along with the railways, offering passengers reading matter for the journey. The stores then spread on to the High Street.

But why is the business named WH Smith and not HW Smith after its founder?

Henry’s son William Henry Smith eventually took over from his father, and he was the one who gave the business its name.

Cowling is committed to that heritage. There are no plans for more High Street shops in the UK on top of the existing 520, but he emphasises that this is ‘still a great business, still a profitable business’ and one in which he is continuing to invest.

One of his latest moves is launching concessions in 76 Toys R Us stores by Christmas, with even more planned.

In common with other retailers, WH Smith has had to invest heavily into safety measures for shop staff – who are among the millions subject to growing abuse and threats.

‘There does need to be a more serious approach to helping tackle it. It’s a poor situation where people can feel vulnerable when they go to work. It seems to me to be only worsening,’ he says.

There will be at least one ‘very serious’ instance of physical abuse in his stores every week, he says. The company has installed buttons that can immediately start recording an interaction with an abusive customer and send this to a support centre, who can alert police if needed. But Cowling is hopeful that new Home Secretary Yvette Cooper will give the issue more prominence.

Earlier this month, WH Smith updated investors on its financial year to August 31.

Group sales were up 7 per cent on last year, driven by a 10 per cent boost in its travel business.

Cowling says his philosophy is to keep things simple. ‘I think where companies and leadership go wrong is when they become very disconnected and try to over-complicate things,’ he says.

He is a life-long retailer, starting out on the shop floor at Comet, the electrical goods chain which collapsed in 2012.

Then he moved on to work at electrical group Dixons for more than a decade, working his way up to managing director of its airport shops division.

Many of these shops were taken over by WH Smith in April 2021 after the Covid pandemic had eviscerated the industry.

Although WH Smith has pivoted to travel hubs, Cowling says he doesn’t lose sleep about a pandemic bringing the sector to its knees again.

‘I find it difficult to imagine we’ll have anything like that amount of restrictions again in our lifetimes,’ he says. ‘I mean, never say never.’

Speaking ahead of what Chancellor Rachel Reeves has warned will be a ‘painful’ Budget, Cowling is optimistic about running a business in Britain.

‘People can get themselves a bit miserable sometimes, but I think we’ve got a great environment,’ he says. ‘When you compare it to other places around the world, we’ve got a strong economy.’

His positive tone is backed up by industry data.

The International Air Transport Association is expecting global passenger numbers to exceed pre-Covid levels for the first time this year. While we’re looking around the shop, a customer seizes his chance to ask if the Meal Deal could be cut by 50p. It is £5.50 for the standard offering and £8 for a fancier one.

Cowling politely welcomes the feedback. But are the prices – such as £1.59 for a small chocolate bar – a bit hard to swallow?

‘It’s a very high-cost environment,’ Cowling says later. ‘An airport is busier than any shopping centre, so the rents are much higher. We’re opening a store at 3am and closing at 11pm.’

Airports also come with all manner of red tape – everything coming in has to be unloaded and scanned by security before it can go on the shelves. This explains the higher prices, he says. ‘What we try to do is make sure that customers feel that they’ve got decent value by making sure that we have good offers,’ he says.

He is also bullish about the London stock market, despite the well-rehearsed gloom about overseas takeovers and an exodus of companies to list in New York.

With the shares closing near a one-year high on Friday, the company is valued at £1.87 billion.

‘American funds have invested increasingly less of their money in UK firms,’ he says.

‘There hasn’t been the desire to invest in the UK stock market in quite the same way. I think there’s been a bit of fear after Brexit.

‘But we’re still a strong economy, aren’t we? These things always go in cycles.’

The company will ‘definitely’ remain on the London market, he says: ‘We’re WH Smith, we’re going to stay on the UK Stock Exchange.’