A Masterclass in E-commerce with Richard Longhurst: From Building a £1BN Sex Toy Empire to Teeing Off All Over Again with Golf Gadgets

Get ready for a rollercoaster ride into the world of e-commerce, as we sit down with the co-founder of Lovehoney, Richard Longhurst.

In a gripping and enlightening conversation, Richard unravels the story of building the world's largest sex toy retailer, and the origin of a new golf accessory innovation, the Pocket Timer. Hear first-hand how Lovehoney rose to prominence - and a £1BN sale - through superior customer service, savvy SEO strategies, and big, often eye-catching, ideas.

We then switch gears to discuss the hurdles Lovehoney faced due to adult content restrictions on social media. Richard shares insights into how they creatively navigated these challenges, keeping the press interested and their brand on the front lines. He also provides an interesting take on the risks of chat GPT for content production, and the blurry lines between journalists, bloggers, and influencers.

We cap off our chat with a deep dive into the evolution of e-commerce and the challenges Lovehoney encountered along the way. Richard candidly shares their biggest wins as well as the hard-earned lessons. And to top it all off, Richard gives us a sneak peek into his new golf accessories venture, shedding light on the modern-day challenges of securing clicks and eyeballs in the e-commerce landscape. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to gain a comprehensive, behind-the-scenes look at the world of e-commerce, from sex toys to golf gadgets!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hello, i'm Caroline and welcome to the Lightning 50 e-commerce growth hacking podcast. Today we're speaking with Richard Longhurst. He's the co-founder of Love Honey, the world's largest sex toy retailer, and he's also invented the Pocket Timer, an easy to use golf gadget that can save your scores. But before we get to the interview, a quick message from our sponsor, peoplevox, the warehouse management system helping ambitious e-commerce businesses scale. If you have a growth mindset, like lounge underwear in the style or O-Poly, you know how important it is to have industry leading fulfillment and customer experience. Peoplevox offers proven increases in accuracy and transparency across your warehouse. Lightning fast pick and pack methods based on industry best practice and a proven track record, partnering with some of the most successful brands of the e-commerce era, all with simple setup and user training exactly what you need to take control of your warehouse and wow your customers With established integrations into Shopify, bright Pearl, inventory Planner and more. Just search PeopleVox and chat to their WMS experts.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Today, and on to the podcast. Shaped like a coin and roughly the size of a poker chip, the lightweight, bright red pocket timer is designed to help you find lost balls using the full three minutes you are entitled to under the current rules of golf, but Richard's pocket timer product is actually incredibly new And those of you out there might actually know of him from his previous venture where he took a sex toy and laundry brand, love Honey, from 9000 pound investment all the way through to a one billion pound company One of the most successful e-commerce stories of our time. Richard, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today? Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 2: 1:52

Very well. Thank you very much, Caroline. What a lovely introduction.

Speaker 1: 1:55

Well, love Honey is an incredible growth success story, and this podcast is all about e-commerce growth. So, yeah, perfect conversation, really. So I'd love to start by asking you what you think those three, like those key factors were behind the success of Love Honey. It's such a massive brand. Now Tell us a little bit about the story.

Speaker 2: 2:16

Yeah, it's a long time ago now. My friend Neil and I started Love Honey in 2002. We sold our first Rabbit Vibrator And, to be honest, we didn't really know what we were doing. We knew quite a bit about the internet. Background was a company called Future Publishing, which is a very big media company. So I'd been the editor of an internet magazine in the days when you needed a squawking modem to get online, and Neil had a background in music production and web development.

Speaker 2: 2:51

And so we saw that first dot com boom and bust coming go, lots of billions burned, and we thought, hey, this e-commerce thing isn't really that hard. We knew a fantastic developer called Jeff And we knew some people who could do some graphics for us. So we thought, hey, we can start our own e-commerce business. We just didn't know what to sell And for one reason or another, we struck up on sex toys as being a big gap in the market, something that was perfect to sell online, that people would want to order over the internet rather than in person in a shop. And off we went. Actually, the hardest part of starting the business was finding a supplier, but once we had our first hundred products.

