RetailCraft 51: "Get more out of life" - in conversation with Paul Hornby, Digital Customer Experience Director at the Very Group

Show Notes

Summary Paul Hornby, Digital Customer Experience Director at The Very Group (owner of very.co.uk and other brands) joins Ian Jindal and Georgia Scott to discuss his role, career and the positioning of Very within the market. We explore the history of the group, which dates back to 1890, and how it has evolved into the UK's largest domestic online-only retailer with an integrated flexible payment platform. We delve into the concept of digital experience and how the Very Group aims to help families get more out of life by offering a wide choice of products and flexible ways to pay. They also touch on the challenges of marketing and personalisation, as well as the ongoing technology transformation at the Very Group. Listen out for the term "technical cholesterol" - both the phrase and the explanation are delightful and we wish that we'd thought of this, but the recording doesn't lie ;)   Takeaways

• The Very Group is the UK's largest domestic online-only retailer with an integrated flexible payment platform.
• The company aims to help families get more out of life by offering a wide choice of products and flexible ways to pay.
• The role of credit is to support families in managing their household income and making purchases more affordable.
• The Very Group is focused on digital experience and constantly optimizing the customer journey.
• The company is undergoing a technology transformation to create a composable architecture and enhance the customer experience.

Quotes

• "Our purpose as a business is to help families get more out of life."
• "Our job was to translate [the heritage] into a digital world, create a compelling digital experience, and then find a way of translating the mechanism of how you could spread the cost online."

Chapters 00:00 - Introduction and Lunch 01:17 - Introducing Paul Hornby 02:12 - Paul's Role at the Very Group 03:39 - The Unique Proposition of the Very Group 04:38 - The History of the Very Group 06:35 - The Catalog Business and Credit Offering 09:26 - The Transition to the Digital World 13:12 - The Role of Credit in Supporting Customers 15:08 - The Value Proposition to Customers 16:35 - Market Competitive Pricing and Credit Options 21:06 - Digital Marketing and Personalization 24:48 - Paul's Career Journey 29:34 - Returning to the Very Group 32:31 - The Technology Transformation at the Very Group 38:11 - Creating a Learning Culture 39:09 - The Exciting Future of the Very Group

 

--  Run time: 48 minutes

INFORMATION:

[ 🖥️ ]

Very - https://www.very.co.uk/

The Very Group - https://www.theverygroup.com/   

 

[ 👨‍👧 ]

Paul Hornby: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulhornby/ 

Georgia Scott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgiajones1/  

Ian Jindal: www.linkedin.com/in/ianjindal/ and www.twitter.com/ianjindal 

 

[ 📷 ] (c) Ian Jindal / www.instagram.com/ianjindal

Creators and Guests

Host

Ian Jindal

Founder of RetailX and CustomerX

What is RetailCraft - digital retail, ecommerce and brands - Retail Podcast?

Multichannel retail, ecommerce and digital business - interviews, analysis and discussion with Ian Jindal and InternetRetailing

I did and it was delicious but as

I said we're not going to it was so

sad you could barely we couldn't enjoy it could we because

we missed you so much no you're supposed to be miserable we

were miserable to one another we sat

there in silence thinking George would have liked this lunch said that a few

times as well actually that's right you know we had all the favorites we looked

at them didn't touch them just cried and the waiter came back and took them

away I said do you want these to go I said no that was just the Georgia isn't with us lunch,

and I actually won't tell you what I had for lunch it's too sad.

It's too sad I haven't had time oh dear right so I think we're ready to go so

let's go hello everyone dear listener welcome back to the studio I normally

say we're in the studio we're We're half in the studio, half not.

So through the power of technology, we're still being brought together.

So I'm Ian, Editor-in-Chief of Internet Retailing.

And joining us over the airwaves is... I am Georgia, and I am the Head of Marketing for Adobe.

I love that pause. It made it sound like you were halfway around the world rather

than 100 miles away, but that was really good.

Do you know what it was? it was me suddenly realizing that I don't have that

cool kind of podcast voice in my ears because when you're not in the studio,

you just sound like your normal self.

There's something about the studio mics that make you sound like a better version of yourself.

And you two are going to sound fantastic.

No, you will sound fantastic, but you've let it slip that this This isn't my normal voice.

You can hear the real very, very squeaky voice.

Anyway, with a lovely voice, we're very, very, very pleased.

And you'll see why that's funny in a second. To welcome Paul to the studio. Paul, welcome.

Thank you. Now then, tell everyone who you are and why that was a very funny introduction.

I'm Paul Hornby. I am Digital Customer Experience Director at The Very Group.

We're already off and running with the Ponzi and I love it. Must be a record.

There's only one pun. I've done it now.

It is, it's the end. So look, let's start off with the job title,

which is pretty cool. What does it actually mean?

