They were tough to miss. As GAA fans arrived at Croke Park for the All-Ireland hurling final on one of the hottest days of the year, hot pink ice-cream vans were there dispensing cones wrapped in a card announcing Littlewoods Ireland’s rebrand to Very.
“I’m smiling because I’m so excited for this campaign, we have been planning it for so long,” says Rossa Butler, managing director for Ireland at Very Group, the British online retailer that has been selling in the Irish market since the 1980s, when Amazon was a jungle and shopping without going into actual shops meant “sending away” for items displayed in mail-order catalogues.
While its exuberant rebrand announcement has coincided with the climax of the senior hurling championship it sponsors, this is a multichannel marketing blitz that heralds a year of messaging backed by seven-figure investment, he says, smiling still.
“This is about building on the legacy and heritage of the Littlewoods brand, and modernising it.”
The Very brand already has some equity with its customers, Butler adds, in part because the Very website has been in operation in the UK for 13 years but also because Littlewoods Ireland launched the V by Very fashion brand here in 2017. “We have been building the brand personality since then.”
Personality it has: Very’s television ad, like its ice-cream vans, is a barrage of what Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli termed shocking pink. It is cheerful rather than brash, accessible rather than edgy.
Over croissants in a Very meeting room at its Dublin base in Westend Office Park, Blanchardstown, I ask Butler how he would describe Very’s core customer.
“We serve Irish families. That’s our customer. Our typical customer, I would say — although we appeal to a wide range of customers and have a very broad customer base — would be an Irish mum, who still has kids in the house, shopping for the family, shopping for the house. And obviously shopping for themselves is very important.”
Butler stresses the benefits of being a multi-category retailer, not least during the pandemic years, when “fashion sales took a step back”, because nobody was going anywhere, “but home really jumped”. Its product range allows it to ride each craze, each wave of seasonality, to the fullest, with humidifiers, air coolers and paddling pools flying out in July alongside swimwear — an increasingly difficult category to shop in physical outlets — and other summer fashion.
This multi-category status may once again prove to have a protective quality on Very’s revenues if the burgeoning cost-of-living crisis puts the squeeze on disposable incomes.
Already in the UK, the narrative for those pure-play online fashion retailers that profited from lockdown shop closures is that the party is over: business costs are higher, consumers have less money to spend and high street rivals are open again. Fast fashion ecommerce outfit Missguided collapsed in May before being snapped up out of administration by Mike Ashley, while Boohoo has scrapped its free returns policy.
Butler sees the outlook more favourably, citing the fact that people are out and about again, needing clothes for the office and special occasions once more, while the “energetic” aspect of the Very brand likely to have “special resonance on the fashion side”. If he’s concerned that a more stagnant economy might take the wind out of Very’s sails, he hides it well.
“We’re a resilient business, we have been here for 40 years and we have seen a few economic downturns in that time.”
Sheltering customers as much as possible from price increases by managing costs across its supply chain is “absolutely” a focus, he says, while offering a spread of price points on the site — which sells 70,000 products across 1,800 brands — is “something that we look at continuously”.
As well as adding Irish brands such as beauty ranges Cocoa Brown and Bare by Vogue, with more to come, the rebrand is notable for bringing on to the site higher-end fashion labels such as Ralph Lauren, Olivia Rubin, Vivienne Westwood, Coach and Paul Smith, creating quite a price spectrum.
At the other end from these designer names sits its Everyday value brand of more than 800 products — the price of Everyday dresses currently listed on Very.ie come in even lower than items belonging to its range fronted by former Coronation Street actor Michelle Keegan and V by Very, neither of which are pricey.
“We also have flexible payment options, which are really important to our customers as well,” says Butler.
Indeed, Very is a regulated credit provider, with the “ways to pay” section of its website bearing the standard Central Bank of Ireland warning that this is high-cost credit. But with Gen-Z fast discovering the allure of buy-now-pay-later, helped along by multiple fintech companies — even Apple is getting into the game — the likelihood is that this trend has some way still to run.
“It is certainly getting very popular, yes, absolutely,” Butler says. “Definitely, I do see it growing. From our perspective, I see it growing in line with our growth as a retailer.”
As for Boohoo’s surge in returns — attributed to a shift back to more fitted clothing, after the pandemic’s anything-goes athleisure vibe — Butler says Very hasn’t encountered the same phenomenon.
