The rise, the fall, and the 340 TomToms. A V Spot Behind the Music special.
BEHIND THE CATALOGUE
The V Spot | August 2026
The year was 2007. I had bleached blonde highlights and had worn dungarees to work. No one noticed, cos this was eBay. I am occasionally reminded of this faux pas by caring friends who like to keep me grounded. I have done worse though, much worse. eBay was my entry point to ecommerce - willing to travel 50% and had my six sigma green belt done in General Electric. Not bad for a man of such tender years and intellectual mediocrity. It was a whirlwind career step including swimming with the Swiss synchronized swimming olympic team, working in Lugano, working in the JD sports warehouse, Office shoes and a £1 lunch, getting called a c*nt by a famous platform owner. Other highlights include Manchester Northern quarter nights out, the trip around ebuyer warehouse with Armando. We had buyer trips, shit*y hotels as we were afraid to spend money - team building was Come Dine with me in Joe Tarraganos home whilst Angus McCarey threw a rugby ball through a neighbours window. Thankfully we had passed our circus training and had been to the Pru Leith school of cooking. We knew what good could look like. We just didn’t exercise it. But we were hungry, on a mission and ready to tackle anything. My first client visit culminated in missed flights, no money and an emergency train to Manchester from Liverpool - more on that another day. It was eventful. And before any of the rest of it, there was a seller on eBay UK that nobody could identify.
Black and yellow branding. A pseudo-brand name with the word bargain or clearance in it somewhere. Pallets of end-of-line stock going out in job lots, week after week, for the best part of a year. Volume that did not match the profile. Somebody with real warehouse access was quietly clearing dead inventory through a side door on a marketplace, and doing it well enough that we noticed and slowly enough that they thought nobody had.
We worked out who it was. We arranged a meeting.
They were not biting.
Argos did not fail. Argos was the band that invented the sound, and Amazon was the band that had the hit with it. Maybe it was just of its time and now there is no need for it.
That is the first half of the story. The second half is harder and I will get to it, because the honest version is not simply that a supermarket ruined a good thing. It is that the ground moved underneath the entire model at the same time, and only one of those two facts gets written about. For retailers reading this today, I think it is a good cautionary tale and is more aligned to where the future of retail is going. More consolidation, more fragmentation of channel and less money but more credit.
2 weeks ago, Sainsbury’s agreed to sell Argos to a newly created outfit called Swift Partners for at least £120 million. Ten years ago they paid £1.4 billion for it. In the intervening decade they killed the catalogue, shut 420 stores, pulled out of Ireland entirely, and generated £9 million of underlying operating profit in the most recent financial year on revenue north of £4 billion. That is not a margin. That is a rounding error wearing a lanyard.
So we are doing this one properly. Cue the synth pad. Cue the slow zoom on a photograph of a conveyor belt.
“In 1972, in a country running on three-day weeks and Green Shield Stamps, one man had an idea he’d brought back from America.”
Richard Tompkins had already built Green Shield Stamps, the loyalty scheme that turned British households into unpaid data collectors decades before anyone had a word for that either. He had seen catalogue showrooms in the United States and decided Britain would take to them. He rebranded his stamp shops, and in late 1973 the first Argos opened in Canterbury.
The company took £1 million in its first trading week.
Read that again with 1973 money in your head. That is a business that understood its customer before its customer understood itself. It was also niche, it had latent demand in other words, this was a time when needs and wants were very different. Needs trumped wants. Wants were, well fanciful and wanting was not as encouraged as needing.
The model was strange and singular and it worked completely. The stock sat behind the counter, out of sight. You browsed a book. You wrote a number on a slip with a biro chained to a plinth. You paid. You waited. A conveyor belt delivered a box to a counter and for about four seconds you did not know whether the box was yours.
That is every ecommerce checkout ever built. Product page, add to cart, pay, order confirmation, wait. Argos shipped the user experience in 1973 and the only meaningful upgrade since is that the biro now watches you sleep.
BAT Industries bought them in 1979 for £32 million. By 1982 Argos was Britain’s fourth biggest jewellery retailer, selling under the Elizabeth Duke name. For a whole generation of working-class families, Elizabeth Duke meant a gold chain at Christmas that was real enough to count. Nobody in Mappin and Webb was losing sleep. A lot of people were wearing it.
It was a Verb damint, it was a Verb.
Buy it at Argos and pocket the difference.” (1973) – The very first launch slogan highlighting its disruptive discount model.
“Famous names at discount prices.” (1977)
“Smile. You’re saving money.” (1981)
“Where the names you know cost less.” (1984)
“It’s so easy.” (1985)
“You’ve read the book. Now see the show.” (1993)
“Brighter shopping.” (2000)
“Brighter prices, brighter Christmas.” (2001)
“Don’t shop for it, Argos it!” (2010s) – An attempt at anthimeria turning the brand name into a verb.
