Millets Brand Guidelines: An 1893 Southampton Outfitter, Sears, Blacks and JD Sports

An outfitter’s shop in Southampton and a family of namesakes.

Millets traces its start to 1893, when Israel Marcus “Max” Millet opened an outfitter’s shop in Southampton trading as J. M. Millet & Sons, according to the architectural historian Kathryn A. Morrison, who set out the company’s tangled history on her Building Our Past blog in December 2020. The Isle of Man newspaper IoM Today gave the same town and year in February 2025. Morrison describes Max as one of several brothers who came from Dąbrowa, in what is now Poland, and settled in Portsmouth and Southampton in the 1880s and 1890s, starting out as hawkers before opening drapers’ and outfitters’ shops.

For most of the twentieth century the name did not belong to a single company. Morrison counts several family firms trading as Millet or Millett, each run by a different branch of the family and, she concludes, apparently buying stock together. After 1918 they sold surplus clothing, then motoring clothing and, by the mid-1930s, what one of them listed as “camping requisites.” A Bristol branch of J. M. Millet & Sons opened in 1921 and grew into what Morrison calls “Bristol Millets,” with five shops by 1939.

A separate line, “London Milletts,” grew from a shop in Croydon opened in 1926, where painted yellow and blue Milletts lettering could still be seen on the side wall when Morrison wrote. A third, Milletts Stores (1928) Ltd, known as “Leicester Milletts,” floated in 1928 with 27 shops spread from Aberdeen to Plymouth. English Wikipedia notes that the British chain is not related to Millet, the French maker of mountain equipment, a point worth keeping in mind when searching for either name.

Sears, The Outdoor Group and Blacks.

The family lines went different ways in 1970. Black & Edgington, the tent-making group behind Blacks, bought Leicester Milletts that year; the year before, that chain’s shops had been refitted in a black and orange scheme as the emphasis moved from surplus stock towards jeans and camping, Morrison writes. A planned merger between the Bristol and London firms in 1970 did not go ahead.

London Milletts, run as R. & A. Millett, had 84 branches by 1971, moved its head office from Twickenham to Northampton in 1973 and floated as Milletts Leisure Shops plc in 1978, according to Morrison; English Wikipedia dates the Northampton move to 1978. The Bristol business, by then Millets of Bristol (Holdings), had 17 branches when Foster Brothers bought it in 1982.

The two lines were finally brought together under the retail group Sears. Sears bought Foster Brothers in 1985 and Milletts Leisure Shops in 1986, and combined 64 Millet shops and 122 Milletts shops as Millets Leisure Ltd; when it sold Foster Brothers in 1992 it kept Millets, Morrison writes. A management buyout in 1996 turned Millets Leisure into The Outdoor Group, with about 158 stores.

In December 1999 Blacks Leisure Group bought The Outdoor Group. Gale’s International Directory of Company Histories, in an entry written in 2001, put the Millets chain at 199 stores at the time, alongside the Air and Free Spirit shops that came with it; Morrison gives 195. The deal put Millets and Blacks Outdoor under one owner, the pairing that has continued since.

Shops, catalogues and owners.

Outdoor, camping and ski retailers sell other companies’ boots, tents and jackets alongside ranges of their own, so much of their identity lives in the shop rather than the product. Trade press coverage of the British chains returns to the same few things: the size and setting of a store, the specialist departments inside it, and the services offered at the counter, such as boot and rucksack fitting or a cycle workshop.

Store format is the clearest divide. In its 2017 review of a merger in the sector, the Competition and Markets Authority described one group of chains trading from smaller, typically high-street shops and another from larger stores, typically out of town, able to carry a broader range. Newer openings mix the two ideas: shops that put two or three of a group’s fascias under one roof, smaller “express” formats with in-store kiosks for the full range, and concessions run by specialist cycling, fishing or equestrian businesses inside a larger store.

Names carry much of the work. Several chains in this guide are named after a place or an activity rather than a founder, and several sit inside larger groups owned by listed retailers or private-equity firms, while the shopfront name stays the same. Campaigns can be timed to the season: one chain’s 2026 autumn and winter campaign came with a floor refresh across all its stores, trade press reported.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — where it began, who has owned it and when, and how its stores are laid out — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From Blacks Leisure to JD Sports.

Blacks Leisure ran into trouble at the end of the 2000s. It invited offers for the business on 7 December 2011 after a profit warning, Retail Gazette reported that month, and on 9 January 2012 administrators appointed to Blacks Leisure sold the business at once to JD Sports in a pre-pack deal. Accountancy Age reported the same day that the sale covered 302 stores trading as Blacks and Millets and about 3,500 staff. Millets has been part of JD Sports Fashion since then; English Wikipedia says the head office moved to JD’s base in Bury, Greater Manchester.

From late 2024 JD began converting some Millets shops into GO Outdoors Express stores, another of its outdoor formats. YorkMix reported in October 2024 that the Millets on York’s Market Street had started a closing-down sale and would reopen under the new name in January 2025. IoM Today reported in February 2025 that the Millets in Douglas had reopened as a GO Outdoors Express, stocking own labels such as Peter Storm and North Ridge beside outside brands such as Berghaus and Craghoppers. City AM reported in October 2025 that GO Outdoors opened 27 stores in the year to February 2025. The Millets website, which sells outdoor clothing, footwear and camping equipment, was still trading in November 2026.

Visually, Millets has changed more than once. Morrison describes the old Milletts signs in yellow and blue, the 1969 black and orange refit of the Leicester chain, and a revamp around 2020 in which the bright blue and yellow fascias gave way to grey and white with a bright green arrow logo. Peter Storm and Eurohike are among the own labels sold in the shops, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, Millets shows how one shop name passed through family firms, Sears, Blacks Leisure and JD Sports and changed its fascia colours along the way; compare Blacks and Go Outdoors. For this guide we use fascia grey, arrow green and a warm signage yellow with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Millets’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.