Yeah, my role at the very group is basically to be responsible for the end-to-end

digital experience for all of our brands across all of our devices.

Practically, that means I'm lucky to be responsible for a really talented group

of people who cover product management, delivery, engineering, UX design, UX research,

And those people come together in cross-functional teams and are responsible

for the different stages of our journey.

Product discovery, my account, checkout, the onboarding experience for new customers, our app.

And their role really is to understand how our customers utilize our digital journey,

understand what jobs they're looking to do, and then constantly optimize that

experience and manage the underlying tech to help customers get great outcomes

and also help the business get great outcomes as well.

Well, so other than buying stuff, what's left?

That sounds like digital experience. I was going to say everything.

It's like, what do you do? Oh, just everything. I mean, just how does that fit

in, though, with the other bits of the consumer's interaction with you?

To answer that question, you probably need to know a little bit more about Veri and the Veri Group.

Obviously, one of the unique parts of our brand is that we have our own financial service proposition.

So very for example has very pay

as its you know preeminent payment option over 90

percent of all of our transactions will utilize very pay and so as a result

of that customers will come to us for a variety of reasons you know for a standard

retail business customers will come to the website to find the product buy it

they may potentially come back to see where that order's up to or to return it,

Whereas for us, it creates an account that our customers will come back to,

manage their account, check their balance, make payments.

They've got a lot of flexibility to manage that account themselves.

So we end up having customers coming to us on a variety of missions,

broader than what you would get normally on a standard D2C online.

Yeah. So you went down the My Account route.

So it's worth, I think, just pulling back a bit here, because younger people

who just joined the world of e-commerce will think, see it, click it,

check out, buy, job done.

Whereas this idea of credit comes very much from an age of the catalog businesses.

Is so is it worth because very such a modern

short lovely url it might

just be worth drawing the line from the thousand page print catalogs and the

incredible transformation the business has been through yeah to get to where

you can just be throw away so yeah well we have our own credit offering it's

like oh yeah that is the really interesting part of the very group story you You know,

very.co.uk as a brand has only been in existence since 2009.

But the history of our business actually goes back to 1890.

So as you span through the web 1.0, as you call it, as you, as you span through

the 1900s, in essence, the very group was two different businesses,

two big rival Northern businesses.

Gus Home Shopping or later Shop Direct and Littlewoods.

So, Gus Home Shopping, Manchester-based, multi-channel business,

catalogue retailer, High Street Presence with brands like Index,

Additions Direct, Choice, Kays, Great Universal, Empire Stores.

And then the Liverpool rival was Littlewoods, so the Littlewoods brand.

And then those two businesses were brought together in the early 2000s.

There was obviously an awful lot of history prior to that, which we've skipped over.

But as the two organizations were brought together in the 2000s,

we then still had a big multi-channel business.

And by multi-channel, because I think in the mid-naughties, Littlewood sold

hundreds of stores, wasn't it?

And then it was a catalogue business. So for our Gen Z listener.

A catalogue business is 1,300 pages of glossy paper full of pictures with the

equivalent of a barcode where you could transcribe that code onto another piece

of paper and send it in the post with a promise to buy it and then you'd send it.

So it was just like mail order shopping, but mega-sized. yeah

yeah the three channels that we would interact with would be

catalog like you've just said and we would send out two

big 1000 page catalogs a year to millions

of customers and they would be able to go through that catalog you

know i remember it when i was a boy at christmas time

or birthdays and you'd go through it and you'd circle the page

down yeah yeah and it was a

waste of time because you weren't you weren't going to get any of it anyway not in my

household sold anyway but you would at least live the dream and then

you could either buy that via your mail order like you've

said transcribing it onto a piece of paper or calling somebody

and taking that order over the phone there was also you

know back in the day a different model known as an agency model where you know

somebody in your street would take responsibility for collecting all of those

orders so that was almost one channel then we still had a really significant

high street presence and that was predominantly via either littlewood stores

or the index extra stores where So everyone of that age will remember.

And then we had web. But web was definitely the smaller of the channels.

The interesting part that ties our heritage and the catalogs together was the

offering of flexible ways to pay.

So typically when you would get this catalog and you would find the product.

It wasn't that you would typically choose a product and buy it in one go.

You would typically buy it and be able to spread the cost, you know,

either spread the cost over a number of months or typically spread the cost over a number of weeks.

And the pricing would be buy this for £29.99 or £2.36 a week over 52 weeks.

Excuse my maths there, whatever it was.

And so the pricing, I'm trying to do mental maths, but the pricing proposition

was very much around weekly affordability as well.

It was. It absolutely was. It was about creating opportunities for a wide base

of customers to be able to get the things that them and their family needed,

but also to manage their household incomes in a way which worked for them.

And so the heritage of our business was offering great products and offering

really flexible ways to buy them.