Speaker 2: 3:37

We then just had to get the website up instead of our marketing.

Speaker 1: 3:41

So what do you think made that literally explode over those like 15 or so years before you merged the business?

Speaker 2: 3:50

Apart from our natural brilliance, i think well, it's starting off. We always had a very strong focus on customer service, particularly online and particularly in the sex toy business. Customer service was something of a rarity. People didn't trust online shopping really back in 2002. And they certainly didn't trust sexual businesses, because they had this association that they'd ordered adult jobs and that kind of thing. So we just laid it on really thick. But whatever you bought from Love Money, everything was going to be all right. You're going to have a fantastic time. If your thing goes wrong, or even if you just don't like it, you can return it to us for a full refund, even if you've used it. So it was things like that that really set us apart from our rivals really really early on, and we were basically copy the best e-commerce practices that we saw on other websites. So free shipping both ways was something that Zappos did back in the day. We did a 365 day returns policy So you could buy something and return it in a year even if you've used it. So all of these things made Love Money unique. So then we had to get the word out And back then it was relatively easy to get listed in the natural search rankings on Google with a bit of basic SEO, and over time that has become increasingly hard.

Speaker 2: 5:25

So we saw then that you could basically optimize your website and get some decent traffic from natural search, so not paying for traffic. So that was probably our first foray into online marketing And gradually over time, as the mobile became dominant and the amount of screen space, the search results is now basically taken up with paid advertising. I think it's a lot harder for the startup businesses to get what they call eyeballs and clicks, so I think it'd be a lot harder starting a new business now that it was in the distant days of the early 2000s.

Speaker 1: 6:07

Yes, that's exactly what you're about to do at the moment. So from sex toys to golf accessories, that's quite a leap. Do you want to tell our audience a little bit about your new venture?

Speaker 2: 6:17

Yes, well, thank you. Thank you for the plug. Yes, I don't know How much your regular listeners know about golf, but two or three years ago they changed the rules, so you used to have five minutes to search for a lost ball.

Speaker 2: 6:32

They changed the rules so you'd only have three minutes, and it occurred to me that nobody really knows how long three minutes is. You're wandering around in the long grass or in the bushes or whatever, and no one times their search, and so I thought how you could have just a little gadget in your pocket that you click And it times your three minutes for you. And that really is all it does. Obviously, given my background, it vibrates. So it's actually made in one of the factories that makes six toys a lot of money. So I've got this thing. It's a neat gadget. Every golfer would have a use for it. This is sort of perfect Christmas gift or Father's Day gift, stopping filler for the golfer in your life. But the issue that I have is that the marketing world has changed so much online that it's very tough to promote it. So I've never been a big user of social media, so I've got to get my head around Twitter and Instagram And then I say it TikTok. I don't even know if golf is big on TikTok, it's what suspect it might be. So that's the big challenge for me is to get my head around all of these social media platforms to promote pocket time.

Speaker 2: 7:54

I did have some excellent coverage. I have to thank Michael McEwen at Bunkerd Magazine, which is a print magazine based in Scotland. He did a fantastic profile of me and Pocket Timer And it was in the issue that they gave away at their Bunkerd Live at the NEC in Birmingham. So I guess I'm going to call it old-fashioned PR. But that is a massively important thing, i guess, for any startup If you've got a unique message and then journalists still need to fill up their magazines and newspapers with words and pictures. I suppose the Pocket Timer itself, i guess, is a unique thing. But I suppose I have the advantage of my sex toy background. That gives an angle to any story that might be run. I guess is also why I'm here.

Speaker 1: 8:45

It's so fascinating though, isn't it, having that kind of experience of launching a startup in the early naughties to catapulting 20-odd years forward, seeing and starting something up again, seeing the changes, not being scared of the changes. The whole TikTok thing as well again is just blown up out of nowhere and being able to go right. Ok, yeah, i don't actually know a lot about this particular part of marketing now, but I'm going to throw myself into it. What's the? was social media not used at all at Love Honey? Was it more because of the product? It kind of didn't suit social Because towards the, you know, when you sold your stake in 2018, people were still quite on Instagram and things like that, so was that typical of the product? I suppose?

