Marks and Spencer are celebrating their 125th birthday with a range of vintage 50’s inspired fashion, lingerie, and home items.

But even more exciting is the news that the major department store is going back to it’s routes of 125 years ago, when it was a penny bazaar, by offering 20 items in all it’s main UK stores for just 1p! The promotion starts today (Wednesday 20th May) and runs for 3 days - but we’ve heard many stores are already selling out of the bargains as the offer is strictly “when it’s gone, it’s gone”.

The goodies up for grabs include jewellery, scarves, purses, knickers, cufflinks, ties and socks, leather passport holders and luggage tags, tea towels and mugs, bags of retro sweets, cans of retro drink, beach toys, and beach balls.

If you do manage to catch a bargain and you want to pay more than 1p, all proceeds will go towards the M&S 125 Charity Challenge.

Today I stumbled across the wash company - and I loved their busy, colourful site! They’ve got a fantastically strong brand identity and they carry it through even to their ‘enlarge image’ graphics. I also - vitally - love their product line. With Beautilicious goodies for “hers”, and Thomas and Friends for “young hims” they’ve got all genders and ages covered if you’re looking for a fun but affordable gift. Suddenly giving someone soap doesn’t show a lack of imagination anymore!

Crucially the site has great photography (on a white background is so important, I always think!) and I can’t use the word “fun” enough about the home page.

You can search by person and then refine your results by subcategory, brand and price - all great features. But there are a few issues that I think could be improved on…

In the search results, you have to click on the image (which is too small) to view the item details. Ideally you should be able to click on the item description too. And we don’t really need to see the model number - keep that for stock inventory and make the images bigger for us shoppers! There’s also the small issue of some of the categories apparently containing (1) item, but then showing nothing when you click on them. Even some of the categories linked to from very nice graphics on the home page are empty - which immediately disappoints a shopper.

But overall, a great looking site with a great stock range… just a few little tweaks to entice us more and it would be even better!

(Oh - and from a techy point of view, as I’ve spent a while doing this on a few shops lately - each item should have it’s own title tag and search engine friendly URL. Remember the shopper, but always remember Google!)