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.
- "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."
-- 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
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
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
(00:20):
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
(00:47):
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.
(01:10):
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.
(01:32):
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.
(01:54):
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,
(02:16):
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,
(02:40):
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
(03:02):
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?
(03:26):
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
(03:47):
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,
(04:07):
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
(04:30):
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
(04:56):
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.
(05:18):
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,
(05:42):
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.
(06:05):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:14):
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
(07:35):
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.
(07:59):
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.
(08:20):
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,
(08:41):
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.
(09:06):
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
(09:28):
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,
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:55):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:41):
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.
(12:06):
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
(12:29):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:11):
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
(13:32):
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
(13:55):
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
(14:20):
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,
(14:45):
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,
(15:07):
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,
(15:27):
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
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:58):
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.
(17:20):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:24):
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
(18:49):
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,
(19:10):
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.
(19:30):
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
(19:53):
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
(20:17):
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
(20:41):
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.
(21:02):
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
(21:24):
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
(21:46):
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
(22:07):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:54):
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
(23:14):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:19):
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...
(24:43):
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.
(25:03):
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
(25:24):
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
(25:46):
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
(26:08):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:51):
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
(27:15):
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
(27:37):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:18):
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
(28:40):
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
(29:00):
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.
(29:20):
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
(29:43):
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
(30:05):
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
(30:28):
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
(30:52):
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
(31:14):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:20):
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.
(32:41):
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
(33:04):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:47):
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
(34:08):
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
(34:33):
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
(34:57):
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
(35:17):
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.
(35:40):
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
(36:02):
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
(36:24):
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
(36:47):
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.
(37:11):
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
(37:31):
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
(37:54):
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
(38:15):
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
(38:37):
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,
(39:01):
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
(39:23):
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
(39:44):
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
(40:05):
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,
(40:29):
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,
(40:50):
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.
(41:12):
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
(41:36):
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
(41:56):
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
(42:17):
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,
(42:37):
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,
(42:59):
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
(43:22):
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
(43:42):
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,
(44:05):
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.
(44:29):
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?
(44:54):
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
(45:16):
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.
(45:36):
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.
(45:57):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:40):
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
(47:02):
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?
(47:22):
Yeah, that flew. It was incredible, wasn't it? Yeah.
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
(00:20):
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
(00:47):
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.
(01:10):
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.
(01:32):
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.
(01:54):
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,
(02:16):
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,
(02:40):
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
(03:02):
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?
(03:26):
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
(03:47):
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,
(04:07):
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
(04:30):
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
(04:56):
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.
(05:18):
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,
(05:42):
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.
(06:05):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:53):
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
(07:14):
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
(07:35):
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.
(07:59):
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.
(08:20):
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,
(08:41):
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.
(09:06):
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
(09:28):
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,
(09:49):
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
(10:11):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:55):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:41):
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.
(12:06):
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
(12:29):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:11):
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
(13:32):
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
(13:55):
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
(14:20):
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,
(14:45):
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,
(15:07):
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,
(15:27):
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
(15:51):
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
(16:14):
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
(16:35):
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
(16:58):
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.
(17:20):
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
(17:40):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:24):
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
(18:49):
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,
(19:10):
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.
(19:30):
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
(19:53):
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
(20:17):
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
(20:41):
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.
(21:02):
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
(21:24):
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
(21:46):
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
(22:07):
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
(22:31):
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
(22:54):
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
(23:14):
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
(23:34):
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
(23:57):
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
(24:19):
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...
(24:43):
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.
(25:03):
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
(25:24):
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
(25:46):
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
(26:08):
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
(26:29):
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
(26:51):
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
(27:15):
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
(27:37):
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
(27:58):
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
(28:18):
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
(28:40):
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
(29:00):
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.
(29:20):
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
(29:43):
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
(30:05):
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
(30:28):
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
(30:52):
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
(31:14):
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
(31:36):
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
(31:57):
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
(32:20):
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.
(32:41):
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
(33:04):
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
(33:26):
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
(33:47):
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
(34:08):
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
(34:33):
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
(34:57):
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
(35:17):
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.
(35:40):
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
(36:02):
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
(36:24):
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
(36:47):
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.
(37:11):
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
(37:31):
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
(37:54):
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
(38:15):
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
(38:37):
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,
(39:01):
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
(39:23):
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
(39:44):
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
(40:05):
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,
(40:29):
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,
(40:50):
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.
(41:12):
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
(41:36):
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
(41:56):
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
(42:17):
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,
(42:37):
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,
(42:59):
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
(43:22):
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
(43:42):
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,
(44:05):
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.
(44:29):
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?
(44:54):
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
(45:16):
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.
(45:36):
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.
(45:57):
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
(46:18):
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
(46:40):
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
(47:02):
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?
(47:22):
Yeah, that flew. It was incredible, wasn't it? Yeah.
Popular Podcasts
Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club
Welcome to Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club — the podcast where great stories, bold women, and irresistible conversations collide! Hosted by award-winning journalist Danielle Robay, each week new episodes balance thoughtful literary insight with the fervor of buzzy book trends, pop culture and more. Bookmarked brings together celebrities, tastemakers, influencers and authors from Reese's Book Club and beyond to share stories that transcend the page. Pull up a chair. You’re not just listening — you’re part of the conversation.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com