“By the nineties, they weren’t a retailer any more. They were a household object.”
Ten million copies. Per edition. Twice a year. Ninety-three editions across the run. At its peak, eight in ten British homes had one, making it the most widely printed publication in Europe. The line you always hear is that only the Bible was in more UK homes, and for once the marketing myth is roughly the right shape.
Bill Bailey called it the laminated book of dreams and the name stuck harder than anything the company’s own marketing department ever produced. Alan Carr chose it as his book on Desert Island Discs, which is either a very good joke or the most honest answer ever given on that programme. Both, probably. Side note, I was once called a normal person lookalike for Alan Carr, it still sits poorly with me.
The story on the sale is weirdly told, little attention paid to what was “the business model and maybe the original marketplace, but what shifted beneath it”. Here is the part the retail analysts i think they miss, when they write this story. Dissecting the catalogue was a play activity. Children did it for fun. Families argued over it at the kitchen table in October. Its arrival was the starting pistol for Christmas. Argos built an annual ritual of anticipation into a piece of print and gave it away for free, and today there are consultancies charging four figures a day to explain the concept of experiential commerce to brands who cannot get a customer to open an email.
If you are reading this in New York, the closest translation is the Sears Wish Book with the showroom mechanics of Service Merchandise or Best Products bolted on. Which is a useful comparison mostly because all three of those are dead. America ran the same format and buried it by 2002. Britain kept it alive for another twenty-four years. That divergence is not sentimentality. It is a story about a smaller island with denser high streets, where a network of trade counters within walking distance of most of the population was an asset rather than a liability.
Nobody in the UK ever quite priced that asset properly. Including, eventually, its owner.
“But behind the record sales, the band was quietly making the best work of its career.”
This is the part where the Behind the Music formula usually gives you drugs. Argos gave us fulfilment infrastructure instead, which is less televisual and considerably more consequential.
Every product had a unique identifier because the catalogue demanded it. Every store was already a warehouse with a service counter attached. Every transaction was a pull, not a browse. When the web arrived, Argos did not have to reinvent itself. It had to publish a URL. They were online in the nineties, years ahead of retailers still trying to work out what a shelf looked like in a browser.
Which brings me back to the black and yellow pallets.
The first client. Argos was the first UK retailer eBay properly brought on board here. Not the first brand with an account, the first one we built a business with. The courtship took a while, because from where they sat they already had what they wanted. They were clearing dead stock at speed and nobody upstairs was asking awkward questions. Why formalise something that was working precisely because it was informal?
What we eventually put in front of them was not a pitch about a channel. It was a set of options that made it structurally viable to stop dumping job lots and start trading. That business went from a side door to a fifty million plus a year contributor to Argos revenue.
The fit was obvious once you saw it. Argos had a large, loyal customer base that came for value and stayed for value, and eBay in that era was where value shopping in Britain actually happened. They used the platform’s demand generation to grow that side of the business faster than anything else they had.
First meeting was a polite F*ck off. With good reason. I do not think to this day the upper echelons really knew what was going on or why. The mechanism - pallets being sold to a small, pre vetted group of traders was border line too. But we worked with them. Sean Douglas working his magic.
THE METRIC THAT WAS LYING TO US. Here is the thing I did not understand at the time and have thought about ever since.
A good month on eBay felt like a win. We treated it as one. Volume up, cash recovered, everyone pleased.
But in those early years, a great eBay number for Argos usually meant the buying team had bought badly or the merchandising team had oversold a line. The channel was not generating success. It was absorbing a mistake made three months earlier and several floors away. The better the clearance numbers looked, the worse something upstream had gone.
We had built an extremely efficient mechanism for making an inefficiency invisible, and we were reporting it as growth.
I have never stopped seeing that pattern. Every business I walk into now has at least one metric that everybody celebrates and nobody has traced backwards. A returns process that runs beautifully because the product page is wrong. A customer service team with world-class response times because the fulfilment logic is broken. If your recovery channel is your best performing channel, you do not have a great recovery channel. You have a great recovery channel and a problem.
Then the profile changed. Over time it stopped being a clearance outlet and became a place they bought for deliberately. Not leftovers. Intent. Video games and consoles on release day, at full tilt, treated as a genuine primary channel. It became important enough that eBay would update its own product catalogue in lockstep with a release so Argos could be live from minute one, every single time a new version landed. The platform was changing its operations to suit them. That does not happen for a clearance account.
