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How Timpson is accelerating their growth with Planet’s reliable, secure payment solutions
Large enterprises
How Timpson is accelerating their growth with Planet’s reliable, secure payment solutions
At a glance
- Planet deployed terminals to 2,000 UK locations in three months, working closely with Timpson’s field engineering teams.
- A support model pressure-tested by Timpson’s leadership has reduced terminal-related complaints to near zero.
- With Planet’s support, Timpson is expanding its key-cutting and unattended launderette businesses with up to 2,000 units.
The challenge
Founded in Manchester in 1865, Timpson is one of the UK’s largest service retailers, with 2,150 shops across Timpson, Max Spielmann, Snappy Snaps, The Watch Lab, and Johnsons. Its payments estate is complex: thousands of in-person terminals across multiple brand environments, including remote locations, Pay by Link for select journeys, and a fast-growing vending and self-service estate.
Timpson runs on a management philosophy it calls upside-down management: the colleagues serving customers are the most important people in the business, and everyone else exists to support them. That trust-first culture shapes how Timpson picks suppliers. When the group went to market, the brief was equal parts technology, commercials, and people: does this organisation share our values, and can we trust its people?
The solution
Planet made the shortlist on technical and commercial merit. At the final stage, Timpson’s senior team subjected Planet’s leadership to what Will Lankston describes as around 150 questions about how support would work in practice – escalation paths, ownership, response times, engineer access.
“At the end of the day, they were the ones who gave us confidence they would look after us. And they’ve stuck to their word.”
Planet, with Barclays acquiring, deployed 5,500 terminals across 2,000 locations in approximately three months, coordinating multiple store formats and brand environments, in collaboration with Timpson’s field engineering teams. The rollout flexed to fit Timpson’s operating model rather than the other way around.
“This was by far the easiest transition we’ve been through. Planet managed the complexity, and what’s been most impressive is their willingness to adapt to our needs rather than making us fit their process.”
The result
At Timpson, success is measured in colleague happiness. The shift to Planet has delivered:
- Reliable uptime across the estate, with support SLAs consistently met.
- Complaints all but eliminated — terminals were once a daily or weekly issue but now are barely mentioned.
- Confidence to scale unattended, with up to 2,000 new 24/7 launderette units planned over the next twelve months, hand-built in the West Yorkshire.
These results have given the team at Timpson the confidence to accelerate their growth plans, without worrying about payment infrastructure slowing them down, explained Will Lankston.
“Growth at our current pace would once have raised serious questions around terminals. Now it’s just business as usual.”
Bede Timpson, Head of Innovation and Development, adds that inclusion is central to the launderette design:
“We want the experience to be simple, intuitive and accessible, with no barriers at the point of use.”
With Planet keeping payments reliable across attended and unattended sites, Timpson can focus on widening access
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