So as we then transitioned into the 2000s, what we wanted to do was transition more of that online.

And I remember within the organization in the 2000s, we had a strategy which we called 70-20-10.

We wanted 70% of the business to be online by 2010.

But what we wanted to do was bring those tenants that

had been consistent in the organization of offering great choice

across a multitude of categories and again I can we'll talk

a little bit more about who we are and what we do as a business in a minute

but bring that real wealth of choice and that real flexibility of payment choice

to the digital proposition and then ensure to allow customers to buy stuff and

spread the cost online but also we had a real heritage of

being able to make intelligent lending decisions,

so really good risk-based decisions from years and years of our catalogue business

allowing us to say, well,

we can credibly lend this amount of money to this person, we can allow this

person to pay off over X amount of time and manage the debt.

And what's interesting about that, of course, is that a lot of these customers are.

Are invisible to normal means. So you might have, you know, we talked about

the agents, we skipped over that, but you might have somebody in your street

or your area who was responsible for selling, collecting cash, remitting it.

But she, and they generally were women, she may not have had a credit card in her own name.

So your credit file, all these people

who were under the radar of credit

card companies but yet you had a trusting long-standing

relationship with them and a role in the community so it's this

group of people that otherwise like if you started digital marketing

today you wouldn't just dream up a segment of

people who are undetectable who aren't a

credit file and who are well known in the community you know you

just wouldn't have that to start with you would have been the really

the only i mean obviously now you have all those all of the payment

kind of spreading companies and i'm nervous

to name names but you know they come and go but but

at the time many are available many are available

but like at the time would have really as

to ian's point to to so many people been the only kind of

payment spreading solution for shopping across that many products outside of

a credit card of a major bank definitely our job was to translate that into

a digital world you know create a compelling digital experience and then find

a way of translating the mechanism of how you could spread the cost online.

So if you fast forward to today, if that was our legacy, that's our history,

you know, rich tapestry of history going back to 1890.

Today, the very group's the UK's largest domestic online only retailer with

an integrated flexible payment platform.

We've got two main brands, veri.co.uk, which operates obviously here.

We've got veri.ie, which operates in the Republic of Ireland.

And then we've still got the Littlewoods brand in existence,

online only, littlewoods.com.

But those brands together do just over 2 billion a year in sales.

We've got 4.4 million customers across the UK and Ireland.

And we're multi-category. So back to our heritage of offering a wide choice to our customers.

We pretty much sell everything apart from books and food

really fashion sports electricals homeware beauty

toys and then we obviously offer customers really flexible ways to pay via our

very pay proposition on very and over 90 percent of our sales happen on very

pay so it's right it's such an interesting point so georgia mentioned the multitude of payment options

which haven't always had the world's best reputation whether

it's around issues of affordability credit control

etc you said something very

interesting earlier on about the role of credit which isn't

to rack up debt and get into trouble but it's very

much to help with smoothing or you

to support your family's purchase throughout the

year just tell us how in a world where

again if you arrive as a digital marketer today you

see the world everyone one pretends they care about the customer they

don't they just care about the credit card number and that

it clears so in a world where everybody you can address has a credit card what's

the proposition to the customer that says you can put your card down this is

what we offer you in this modern context just explain that for our listener

yeah well i mean firstly we're a fully.

We're a fully regulated business you know so being a

responsible lender is the cornerstone of what we do

and we spend a huge amount of

time and effort ensuring we understand

customers ability to repay and be responsible lenders but to answer your question

the easiest way of probably starting that is to talk about what we truly believe

our purpose is our purpose as a business is to help families get more out of

life like we know that there are you know millions of customers like you know,

we've just spoke about who are going through the same struggles that everybody

is and just trying to manage a household income,

you know, be that, you know, I've got two young children,

one seven, one four and a half, the seven year old grows at a rate of knots

and we have to buy a new school uniforms twice a year, new shoes four times

a year. You're feeding him too much. Yeah.

And so there's the realities of we need to buy them new clothes or if we go on

holiday and we need to buy them new clothes or it's Christmas time or there

could be something in the household where the washing machine breaks and it's

a distressed purchase situation.

Our role as a brand is to help families in those moments by giving them the choice,

but then also giving them flexible ways to pay so that they haven't got to pay

it off in one go, but also that they've got someone reputable who they can trust

and also gives them control over how they pay back.

So the standard mechanism for how it works when you buy with us is if you come

in and you use Veripay, let's say you bought a school uniform,

if you pay off within three months, it's interest-free.

Or you can choose buy now, pay later. You can buy over six, nine, or 12 months.

If you pay that off when the buy now, pay later matures, it's interest-free.

So the only time you would pay interest is if you allow it to roll because you

want to pay a minimum amount to spread it over a longer period of time,

at which point it does default more to behaving like a credit card.