They also ran what was effectively certified refurbishment before certified refurbishment existed as a programme anyone could name. Taking returns and end-of-life stock, putting it through a process, and selling it with a warranty attached. It took some doing to get over the line internally, on both sides, because nobody had a rulebook for it yet. But it recovered real cash into the business out of stock that would otherwise have been a write-off.
That was where I learned the thing I have used in every engagement since: multiple business models can run underneath a single strategy, with each channel doing a genuinely different job. Full-price release-day trading, structured refurbishment, and clearance, all live at once, all measured differently, all feeding the same P&L for entirely different reasons.
Almost nobody was thinking like that then. Marketplaces were where you dumped the stuff you got wrong. Argos treated the same channel as three separate businesses and ran them accordingly, and internally they became the poster child we pointed everyone else at.
The traders. Two of them on it at the start on the Argos side, one whose name has genuinely gone from me, and Pete Harris. Above them was Sean Douglas, now on PayPal’s UK leadership team, and the single best trader I have ever worked with in ecommerce. Not the best strategist. Not the best operator. The best trader. There is a difference and the industry has largely forgotten it.
Here is what that looked like in practice.
Pete rings in one day. They have 340 TomTom devices sitting there and no obvious route to shift them. Sean, instead of doing what everyone else would have done and building a promotional calendar for the following quarter, goes and reads the anatomy of the eBay homepage. He finds an advertising panel that Vodafone had been running on. At that point nobody internally could tell you who actually owned that panel, which tells you everything about how young the whole thing was.
So he navigates his way across to Rob Bassett and the advertising side of the business and asks the question nobody had asked: what does that cost, and can I put product in it? The answer was somewhere around twenty grand a day for a small square.
He put inventory where an ad was supposed to go.
The 340 TomToms were gone in about forty minutes.
An hour later the phone goes again. They have found more.
That is the first daily deal in anything resembling its modern form, invented in an afternoon by a man solving a problem for a client he liked. Not a product roadmap. Not a strategy deck. A trader looking at a homepage and asking what would happen if you put a price on it. That mentality became the engine of the whole thing, and without Sean I have no doubt none of it happens.
What it became. The formal version arrived in September 2013: eBay Click and Collect, launched with 50 eBay sellers and 150 Argos stores, eventually reaching around 650 stores nationally. A marketplace of individual sellers routing parcels through a national network of trade counters, selected by the customer at checkout as a preference. Amazon Prime was two years old in the UK. Deliveroo did not exist. The phrase “last mile” was still mostly used by people talking about actual miles.
Argos was named Multi-Channel Retailer of the Year at the 2015 Retail Week awards. By 2017, digital was more than half of total sales. This was a technology company with a very persuasive disguise, and the disguise was so good that its eventual buyer appears to have believed it.
“In 2016, the offer came in. The band took the money.”
Sainsbury’s bought Home Retail Group for £1.4 billion, with Argos as the prize and roughly 845 standalone stores attached.
To be fair to them, the early direction had a logic to it. It read as hub and spoke: use the supermarket estate to host smaller format Argos points, collapse the standalone property cost, and turn the combined footprint into a denser collection network than either business had alone. On a whiteboard that is not a stupid idea. It is arguably the right idea.
It unravelled fairly quickly.This is the point where I lost close contact with the detail, so I am reading the last decade from the outside like everyone else. But from the outside, what you could see was a business that stopped doing the thing it was uniquely good at.
Because here is the quieter loss. Grocery is a planning culture. It has to be, because you are ordering perishables against a forecast and the forecast is the entire job. Trading is the opposite discipline. Trading is a phone call about 340 TomToms at eleven in the morning and a homepage panel repurposed by lunchtime. You cannot put that in a five year plan, which means in a planning culture it eventually looks like indiscipline, and indiscipline is the first thing a new owner tidies away.
A grocer looks at 845 stores and sees property cost. A platform operator looks at the same 845 stores and sees a distributed fulfilment network with existing customer traffic. Those were two entirely different companies. Only one of them got bought.
“It started with the catalogue.”
July 2020. After forty-seven years, the printed catalogue is discontinued. The writing, as they say, was on the wall.
November 2020. Sainsbury’s announces the closure of 420 standalone Argos stores by March 2024, part of a group-wide programme with 3,500 job losses attached and £600 million of savings promised.
June 2023. Argos leaves Ireland. Gone, and a genuinely strange afternoon for anyone in Tralee who had spent a childhood writing numbers on the back of their hand.
Talks to sell Argos to JD.com collapse quickly. That is the most revealing data point of the whole decade. A Chinese platform giant with global ambitions and a serious logistics stomach looked at 667 UK collection points and walked. When the buyer who should want it does not want it, the problem is not the asset class. It is the condition of the asset.
For the year to March 2025, Argos posted a £223 million pre-tax loss on revenue of £4.1 billion in a general merchandise market Sainsbury’s itself described as subdued and highly competitive. Subdued and highly competitive is corporate for “Temu ate it.”