Speaker 2: 9:34

Yeah, social media was always difficult for Love Honey and still it is because of the rules over adult content. So I think it's still the case that Instagram and TikTok do not allow Love Honey to link out from their posts to the Love Honey website. Watch it, you all. would not be allowed to show any nipples.

Speaker 1: 9:58

No.

Speaker 2: 9:59

On those like. You'll never see a nipple in the Daily Express. That's a bare minimum as well. Yes, and also it's not really a show off thing. I mean, social media is basically it's people showing off. If you're, for example, jim Shark in an amazing job on social media fantastically beautiful bodies working out in the gym everybody wants to show that off. Your sex life at home, though, may not be a natural thing that you want to put on Facebook page or Instagram profile, so it's not a naturally shareable thing. People do like to be private when they're only six, though I do understand there are some fetishes that people might not select in public places.

Speaker 1: 10:45

But anyway, that's for another podcast, another podcast, i suppose.

Speaker 2: 10:51

So Love Honey always found it difficult to do anything on social media and is still grappling with it and trying and doing what it can. But it always meant we had to work harder at other ways of promoting the business. So Neil and I always encouraged the team to come up with different ideas that were newsworthy. For example, we did something called the sex map of the UK, where we mashed up all our anonymized sales data with the census information and created a heat map of the UK that you could zoom in on and see which were the places that bought most bombage gear, who bought most whatever rabbits, all of that kind of stuff. So then Fatou was looking at some PR the other day, or stories Yeah, sustainability is always in the news at the moment and all the other stuff.

Speaker 2: 11:53

We were well ahead of the curve 10 years ago. We launched the program called Rabbit Amnesty when they introduced the waste electronic and electrical equipment regulations, which meant you couldn't just throw your old electrical items in the bin, you had to take them to recycling, and that included your sex toys. So we thought hang on a minute, who's going to want to go down the rubbish dump and chuck their old rabbits in with the posters and broken monitors. So we encouraged people to send them back to us. We made a donation to a green charity, we sent the stuff away for recycling And they got a discount on their new toy.

Speaker 2: 12:31

So the difficulty of not being able to use social media just basically made us be more inventive and work harder coming up with different ideas and different stories to give the press an excuse to write about us. And also, back in the day, that was all part of the link building, a hesitate to say strategy. You just knew that you needed other websites to link to you, which was one of the very early ways that Google was innovative in its search engine. Now it's probably ruinously polluted with affiliate links and scrapers and people shilling and just awful sites, but that was what worked back in the day. So I think companies still need to come up with those creative ideas, those reasons to be written about. I mean, i did this idea if it's actually built into your product, but I guess the link to use benefit is not what it once was.

Speaker 1: 13:37

No, of course. Do you think in general, the idea I'm just thinking of potential startups there or early stage businesses that are looking to grow right now, if they've got a conversation around their product is engaging with traditional forms of media and PR? You know, you're from a publishing background. I'm a journalist. Obviously we're going to lean into these forms of marketing. Do you think there's still a place for that, especially in the world where a lot of copywriters and writers are a bit worried about chat, gbt kind of taking over their jobs? Or is it really a focus on social and playing Google and the next marketing areas in that area of the world? Is there still benefit from engaging with the press? basically?

Speaker 2: 14:21

Yeah, definitely, Because the lines are so blurred now between what is a journalist, what is a magazine and what is an enthusiastic blogger. Yeah, influence.

Speaker 2: 14:34

Or influence or whatever. It's just a big blurred area. Whatever your story is, you want to get that out there too, as many people as possible. I mean it's interesting you should mention the chat GPT thing. Probably chat GPT could write. Most of the websites that you see online now, say you, that are just infuriating. Say you search for a recipe, you just want the recipe, but actually what you'll get is a Google friendly, keyword, keyword stuffed page that talks about the history of every single ingredient, the history of the country where the recipe was found, a restaurant that serves this recipe. You just want the recipe. So the danger of chat GPT is going to cause an even bigger proliferation and potentially crack on the internet. So the value of opinion, good journalism, dare I say it, humor, interesting things is going to be even higher. So I guess the job for the word journalist is to be more interesting, because the AI tools are going to be able to turn out the prosaic copy that nobody really wants.