But it just gives customers that choice, and obviously they can then do that

across all of the product categories that we offer.

They can have mixed baskets It's where they buy in fashion, homeware, and electrical.

So the core of our proposition has always remained, try and offer them great

things, and then try and offer them really flexible ways to buy them and manage

their own household income.

And just to finish on the customer perspective, because when people think about

e-com, a big attractor there has been that prices tend towards the minimum.

So if you're doing that sort of snaky thing, we

say it was interesting credit but the price is double we'd pay

elsewhere that wouldn't work so you're providing the

credit but at market competitive

pricing so the prices aren't marked up yeah yeah

for very if you look at all of our

price indexing it's all standard and you

know the reason for that is what you've just said you know if you take littlewoods

as an example the littlewoods prices have always

been higher and that has been a legacy of

how the catalog business would always work the price point would

be higher because it would factor in free delivery free returns

it would factor in some of the payment structure in the

world of price transparency and in essence recruiting

customers on a SERP if you're going to go in and

the same product is x percent higher on a

brand it's highly unlikely that you're going to recruit a

new customer or someone someone's going to buy so core

to very has always been it's an e-com site it's

a you know it's a standard d2c retail proposition that offers a full multi-category

breadth of choice at market standard pricing but has the benefit of our own

fully integrated fully regulated flexible payment platform that's where we try and.

Identify our sweet spot really because it gives customers the best

of both you know and ian mentioned before some some have

had trust issues and you're a trusted provider of that right so

you've got the history of it you've got this really loyal

customer base 90 of them using your by now kind.

Of pay later options are growing at crazy rates but

a lot of them you know you're still talking maybe

they account for like 15 of the site's sales so

i mean that trust piece is is huge with

your customer base i think yeah we certainly try

yeah we certainly try how do people find out about it

because you know we're we spend

a lot of time looking at websites clickety yes fine i

get it move on the credit option

hadn't really jumped out

at me and also i'm trying to think where do i

see very that might attract me to become a new

customer so we've covered the heritage but

frankly we're now talking to the grandchildren of the people who

remember the catalog business how are

those people the sort of boohoo asos shane

generation how do they find it is fall

into a hole they bump into you alphabetically what's

the what's the main way you're getting a new customer to

come to you yeah a number of ways i think firstly we've definitely been talking

far more loud and proud about very pay as a proposition i think if we were critical

of ourselves we would say that in the past we didn't talk loud and proud enough

about the very pay part and we would hero a lot of our above the line activity on our product.

The real differentiator for us is when you tie the retail proposition and the

financial service proposition together.

And we didn't talk enough about that publicly. I think we are doing better now.

You know, we've recently launched a new great ad campaign, House of Flamingo,

which is trying to really drive an increased level of awareness,

drive an increased level of consideration.

Again, all of the same thing that we've got great retail products,

be that fashion, homework, elect, and great flexible ways to pay.

And then also you know we've been very mature in the digital marketing space for some time so.

Those are the main areas but we've definitely

been trying to double down in brand to tackle that exact

awareness and consideration challenge that you've mentioned

of a helping more people know who we

are b when people do know who we are

helping them understand more about the breadth of what

we can do for them and then c when they think that we

are somewhere that can serve their needs from a retail

proposition also helping them understand that they've

also got the added benefit of really flexible ways

of making that purchase and managing their own household income

and obviously everybody kind of relates to different parts

of your usp right so like and i know you do loads of

really successful like celeb product launches and collabs

and things like that because that's how i know about very you are

that generation i was i was actually semi-offended earlier

when you said these people point to

the other screen how are you are you

I mean from a digital marketing perspective right I'm interested how

are you experimenting with that like how are you using like what's your kind

of personalization strategy like are you leaning kind of really into experimenting

with what people relate to whether it is very pay or whether it is more kind

of different pieces of content or are you still kind of just pushing the brand message.

Definitely not just pushing a brand message. We've been really strong in the

true performance aspect, I would say, for quite some time.

We're really mature when it comes to our management of PPC shopping.

We were really early in things like display. We've probably backed out of that

a little bit more now, but we're really heavy in paid social.

TikTok's been a completely new channel for us over the past 12 months. I've heard of that.

That's been really interesting. but i you

know i think the big future opportunity for us more is how we can utilize

more and more first party data in that space you know

one of the really interesting things for us as a business is

when you are a proposition where

90 of your orders come via our

own flexible payment model it means that we have

a wealth of of data because we don't

have customers coming in and buying via a guest checkout you

know we know who's buying from us yeah and we

and we typically know a lot about them we can typically have you

know up to 140 attributes of on an individual customer

so i think the bigger opportunity for us is

how do we start to leverage more and more of that first

party data in and activate it in

a variety of our channels we do it really well in some areas there's

other areas where we've definitely still got work to do

and we've got mileage to get after but that's the

direction that would definitely go on in georgia and what

about monetizing that data in the

nicest possible way so thinking about some of the

things that amex and other people do with on statement

promotions if you know that they've bought a boy's blazer approximately age

12 and another thing approximately age 8 you can build a pretty good picture

of the family of where they're spending their money so how can you use that

data to market at them via the financial services and statements and other comms,

rather than just saying, look, it's Friday, buy some more stuff.

