Never has a year in my career gone as quickly as the last 12 months.
The reason is simple – the environment I work in encourages me to be the best version of myself. The opportunity I see today remains as incredible as it was a year ago. And the task at hand requires relentless focus and stretch. As they say, time flies when you’re having fun!
People have asked me why I joined THG. I answer in two parts:
- In Matthew Moulding, I found a brilliant entrepreneur who deeply cares about the business he has built, and I knew I could learn a lot from him.
- In THG, I found a company with real heart and ambition, where I could channel my experience and passion.
One year on, I wasn’t wrong.
I am blessed to have worked at some brilliant organisations in my career. THG is the first organisation I’ve worked at that is truly digitally native. We don’t talk about digital transformation, we just ‘DO IT’.
Data point: back in 2016, THG built and launched 74 webstores in 12-months, fully operational with localised consumer propositions. I wonder how many organisations could do this in 2023?
Over the last year a wide variety of people in the enterprise world and my network have asked me, ‘What does Ingenuity actually do?’ I love to describe it as a ‘superhighway for brands’, a complete commerce solution built on 18 years of hard graft.
Every time a CEO and their board visits our campus, we always get the same response – ‘Wow! We didn’t realise you had this breadth and depth of capability.’ Somehow, it still amazes me every single day too.
This business has been built with the goal of solving some of the most complex problems in the world of retail and ecommerce by acquiring the right capabilities, internalising them at the optimal cost, adopting them on our own retail brands and platforms and then externalising them to global consumer brands and retailers, to help them accelerate their plans – the essence of what ‘Ingenuity’ stands for.
What has personally stood out for me at THG is the obsession to ‘detail’ in everything we do. I’ve heard many global brand leaders talk about being consumer-centric, consumer-obsessed – all well and good.
But what I have learned at THG is that there needs to be a very big shift in mindset and muscle for consumer brands to switch from getting to the back door of a retailer (which they excel at), to getting to the front door of a consumer – and be obsessed about it at every single touchpoint every single day.
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