I AM BRANDED ON MY FEET [541]

Some decisions make so little sense, you must write about them to understand the situation. Business decisions, I find, make less sense than those which are personal: it is not just that making money can involve surmounting moral ambiguity, making money is the reason to do anything at all. Whatever the implications, the arrangement I am attempting to parse here sounds surreal, if not dubious.

Inevitable derision followed the rebranding of the high street stores of booksellers, stationers and newsagent WH Smith as TG Jones, following the chain’s sale to the private equity group Modella Capital in 2025. WH Smith, whose stores remain in train stations, airports and hospitals, did not include use or licensing of their name in the contracts signed, except in the continued selling of their stationery range. The attempt made to provide continuity with the old brand by choosing initials and a surname that mirror the original enough produce some sort of recognition, remains a bizarre move, but I can’t name a bookshop that doesn’t use someone’s surname.

Modella Capital, approaching a year since the sale, will be able to start closing unprofitable stores, after a moratorium period in the contract ends. In the shops I have visited, only the name above the door has changed, issues about tired decor and cluttered shelves remain unresolved. When the closures were announced, “The Guardian” newspaper reported that TG Jones owes £2.9 million to its owners in licensing fees to use the name “TG Jones”. 

At the time, this was discombobulating. Surely, the chain could have chosen a further name they could use for free: QT Taylor? AB Brown? JD Williams? (The last is a catalogue, now online-based department store, so perhaps not.) Modella Capital had said “the forced name change from WH Smith has also negatively impacted consumer awareness”, but after stepping in to provide “The Guardian” with more context, no actual money is changing hands, and any licensing fees that have appeared on paper would be waived subject to a restructuring deal, to be approved with a lender.

But why do this at all? Why do anything like it? It reminded me of the ownership of record store HMV by another private equity group, Hilco, between 2013-19, which accrued payments to Hilco for operational and licensing purposes. Surely, if you wanted a payment from one of your subsidiaries, you could just mandate it. (I originally wrote “ask for it”, as if it were a benevolent act.)

After HMV fell into administration a further time in 2019, bought out by its current owner for just £883,000, the “His Master’s Voice” brand and Nipper the Dog were just about the only non-stock asset left to it - Hilco’s 2013 purchase of HMV was for £50 million. You want to accuse someone of profiteering, but making a profit remains the name of the game, no matter how it is achieved.

It just so happened that I needed a TG Jones in the last week, knowing they would sell a certain brand of gel pen without resorting to ordering online. It is “that store” for me, the name change being so clumsy it cemented the connection in my mind instead of severing it.

But with the TG Jones name not being there, and with any licensing costs, whether they exist to be paid or not, being linked to profits, is there any incentive to create value in that name, when that will only cost you more in the long run?

THAT’S NOT MY NAME [512]

Who was T.G. Jones?

Did they get their start by opening a newspaper stand next to W.H. Smith? Did they keep a beady eye on each other ever since? Did T.G. Jones also open TV channels and a DIY store chain in the 1980s, again to compete with W.H. Smith? Did T.G. Jones know John Menzies before they sold their also-similar store chain to W.H. Smith? 

Naming a business after someone implies both history and vision: Boots, Cadbury, Sainsbury’s, Selfridges, Debenhams, Cath Kidston, Charlotte Tilbury. Making a name up hopes to imply and aspire the same: the JD Wetherspoon pub chain combines a character from the TV series “The Dukes of Hazzard” with the surname of an ineffectual schoolteacher the founder once had.

But the renaming of the high street stores and retail website of WHSmith to “TG Jones”, prompted by their sale to the private equity group Modella Capital at the end of June 2025, created a name designed to sound close to the original. WHSmith is now being a separate chain focused only on appearing at railway stations, airports and hospitals.

But “TG Jones”? A similarly common name to “Smith”, it also recalls the jeans brand Smith & Jones, the food brand Smith & Jones, the TV series “Alias Smith & Jones”, and the comedy double act Mel Smith & Griff Rhys Jones. As for the initials, “G” is next to “H”, and “T” is close to “W” – my guess is the rhyming “tee gee” was a helpful discovery. But so obviously basing the new name on WHSmith is detrimental to it so long as WHSmith continues to exist elsewhere, a confidence trick that didn’t have to exist.

Name changes made by businesses, or people, usually imply new starts, new approaches. But from the name down, TG Jones is all about continuity: with no material changes to stores announced by the new owners, it remains a bookseller, stationer and newsagent that continues to stock WHSmith-branded products, with newspapers and magazines stocked by the distributor Smiths News, and their floorspace will continue to be shared with Post Office branches and Toys “R” Us concessions. Even the sign above the door is still white text on a royal blue background, the only break with WHSmith being its use of a sans serif typeface.

I had been recommended a documentary on YouTube made by NHK World TV of Japan, which explained that a boom in stationery sales to the general public happened after the 2008 financial crisis when businesses stopped providing employees with pens, paper and notebooks. Either this boom didn’t happen in the UK, or WHSmith couldn’t compete on range or price. 

I mostly use Uni Ball Eye rollerball pens, but these are mostly bought from discount retailer TK Maxx or the supermarket Tesco, and the notebooks I use usually come from Amazon because I want is usually in a particular range, size or page count so specific that a high street store cannot afford the space to stock it. WHSmith, or TG Jones, is there when I want a newsmagazine, which it is likely to have, even if it doesn’t seem to stock “The New Yorker” near me anymore, or if I need a Post Office, or indeed anything I cannot wait for, which is something for which I cannot think of an example.

This is the predicament that now needs to be answered by Modella Capital. They are already owners of the “big box” chain store Hobbycraft, which will have some overlap in their ranges of stationery and art supplies, but their website states, above a picture of their chairman, “successful transactions include... Paperchase”, a specialist stationer once owned by WHSmith, its brand bought by Tesco when it went into administration in 2023. Here’s hoping TG Jones can make something of its name this time around.