Or summer buy some more stuff you know that kind of outbound marketing messaging

yeah yeah definitely we can create you know

a variety of different cohorts when it's important

to stress that you know from a monetization perspective we're not selling any

data but what it obviously allows us to

do is understand a lot more about who our customer is what

they're doing you know a great example is we can

use some of our propensity modeling to pretty accurately assert whether

someone's got a garden or not and that type of information

can then really help you at different stages of the

year like it's not really worth trying to encourage someone

to buy a garden set if they live in a

block of flats for example so again almost building

on the previous point we've got a wealth of data and

we've been able to successfully use it and we execute a

lot of it really well in crm i think one of the

big opportunities actually is it within my own world where what

we haven't done as well as consistently is

activated all throughout different stages of the digital journey

which is one of the reasons we've you're seeing in the three in a bit year since

i've been back at the very group we have been completely re-platforming all

of the technology that powers our sites and apps to create a far more modern

platform that allows us to do exactly that type of thing right now because this

is sound only no one can see the glint in your eye.

But i'm just going to hold off a second because we've talked

about very but we have to talk about about you

okay because the listener is thinking hang on isn't

that the paul i'm looking at on linkedin who

seems to have been in and out of very a few times so you were at shop direct

left went to matalan liked it so much you went back so maybe just give us a

little quick thread of your career yeah and then i want you to reflect on in

the time you were somewhere else having a lovely time and a lovely company,

you went back to how the landscape changed.

Yeah. So first thing is, thumbnail the Paul Hornby CV, please. Yeah, no problem. I...

Yeah, I did computer science at university and had no clue what I wanted to do.

I hadn't even done IT, GCSE, never mind A-level.

And then everything I'd done was maths and I was going to go and be an accountant or an actuary.

And then at the 11th hour, applied to do computer science, went and did computer science.

Could have been a terrible mistake.

Sorry for all the accountants listening, you are fantastic. Including me, man.

Yeah my wife works in tax as well so hopefully

she won't listen and then and then yeah i

in the third year of my uni

a guy come in from industry and taught us

a module on e-commerce and i thought that is what i want to do with my career

i taught myself to be i'd say a developer i wouldn't be strong enough to say

an engineer and then started building websites and got a job i think i was 23

at that point at what was then ShopDirect,

joined entry level as a developer, and then was really lucky to progress through

the organization really quickly.

This is like one of those shop floor to boardroom stories, except you started

out coding and now look where you are.

Because when you talk about the company, as Ian said, you were kind of interviewing

yourself beautifully, but you sound like almost like a founder,

like a founder talks about their company.

You know, you had such much passionate knowledge of the history and it makes

sense because you yeah kind of rose through the ranks there well I wouldn't

be that grandiose I'd say I had a I had a good vantage so yeah.

So when I actually started I said right I'm

get out of Liverpool as you can tell from the accent I'm from

Liverpool join shop direct in Manchester let me

get out in the big bad world finish university and then

as I joined I was told that the organization was moving back to Liverpool pool

so yeah so you can take the boy out on exactly that so it wasn't by the time

no that was great yeah exactly that and then yet progressed through so ended

up being head of front-end development.

I think i was 27 and then sorry just

pause head of funding development let's just

put a bookmark in to say that is not the most customer facing

commercial role in the organization fine carry on

so you enjoy the progression yeah and then around that

point i started to want to

diversify so i went and did some qualifications in digital

marketing so i studied the idm i started to get more involved in product management

which then was allowing me to take the technical skill which at that point was

almost like the bedrock of what i've learned i'd also when i'd say i was head

of front-end development there's two different teams one team was the team who would build,

all of the marketing activity so it got me deeply ingrained in our day-to-day trade,

so even though i was managing a technical team i'd be sat in trade meetings

every single day so it gives me a lot of commercial stimulus and then the second

team that we created was we We actually called them then the Interaction Development Team.

It was a front-end development team who would build the front-end experience.

We started to run experiments, and that led to me getting far closer to product

management, and we actually established product management in Veri to really

think about what are the business and customer problems.

And then what are the best solutions to them rather than stakeholders coming up with the solutions.

That ended up with me becoming head of e-commerce, I think, when I was 29.