Speaker 1: 15:58

But from an e-commerce perspective, that's going to save time for Pocker Timer's website, being able to maybe pull in marketing copy easily. Potentially or if you were pulling together, i don't know you had a meal kit business and you wanted to come up with ideas for recipes and potentially, from a business perspective, do you think chat GPT would be helpful?

Speaker 2: 16:23

Yeah, certainly companies. You should certainly have a play with it and see what you can do with it, see what it can do for you. But I don't think anybody should really rely on it as a content production at all, because if you can do it, so can the next best. So what does that mean for your unique business skill that you're better at driving an AI tool than the next best? Yeah, that's a pretty fragile foundation for a business. So by all means, get stuck in and use them. I mean, that's over the years. Neil and I love honey. We played with whatever new technology was going to come out to see how relevant to the business it was. But yeah, ai is the hot topic at the moment, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 17:16

So, everybody's got to have a go on it.

Speaker 1: 17:19

Well, when you think about the type of smartphone that you were probably using in 2002 when you launched Love Honey, compared to the power in your smartphone now, I think the scary thing is is thinking 20 years from now, what these AI tools are going to be able to do, which could be quite incredible really.

Speaker 2: 17:36

Yes, I wonder if any of your listeners ever went on WAPLoveHoneycouk Or even remember what a WAP went on.

Speaker 1: 17:46

I mean it's been a little while since I've heard the term WAP almost. Are you tired of being buried in excess inventory? The new need inventory planner. the number one demand planning software for e-commerce businesses. Inventory planner gives you real-time insights to identify slow-moving products, make informed decisions about your inventory and free up cash flow. Right now, listeners of the Lightning 50 podcast can get a free 14-day trial of this incredible tool by heading to inventory-plannercom. Inventory planner never knowingly over by again. So I've got from going from WAP to Foot Foot 2, like 5G on my smartphone at the minute. How else has e-com changed over the last 20 years?

Speaker 2: 18:31

Oh, my goodness, i think the proliferation of well, not proliferation Shopify has done an amazing job of enabling startups to start up so quickly. My girlfriend and my son's now wife started a business called Table Day selling place-setting kits online. They are not technical at all, but within I hesitate to say minutes, probably hours Shopify. You can sign up for an account, create a store, create products and then all your payment processing is built in. Some very simple order management is all there for you. So the barriers to entry for any e-commerce business are now a lot lower than when we started. So, again, having so technology is not really a differentiator, which I guess is kind of the same point as the AI. If anybody can use Shopify so easily, what are you doing differently to your competition? what are people going to come to to your Shopify website and buy your stuff rather than the?

Speaker 1: 19:41

next one That's so interesting And I guess, depending on the business, that could either be the product potentially you've got a market that needs shaking up and you've got a product to answer that or it's the customer experience. Right, The customer experience has been so slick that you go there compared to your competitors, And those two avenues, I suppose, are quite interesting, depending on what you're offering is.

Speaker 2: 20:05

Yes, absolutely, And obviously the customer service plays a big part of that. There's some interesting stuff coming out. I think it was. I want to say it was Octopus Energy who had some AI answering customer queries and they said that the customers who were served by the AI were more pleased with the service they got than the ones who were served by the humans. So that's just an interesting thing. I don't know what that says about the AI or the humans, or the customers.

Speaker 1: 20:39

Yeah, another one to add to the nature of the queries, another one to add to the scamongering of the robots are going to be taking our jobs, i suppose. Yeah, we just don't know what's going to happen for many years from now. So, looking back over the time that you were running Love Honey, what was the biggest mistake that you made and what did you learn from that?

