The John Lewis Partnership has announced that it has signed an agreement with Tesco to lease a 1 million sq ft distribution centre at Fenny Lock in Milton Keynes. Since the start of the pandemic, online sales have grown from 40% to over 60% of John Lewis’s total sales and the move will help the company meet growing customer demand for online orders. The warehouse, leased for 11 years, will become John Lewis’ second-largest distribution centre, after the 2 million sq ft campus just four miles away, at Magna Park in Milton Keynes.
Andrew Murphy, Partner and Executive Director of Operations for the Partnership said: “This one-of-a-kind distribution centre represents a fantastic opportunity to power the continued growth of Johnlewis.com, ensuring that we can keep pace with customer demand – both for our products and for our wide range of fulfilment and delivery options. We will invest in the site’s automation capability to support future growth and, over the next two years, we will recruit 500 new Partners to work at the distribution centre, which we plan to start operating during summer 2022.”
“We will use the Fenny Lock site to fulfil customer orders for fashion, small home furnishing items and technology products. The proximity to our Magna Park campus will enable us to combine more customer orders, reducing both the number of packages we create by approximately one million per year and the number of lorries on the road, helping us to meet our target of being net zero carbon by 2035.”
This year, the Partnership is investing £50m in johnlewis.com and the fast-growing John Lewis app, and creating more virtual services and events, with a further £100m+ to be committed to online growth over the course of the next five years. John Lewis have also signed a three-year lease agreement for a 300k sqft distribution centre at Bardon, Leicestershire which will start being used this month in time for Black Friday.