And then you know i took more

and more on in that role and become lucky enough

to spend some time at london business school and that was brilliant and

that got me thinking about strategy and org design and

op model then moved into a digital

transformation role which i loved and loathed in equal

measures i loved the academic part of

being pulled out of the organization being able to look

at the whole organization and think about how you

define a strategy how you define a tech strategy how you

manage your capex investment how you

would restructure your teams how you would

try and drive consistency between an exec strategy and

the action on the floor but i found it really

frustrating because for my entire career i'd been on the cold face you know

i'd been involved in the trade meetings black friday had mattered to me yeah

even though i had a technical skill set i felt like i was ingrained in the drum

beat of the org whereas i felt like a consultant at that point where I was commenting

on what the business was doing.

So I knew I wanted an opportunity to take what I'd learned and apply it somewhere else.

Matalan asked me to go there and run the online part of their business.

I think I was 34 at the time. Brilliant opportunity.

And it felt like a real-life MBA. So I left Vary on really good terms.

I had an amazing time there. They completely understood why and went to Matalan. Loved it.

Absolutely loved it. Brilliant business. Amazing people. Got the opportunity to learn an awful lot.

You know baptism of fire it was definitely fair

to say but i loved it and kept in touch with very they

were keen for me to come back a

few times and but i was really happy where i was and then

i had a conversation with them in my third year at matalan

and what they were really keen for was

for somebody to come in and lead a transformation of

all of the technology that powers all of the websites and apps oh the whole

train set yeah the whole train set but do it i suppose with quite a commercial

lens so not tech for tech sake you know they wanted someone who could understand

the technology set the vision but articulate it in a non-technical way to non-technical stakeholders.

And i was really personally and professionally

interested in that so you know took down the heartstrings a

little bit you know going back getting back into an organization

i knew but would have changed an awful lot but then also

an opportunity for me to go and learn an awful lot in

a more technical sphere and bring some of the experience i've had to to bear

so yeah i've been back just under three and a half years that is a lot of learning

so we talk a lot georgia about skills and the modern professional but you've

ticked off your degree then we've got lsc we've You've got CIM.

He says, like an MBA. You're like a poster boy for continuous professional learning

and development. I would say maybe in a...

Oh yeah i wouldn't say it felt like a standard linear path

but yeah in my in my own way maybe but i mean

i i like learning i like reading i like

trying to better myself i always

wanted to try and get to a position where i could have a broader

level of influence you know my ambition had always been to to

run a business and i knew that you know when i looked at really

inspiring leaders people i found

inspiring were great people leaders who could motivate but

also people who were credible and so i knew what they were doing

or just based on the level of experience yeah yeah and also

i'd watch great operators and

i'd see great operators who had empathy for another

part of the business because they understood it and then could help

ensure that their part of the organization could support because

they knew it deeply enough so i've just always tried

to learn so when you went back to fairy and

you just still known people there were people there who'd worked for

you and welcoming you back they're hugging you kissing

you and they go oh that there paul he said

no no i'm not that paul i'm a new i'm a

new paul what was the difference what was the

difference with that time you'd had away the more commercial time so we went

back to the organization if someone was doing a sketch of you three years prior

than three years we came back what do you think had changed or that you tried

to change to go into your now current role it's a It's a brilliant question.

That normally means I hate that question. No, no, no. It's given me two seconds

while I think of an answer.

Yeah, I'll use flattery and then I'll think. Right, you've had your 10 seconds now.

I helped you out there, Paul. Yeah, thank you.

No, when I went back, I got asked this quite a few times, actually,

when I'd gone back. And what I would frequently say was.

The organization was familiar enough to allow

me to get quite comfortable quite quickly but it

was new enough where i had to treat it like

a new job so you know i went through a full interview process

i was interviewed by seven different people i wrote a

full 90-day plan you know i still came in and

treated the organization like i didn't know it you know a global pandemic had

happened since i'd been there previously there was still a lot of familiar senior

people but an awful lot of new people we had a new chief exec we had some new

non-execs in the picture you know the organization was slightly different in

terms of its brand construct so.

That was how I got the balance in terms of me personally I

had major major major imposter syndrome

coming back because I was

coming back to lead a relatively big team you know 100 or

so people and there's people in the team that I lead who were

there when I joined as a 23 year old lad so

yeah i definitely had imposter syndrome did

you talk about that at the time i mean we say impossible everyone

throws it around now because it's a it's an accepted

term in polite business conversation whereas when you're living it it can be

sometimes quite hard to say it or say it to anybody so was that vocalized and

and or how did you get over that to settle down and I don't know,

actually, I'm having a great time.

So how do you go from thinking I've got imposter syndrome to getting over it?

I'm always quite open. So I definitely had some imposter syndrome because I

wanted to, I knew that people may wonder why I was coming back or know me from

a previous role or wonder.