Speaker 2: 21:02

Goodness. I hesitate to say we never made any mistakes, because that wouldn't be true. I think we were probably a bit too cautious early on when we could see that we were onto something good and we were selling a lot of products and we were profitable pretty much right from the start, if you ignore the fact we didn't pay ourselves anything for two years. To answer your question, the mistake that we made was not to recruit better people sooner, so we were too cautious. We didn't really want to take too many risks with employing people that we would then have to pay. So not that it held us back particularly, but we didn't appreciate the benefit that really good people could bring to us. And then, when we realised that it is worth paying a little bit more to get a really good person, over being a little bit of a person with your salary and getting a less good person, so that was yeah. Was it a mistake? Well, yeah, i guess, just looking back, it was.

Speaker 1: 22:16

So when you look at some of the, you know the growth that you had at Love Funny do you feel that people were really, really important to that growth And could you not have gone that far Had you just stuck to maybe not hiring the people that were?

Speaker 2: 22:30

there. Yeah, absolutely Yeah, and me and I were always very honest with ourselves about our own deficiencies, So it was not hard to employ people that could do something better than us, whether that was product development or marketing or logistics or whatever part of the business it was. It was our job was to get someone. Whatever we were doing, get someone in that can do it better than us. That was the sort of the perfectest of any startup, because as a founder, you do it. You do everything yourself.

Speaker 1: 23:11

It's a very good mantra to live by. And how about the biggest wins?

Speaker 2: 23:21

Well, we are probably, i think, our proud, our proudest moment was winning the Queens Award for Enterprise for International Trade in 2016. So it was the first time we won it, and Neil and I were invited to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen, which was absolutely incredible, and so it was the Queens Award for Enterprise Reception. So there were probably 200 or 300 other people also drinking champagne and having nibbles with the Queen, but there we were in the throne room and the Portrait Gallery rubbing shoulders with Princess Dan, duke of Edinburgh, and the Queen.

Speaker 2: 24:08

So that was probably our proudest moment, but we've had fantastic experiences over the last 20 years. We were in the centre of the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon, obviously when those books came out remember. So 10, 11 years ago, everywhere you looked, someone was reading Fifty Shades of Grey. So we made the official Fifty Shades of Grey Sex Women Bondage Range just fun. We've worked with Tracy Cox, who is a very well-known, well-respected sex expert, was someone that we started working with very early days because we realised that we were a sex business run by two divorced bloats, so maybe people weren't going to take us especially seriously. So we needed a sex expert And Tracy has been absolutely fantastic to work with at time, which is another way that we've got a point of difference from the competition as well as making up for our own deficiencies Incredible.

Speaker 1: 25:19

And, looking back, as you say, the landscape has obviously changed. It's changed in the last two years, never mind 20. But what were the key technologies that you think you used to help you guys grow back then? What was maybe the one technology that you genuinely think you would not be able to grow to the point that you did a £1 billion company without?

Speaker 2: 25:41

This is a strange one thinking back, because our chief tech guy, jeff, who developed the website from the ground up. He built it in cold fusion, which may or may not give your listeners jivers So we were very basically had a default position to develop things ourselves. So up until the last three or four years, it was all our own hand built system. Gradually we would plug other things into it, but all of the website, the logistics system, the order processing, the warehouse management system actually everything we developed ourselves, most of it in cold fusion and then some of it in whatever that Microsoft thing is I don't know what they call it. And then, when the we saw the majority share of the business in 2018, the private sector firm Telemos we realized then that, well, we've gone probably as far as we can with our own platform. It's now, even though it's customized and is absolutely perfect.

Speaker 2: 27:08

The Samid sector is online and shipping products out the door very, very efficiently is really straining at the limits of its capacity, because we were running nine, i think, international websites. We were running six warehouses All of these things that all these big packages promise you can do. We have built a system ourselves to do it, but it was felt a little bit like well, if you pulled the wrong bit of string, it might have collapsed. So they have now moved on to the Salesforce platform they're putting in next week, and even all these things, which I am assured are the correct decisions for the business. But a large part of me has died.