From where I was standing, watching it from a distance, a decent part of that decade looked less like a turnaround and more like asset stripping conducted at a respectable pace. Which is worth holding in mind when we get to the new owners, because the stripping already happened. Swift are not buying a business with a lot left to take.
WHAT £120 MILLION ACTUALLY BUYS
Every Behind the Music has the accountant scene. Here is ours.
One and a bit footballers. Liverpool paid Newcastle a British record £125 million for Alexander Isak in September 2025. So Argos, all 667 collection points, the logistics network, the Daventry distribution centre, the Shanghai and Hong Kong sourcing offices, Argos Care and the pet insurance book, went for five million less than one centre forward. Newcastle then spent roughly the same £120 million replacing him with Wissa and Woltemade, which nobody has yet described as good business.
Most of a superyacht. A 77.7 metre Golden Yachts hull from 2023 lists at €132 million. You would be slightly short. It sleeps fourteen. Argos served around 20 million active customers.
Just under two seasons of a shirt. Manchester City’s front-of-shirt deal is reported at £67 million a season. So the entire company is worth about twenty-one months of a logo on a chest.
Sixteen years of a small square panel. At the twenty grand a day it cost to rent the advertising slot Sean talked his way into, £120 million buys you roughly sixteen years of the box that shifted 340 satnavs in forty minutes. Make of that what you will.
And the write-down is bigger than the sale. Sainsbury’s expects a non-cash impairment of around £350 million on the way out. Three times what they are getting. In fairness, the deal also strips roughly £250 million from lease-adjusted net debt, which is the genuinely rational part of the transaction and the part the headlines skipped. But strip out the accounting and the plain English version stands: they spent ten years running it, absorbed a nine figure write-down, and collected the price of a striker.
That is not a strategy.
“In 2026, an offer came from an unexpected place.”
Swift Partners is Richard Pennycook, former Morrisons COO Trevor Strain, and Matt Truman with True Capital behind them. Pennycook steered the Co-op through a governance crisis and came out with his reputation attached, which in British retail is close to a superpower. They have said the acquisition is about the multichannel model, the store network, and technology investment.
They are buying 201 standalone stores, 466 Argos outlets inside Sainsbury’s shops on a long-term agreement, a further 466 collection points, the logistics network, Daventry, and the sourcing offices. Completion is expected in February 2027, with full separation from Sainsbury’s by 2029. Nectar and rental agreements keep the two companies entangled for years after that.
And Pennycook has not ruled out bringing back the catalogue.
Which is the single most Behind the Music sentence available in retail this year. The band that broke up over creative differences with the label, buying back the masters, hinting at a reunion tour. It would be very satisfying to end this by saying a supermarket got hold of something visionary and ran it into the ground. That is true. It is not sufficient.
What was also happening, underneath all of it, is that the model itself was being dismantled by the market. Argos sold ubiquity. A wide general merchandise range, available near you, at a keen price. Every single component of that stopped being scarce. Whatever you could get in Argos you could get somewhere else, usually cheaper, increasingly from a phone, eventually direct from the factory that made the Argos version in the first place. When your entire proposition is availability and availability becomes free, you do not have a strategy problem. You have a physics problem.
That is why I do not find this sad. A bit wistful about the biro, yes. But not sad. This is what a business model looks like when it reaches the end of its useful life, and it is a preview of a lot of conversations the rest of retail is going to have over the next fifteen or twenty years.
Because the direction of travel now is the reverse of everything Argos was built on. Not vast range held centrally and pushed out through a network. Faster manufacture, closer to the customer, smaller runs, shorter chains. Ireland and the EU are going to feel that differently to the US, because the nearshoring conversation here is a genuine industrial policy question and over there it is mostly a tariff question. Either way, the winning shape is not a warehouse full of everything with a counter attached. It is the opposite.
So if Pennycook and Strain want a starting point, I would offer this. Do not begin with the catalogue, however good the headline would be. Begin by finding out whether there is anybody left in that building who would look at a pile of unsold satnavs and go hunting through a homepage for somewhere to put them. The catalogue was the packaging. The traders were the asset. One of those is easier to reprint than the other.
Argos, incidentally, is the Greek word for swift. The new owners have taken that name for their company, which suggests somebody in that room has read the history and enjoys a bit of symmetry.
It is not the word anyone would use for the last ten years. It might be a decent name for the next three.
Vinny O’Brien writes The V Spot from Tralee, County Kerry. He worked with Argos during his time at eBay and now consults on ecommerce strategy across Ireland, the UK, the EU and North America. If you were the third man on that Argos desk, get in touch, your name is on the tip of his tongue.