“Returns have always been quite steady across the board for us and free returns are a really important part of the offering. It certainly isn’t something that our customers use all the time, or anything like that,” he says.
“It just takes a barrier away from shopping online and gives people the comfort of knowing they won’t have to go through a lot of hoops to get the product back if it doesn’t fit them or they don’t like the colour, or whatever it might be.”
New delivery options include next-day delivery and a free click-and-collect service to the 1,000-plus Parcel Connect locations, often newsagents, that double as its network for returns.
Butler is keen to talk about Very Group’s “absolutely stacked development roadmap”, which includes partnerships with companies like Commercetools, with which it is working to modernise its tech platform, and Amplience, an agency that provides marketing content and editorial pages to keep browsers engaged. And then there’s True Fit, a tool offering personalised fit and size guidance that shoppers may already have used on other online haunts.
So why was retail, which Butler (36) has worked in his “entire career”, the right fit for him?
“I love retail,” he says, expanding on the “buzz” of selling products to shoppers who might be passionate about them for whatever reason.
During his college years, Butler had a job on the shop floor of outdoor clothing and equipment retailer 53 Degrees North, learning “the fundamentals of what makes a great retailer”, then making his “first proper step” into the industry at the same company as it built its first ecommerce site.
He later moved to what is now called Very Group, holding various marketing and operations roles before being appointed managing director, “which I think is the best role in the world”, in 2019. Could he ever have envisaged the retail rollercoaster that came next?
“It was clearly a very challenging period for a number of reasons, but one I look back on with a lot of pride in terms of how the team navigated it,” he says. Very employs more than 50 people directly in Ireland, where its airy Dublin 15 office has embraced a hybrid working culture since the pandemic.
The group’s headquarters are in Liverpool, which is where Littlewoods was established as a football pools company some 99 years ago before moving into mail-order retail in the 1930s. Another strand of Very’s company ancestry, meanwhile, can be traced back to an English catalogue business called Kays, founded in 1889.
In 2002, Littlewoods was acquired by the billionaire Barclay brothers, twins Frederick and David, who are perhaps better known for their ownership of newspaper publisher Telegraph Media Group. David Barclay died last year. The Barclay family are now said to be mulling an initial public offering (IPO) for Very in 2023, while the group will have a new chief executive from September, when Lionel Desclée, a former boss of Walmart Japan, will succeed Henry Birch.
Very Group, which went through a phase of being called Shop Direct, has total annual revenue of £2.3 billion (€2.7 billion), with sales in the Irish market exceeding €125 million. The Irish operation delivers 2 million parcels to about 350,000 customers, with what is now Very.ie attracting about 38 million visits each year.
Who does Butler regard as Very’s competitors? There are few like-for-like offerings, he says, then names Next, Argos, TK Maxx and H & as “brilliant brands”. On the electrical side, it is “all the usual suspects”.
The online retail market is “competitive and getting even more competitive”, but he anticipates that its pandemic-era momentum will continue. Customer expectations have changed, and he believes Very is “well-placed” to capitalise.
It’s hard not to be struck by the fact our conversation is taking place across the road from Blanchardstown Centre, the vast West Dublin shopping development that transformed the area when it opened in the mid-1990s. How does he assess the future of bricks-and-mortar retail amid this acceleration in ecommerce?
“My personal view is that there is room for both, and that they both serve important purposes,” says Butler, before hastily clarifying that what Very is focused on is digital. “That’s what we’re good at, that’s what we’re investing in.”
While the summer sun might be blazing outside, Very is already preparing for its “golden quarter”, as back-to-school sales segue into the long ramp-up to Christmas. With the rebrand to bed in too, it must be a very busy time, I suggest, before becoming conscious of how often I’m suddenly using “very” as an adverb.
The Very team have a habit of doing the same, Butler says. “The puns have really been dialling up in the office.”
CV
Name: Rossa Butler
Position: Managing director, Ireland, for the Very Group
Background and family: He grew up in Shankill, Co Dublin, and now lives in Greystones with his wife, primary schoolteacher Kate Raleigh, and their two children, Liam (4) and Olive (1), spending his weekends in playgrounds and on the floor “building Legos”.
Something we might expect: He loves travelling to Very’s headquarters in Liverpool, “a brilliant city”, and enjoys the camaraderie he finds there.
Something that might surprise: He says he plays golf, a new hobby, “extremely poorly” to the amusement of his friends.