Speaker 1: 28:00

Yeah, it's all that effort, isn't it? But a case of, as you say, when you build something like that over such a period of time and throw this technology on top of this technology, pull on bit of string house of cards. Or even, maybe did you ever fear that if somebody left the business, that would had all that knowledge and then it was taken away from concern as well For a startup out there or an e-commerce company that's thinking about their platform? would you advise that now for somebody starting out, or would you advise them to take off the shelf technology now?

Speaker 2: 28:32

I think definitely you go off the shelf now. Probably you could ask that GPT to develop something for you.

Speaker 1: 28:40

Is that weird?

Speaker 2: 28:41

Yeah, unless you've got a particularly unique or niche product or service to sell, it's almost inevitably. Someone has already done it before you and there is a package that you can use and customize to suit what you're doing.

Speaker 1: 29:03

Yeah, there's a lot of pick and mix out there now, isn't there?

Speaker 2: 29:07

Yeah, there's so many plugins and whatever just for Shopify, for example. So, yeah, I think to get started, you go off shelf. also, you probably want to create a minimum viable product just to get a website up.

Speaker 2: 29:25

If you are retailing for e-commerce, get your website up and start selling and get real customers on it and real customer feedback. We always used to say that the perfect is the enemy of good. Enough that you can keep refining and refining and refining your code or your system and never actually launch it. But if something's good enough, get it out there and start making some money or get some customer feedback on it, Especially if that good enough is sitting there on the shelf for you to grab right.

Speaker 1: 29:56

It's not going to feel like you're maybe so much, so you don't need to keep refining it. I guess you can move a lot faster then. So, in terms of pocket timer, is that what you're thinking? Is it going to be the online route? Are you talking into reseller territory? What's your plan there?

Speaker 2: 30:12

Yes, pocket timer has its own Shopify website and it works very well. It's taking orders and there's some money in a PayPal account because of it. I've taken some credit card payments. I don't know where that money goes. It's in Shopify's banks somewhere, so I asked for it. It's on sale in a few golf pro shops and things like that, But honestly, I would just really need to pull my finger out and get stuck into marketing it online. I think there are so many like profile basically golf journalists, golf bloggers, golfers on Twitter. I think that is going to be a key thing basically make friends with a lot of people in there, be part of the golf world, because I am a play golf, So I think being, but just be genuinely. I am a golfer and I've made a thing that can help golfers, So I think that's it. It would be brilliant if the RNA decided that mandated a rule that you had to carry a timer. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to bring any pressure to bear on the governing body of the sport.

Speaker 1: 31:35

And what do you think are going to be the main challenges for you? going forward and looking a bit wider other e-commerce merchants and maybe not necessarily based on your product and the area of golf, but just general what challenges are going to be facing new merchants this year?

Speaker 2: 31:51

Gosh, specifically for pocket timer and probably startups is how to get traffic without spending any money, because they might be on okay margin on this pocket timer thing, but the repeat purchase value repeat purchase can be zero. You only need one lesson. So a lot of e-commerce businesses will talk about lifetime customer value and all of these stuff. So I can buy a customer today for £100 worth of Google clicks because I know they're going to spend £200 over the next three years, and I can stick all those numbers in a spreadsheet and raise the money instead of blazing away. That's not how it is for pocket timer And that's not how it is for a lot of startups.

Speaker 2: 32:37

So I guess we're back to the creativity and the ideas that you can have to essentially get free publicity. It boils down to that, i suppose. Inevitably, companies need to keep an eye on the macro situation, which is a little bit boring to talk about and out of everybody's control. But if consumers don't feel as well off or have less money to spend on discretionary items, then that makes it tough for a lot of e-commerce businesses And then that points towards controlling your costs and bringing your horns in a bit, but then that's a tough one If you're expected to grow a business, then keeping the costs down is not necessarily compatible with this.

Speaker 1: 33:37

And how about opportunities? What's the big opportunity that you have now that maybe you didn't have when you started out on Love Honey? What's the best thing out there at the minute?