I had a great example. So one of

the reasons I obviously was brought in was to lead this technology transformation

and a lot of the you know most of the team wanted

to go on that journey and about a year or so in there was a lad in the team

who really close with great guy who'd been there previously and uh we had a

bit of an away day we had a few beers and he said to me i was devastated when

i found out you were coming back and i thought thanks i love you too,

thanks for thanks for the feedback is it do you mind if i ask why and he said no you know

you you're great and we knew you would be great from a leadership standpoint

but we just all assumed you'd want to come back and keep everything like it

was because you'd been in the business before and we felt like we needed a change

agent and we didn't know if that was going to be you just because we didn't

know whether you would come back with nostalgia for the past

so once we realized that you were coming in to be a change agent then we had

the best of both worlds but yeah I just I was quite open and honest with people to be honest around.

Proactively faced into it and said i

know there will be lots of questions i know you'll be

there'll be different points of view but let me be

very clear i'd like i said set a very clear 90-day

plan so i was quick not to make any quick decisions

quick judgments did an awful lot of listening and

then tried to set a very clear vision for the team which i

think they galvanized behind and that helped and

set us on our journey yeah and how do you because

this sounds like an

ego thing but i'm a bit like you in terms of i love i love

learning i love reading and like fine you know trying to constantly

evolve but like you've then got a really large team that

presumably you want to instill some of

that in or you kind of want a culture of you

might not but you might want a culture of kind of involvement and stuff how like

what have you done i guess to kind of take that and and bring

the team along because it's there's no good if just you're the only one uh

kind of learning and and developing and growing yeah i

think the the main thing i've done is give

them space so you know if you bear in mind the journey that we've been on has

been a journey of taking you know a technology platform that has powered our

websites and apps in one way or another since 2009 has done us proud it's fueled

huge growth for us and all that but we We had a very clear mandate to go on

a journey that none of us had ever been on before.

Now, my direct reports are a head of product, head of delivery,

head of tech, UX manager, insight and analytics manager.

I deeply, deeply believe that they are all better at their crafts than I am. Deeply believe.

Because if they're not, there's something fundamentally wrong.

So my job as a leader is to create the space for them to be great,

give them context, help them when they need help.

I'm sure that micromanaging them remorselessly eight

days a week isn't an alternative I'd like

to think that they would agree with me but um just

asking asking for a friend and so the reason as

I say that as the answer Georgia is because we've all been very

clear on what the journey is we've all had to let because the

the bar's been set in terms of this is where we're going it sounds

so normal when you say it and I was being slightly facetious before

but one of the challenges in retail

is finding time because everything's

on if you're lucky on a weekly cycle yeah if

you're trading it's a daily cycle and every

time you pause to take breath someone looks at you thinking couldn't you've

traded harder quicker etc so it's actually a more difficult thing that it sounds

to create that time for thinking and improvement which sort of brings me back

to the twinkle in your eye earlier on which I haven't forgotten,

I'm just going to say one word and that word is,

skyscape tell us.

Yeah, so Skyscape is the platform that we're building. Like we've just briefly

mentioned, the remit I had when I was brought back in was to take us from the

platform that we're on now, which is end of life.

You know, if you had a bricks and mortar store and all of your stores are out

of support, you would want to face into that risk and do something about it.

Or maybe not. Maybe that's why I'd want to go work for another company.

Yeah, so the journey that we've been on over the past few years has been to,

you know, clarify what direction we want to go

in you know our existing platform as much as it's done

as proud it's a big monolithic platform you know

it's it's generated i'd say technical cholesterol is

probably the polite way of putting it such a good frame you know

which has made it more difficult cholesterol that's our

zinger of the episode it is always one i'm

just hitting pause so i can delete that bit and pretend you'll

hear it in the edits all year

yeah exactly as ian said digital yeah you

can have that one so yeah we've been you know setting the direction

we've doubled down on wanting to move to a

composable architecture and you know we did

that for a number of reasons one we want

to build a digital customer experience layer which

is completely uniquely ours so that we can you know

really elegantly intertwine the retail and financial service part

of our propositions if you were going to go and get an accelerator they

won't they won't do that and that will allow us to

have maximum control my my belief when it

comes to tech strategy is you buy rather

than build but you build where you need true strategic differentiation and for

us that you know thin layer that our customer interacts with i think is the

most strategically important what we then wanted to do was not have to concede

and what i mean by that is in our existing platform it will power,

search, recommendations.

Navigation, basket, promo, content management, and a plethora of other things,

and you naturally feel like you're conceding in some areas, it's a graphic equalizer,

some bits are good, some bits are bad.

I didn't really want to concede. You know, I wanted us as a pure play business

to be able to go and find the best partners that we feel best match what we

think our customer needs,

what we think our organization needs to be able to maximize value for customers,

colleagues, and shareholders.

