It’s the 31st of October and after a long day you’re making your way home along your local high street. For a Friday, it’s eerily quiet and you shiver as a chill wind catches your scarf. It’s dark already and the streetlights flicker. Somewhere in the distance a dog howls.
Suddenly, you stop in your tracks, the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Your skin crawls. Something’s wrong, you can feel it. With a gasp, you spot something unnatural in the corner of your eye and stumble back to take in the scene, heart hammering.
It’s hideous. Soulless. Uncanny. It’s –
“TGJones?”
By now, many of you will have noticed this interloper in your local town, masquerading as the brand we all know and love, WHSmith. But where did it come from? And who is this mysterious TG Jones?
It’s not a Halloween trick. It’s not even really a rebrand. 464 WHSmith stores nationwide are slowly mutating into branches of TGJones after the former sold its high-street business earlier this year to Modella Capital for £76 million. WHSmith kept its more successful travel business though – its branches in airports, station and hospitals – as this alone generated 85% of its trading profits in 2024. It also kept the well-known brand name, and its 200+ years of retail history, leaving Modella Capital to create a new name for its acquisition.
A brand identity that lacks identity
According to Modella’s website, the brand they came up with would ‘be a worthy successor […] carrying with it the same sense of family’ as WHSmith. But instead of creating something fresh and new, the team at Modella decided to retain much of WHSmith’s existing brand identity, keeping the blue and white colour pallet, as well as the naming convention. With the result being that a branch of TGJones still heavily resembles its predecessor… if you bought it on Temu.
A rebrand that missed the mark
Clearly, Modella wanted to try and retain as much of the WHSmith brand identity as it legally could, perhaps thinking that this would help maintain customer loyalty. But in reality, it’s baffled shoppers. Not least because Modella didn’t communicate the renaming in any way, instead leaving it to passersby to eventually notice for themselves. And in a way not acknowledging the change did generate a bit of a media stir. There are plenty of videos on TikTok questioning the name change; but not much of the publicity is good, with many questioning if Modella used ChatGPT to come up with the new name.
Who is TG Jones, anyway?
Shockingly, this could well be the case, as TG Jones doesn’t appear to be a real historical figure in the company’s history. How the name portrays ‘the same level of family’ while being completely made up is a mystery. As a family business, surely there was someone in Modella Capital’s history that they could have named the shops after. And TGJones doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
So, what went wrong here?
It will always be a challenge to rebrand a longstanding business. Many will remember the failed rebranding of Royal Mail to Consignia back in 2001, when the bosses took the opposite tack to those at Modella, opting instead for a full name and branding change into a completely unrecognisable entity. No wonder it didn’t take off.
To land, a rebrand or name change needs to feel well thought out and needed. It should demonstrate development or clarify a brand’s identity – not confuse it. And what confuses the matter here is that WHSmith does still exist. Somewhere in the UK, a WHSmith travel branch is probably a mere five minutes’ walk from a high street TGJones. The waters are muddied with both the master copy and the rip-off fighting for brand recognition. To stand out and avoid confusion, WHSmith’s ugly younger brother desperately needed its own identity.
Communicate change or risk losing trust
Communicating any change with your customers is also key – that’s where we can help. Explain what’s changing and why. What’s in it for the customer. Tell a story of growth and evolution. Highlight the brand’s history and what’s to come. Give the change purpose. Get the customer on side.
Even then, changing a company’s name in the eyes of the public takes years. Like X, TGJones will likely be referred to colloquially as its predecessor for many years to come; but a fresh new brand identity – well communicated to the public – would certainly have helped differentiate it in the eye of the shopper.
Need a coffee break? There are seven ghosts to find in the image above.
Written by: Alice Straker
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