Speaker 2: 33:49

Oh gosh, that's a good question. I think Love Honey has got a big opportunity globally. It's really the only brand that has travelled internationally. So as Love Honey, we noticed that other places in the world speak English so we could go and market ourselves there. So we became number one in Australia and very strong in the US. And then two years ago we merged with a company called Wildset, which is very strong in Europe and Asia. So the Love Honey group is very, very strong globally. So I think that is the big opportunity for Love Honey, particularly in growing in the US. But that's not a very helpful thing to observe for your listeners particularly.

Speaker 1: 34:41

So, yeah, what's the opportunity to be here at the minute? Get more customers around the world, which social media also gives you that opportunity to as well. I suppose. Get you can be in touch with somebody, a potential shopper in Australia. Get really popular, real or a tick tock going, then that's your opportunity there.

Speaker 2: 35:02

Yeah, possibly, yeah. The other thing Love Honey has done a lot more of recently is selling through marketplaces. It's become a good seller on Amazon, which is a little bit sort of playing with fire, because Amazon is your competitor but it's also a platform that you can sell on, so you're sort of almost feeding the beast that's trying to kill you. So certainly those kind of things, marketplaces are worth considering. But they are pretty ruthless, pretty low margin And you are at the mercy of the whims of them.

Speaker 2: 35:43

So one of our Amazon stores was taken down because they were going through a big no-your-customer process and just fell in the hour. One fell in the lap of essentially a jobs worth. So one of our American store was left. Online was actually fine. I don't know if it was the UK store I think was taken offline because we couldn't prove some weird company ownership thing in the private equity structure. It was just bizarre and they just turned the site off. It's like, well, if your entire business, or a large part of your business relies on Amazon or any marketplace, then you've got to be really, really known, because they can just turn you off.

Speaker 1: 36:27

No, that is very good advice. Richard, we're coming to the end of our time together. It's been a really really fascinating conversation, but before I let you go, i need you to come up with a couple of top tips that you think it would be really great for e-commerce businesses today. looking to grow into that £1 billion company. What are your top takeaways?

Speaker 2: 36:49

Am I allowed to say, start 20 years ago. That would be my first one. I've probably said it quite a few times, but I keep going back to this idea of being creative and innovative and having a story, a product, a message that is newsworthy and stands out, something that will get you written about, talked about, linked to, blogged about, reeled about, ticked talks about all of these things, because there are so many other companies fighting for attention that it's very, very, very hard, if you haven't got something distinctive about you, to say Yeah, that would be the one. Can I just stop with one tip?

Speaker 1: 37:52

I mean Time Machine and having a really good story. I'll let you off with it.

Speaker 2: 37:55

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 1: 37:56

We're really good, Richard. thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you.

Speaker 2: 38:02

Thank you very much for having me, Caroline, and good luck to all your listeners.

Speaker 1: 38:08

So that was an absolutely fantastic interview. I think the key takeaways there are how much the e-commerce landscape has changed. It's so much easier to get some off-the-shelf technology and start up and get the ball rolling on your retail business. but, that said, customer experience is as important as ever. If you get those eyeballs coming to your website, you still need to give them a good experience. And don't forget, make sure you have a story. Tease out something from your product which is newsworthy and is standout, and even if it's not the case of the journalist writing about you in The Times, it can be maybe something that's picked up by an influencer or a TikTok and Instagram and goes completely viral. Some really great tips there from Richard.

Speaker 1: 38:54

So before we let you go, do not forget that, with companies like Furniture Box, natural Baby Shower and Beyond Retail, they're just a few of the ambitious retailers who have integrated PeopleVox warehouse management systems to take their e-commerce tech stack to the next level, with Lightning, fast Pick and Pack workflows, easy user training and a 360 degree transparency into your warehouse operation. anyone who has used PeopleVox will tell you that the platform is a genuine game changer. Not only does using PeopleVox enhance your customer experience by tightening inventory control and cutting out packing mistakes. it also boosts your efficiency and unlocks growth for your business. So if you're ready to transform your business, head over to PeopleVoxcom today. And that's all we have time for today, everybody, don't forget. you can go to the usual podcast platforms to listen to your previous episodes of the Lightning 50 podcast. Until next time, goodbye.