And so we thought Composable was great for us because we could go out there

and find the right tech partners, integrate them into the presentation layer,

really step change the experience for customers, but also give colleagues a lot more capability.

So when you were describing Composable, you wanted to just get it over simply.

So Composable is not rotting food.

It's a technology approach. How did you sell that to your stakeholders?

This is not more technical jargon.

It's not broken, just carry on. How did you describe and sell a new Composable architecture to them?

Yeah, an awful lot of the time I spent in my first few months back was chief

storyteller, having to try and craft a story.

And the story that we told was one of burning platform and a burning ambition.

The burning platform was our platform's out of support.

It's end of life. It will be out of extended support soon.

But more visibly, what we did, we built a slide where we'd show a schematic

of our platform and then plop a big ball of spaghetti on top of it.

And say like practically that's what it feels like

today right the presentation layer the business

logic all the data is tied together it's

really difficult for us to make changes you know we

want to be able to keep pace and

it's increasingly complex and what we

want to do is move you know our burning ambition is to move to a composable

platform which you know practically means we've got different lego blocks that

we can plug together this will take us from this to this so we spent an awful

lot of time again back to the point earlier the mandate was that this cannot

be a tech for tech safe migration that will not work in our organisation,

and also it wasn't the goal you know the goal was.

Build a tech platform that will provide fantastic technical foundations for

us to grow, but build a platform that is better for our customers,

solve some of their key problems, but also creates far greater capability for our colleagues.

So, yet so much of the time, and still now, was telling that story,

helping people understand it, trying to explain it in a non-technical way that

they could grasp. But it's tough.

It's an ongoing concern, concern

but you know we're doing really well 50 of all

of verry's web traffic is now on skyscape so which

is so you're so sneaking it in it's just

not like a big you know flick on flick off yeah no

big bang it's just yeah oozing its way

in yeah thin slices thin slices probably didn't

yeah yeah yeah tech

ooze we're aiming to minimize ooze yes in the migration so

yeah we we again we were very choiceful in

terms of how we were going to do it you know do we go build it all big

bang and we said no for a number of

reasons you know one of my steadfast beliefs is that we should unlock value

quickly get fast feedback get things in front of our customers quickly so we

identified parts of our upper funnel you know home page search product detail

page where we thought we We could get those bits in,

test them, understand the platform.

And so that's definitely put more effort in because as you go through a very

shopping journey now, you will flip between Skyscape and the existing platform

or obviously having to stitch all that together, stitch customer identity together,

stitch the basket together.

But yeah, with 50% of web traffic on Skyscape now, that will be 65% in the next few months.

And then we'll be done in the first half of next year for all brands.

Well, time is ticking by, and you said the word done.

To me, it sounds like you might be up to something else next.

So surely it must be time for a new degree or a PhD or something.

So as the thin slices become the thick slice, when you head back to the office, what's exciting?

What's next on your list? The next sort of thing to keep you occupied and interested?

Yeah i mean the laser focus at the moment is

getting it done but that's a good project manager answer

yeah but the really exciting thing is how we yield the value once it's done

you know the benefit of the platform is that so much of it will unlock value

on day one i'll give you a quick practical example if you search for white trainers

on our old platform the first three products that you get back are black trainers.

Oh, that's a pet peeve. And that is because the search platform that we previously

will use product description and name, and it might say black and white trainers.

The platform that we've put into Skyscape, which is called Constructor,

AI is definitely an overused term, but they've got a great AI use case where

the algorithm self-learn and self-heal.

So white trainers return white trainers.

We had a great example where Girls Converse, the first 30 products were all

Girls Converse, but Girls Converse clothing.

Whereas we know the intent of that search term is Girls Converse,

all-star trainers, the AI learns that.

That so when we get the platform in in some ways that's

when the fun starts you know that's when we've got so much new

opportunity you know georgia we spoke before about first party data yeah you

know the opportunity constructor is a glass box platform so we can see the algorithms

we understand why it works another one yeah and we can inject our own that is

an actual term man yeah yeah thank Thank you.

And after that, who knows? You see, this is like being schooled. It's lovely.

Glass box, I like it. Right. Well, look, on that transparent and crystal clear

note, our time's up. They're going to throw us out of the studio.

So, Paul, just what an eye-opener.

And just looking at my notes, we have touched on maybe a quarter of the things we wanted to cover.

So, I'll let you go on condition you promise to come back.

No problem i would love to great well thank you so

much paul georgia remotely 100 miles away and

from the studio so i'll be back next

time fear not thank you both so very much no problem thank you for having me

ta-da done well that was a laugh i mean this journey covered two points i know

i'm just looking at the very posh clock thinking yeah a i need a clock like

that in my office and be, where did the time go?

Yeah, that flew. It was incredible, wasn't it? Yeah.