The @debenhams marketplace opportunity with Dan Finley

Thank you, thank you for having me.

Debenhams is a great British iconic heritage brand. Everyone knows Debenhams. For over 240 years it's played a small part in the moments that matter in people's lives. It's one of the founders of department stores, one of the founders of Oxford Street, and we think pretty much everybody in the UK — certainly over the age of 30, maybe over 25 — has a story to tell about Debenhams because we've all grown up with Debenhams being that department store where we could get great brands in fashion, home, and beauty. Going forward, we're serving consumers in different ways. For many years Debenhams has been known for all of the stores, but the world's changed, the business model has changed, but Debenhams is continuing through that under new ownership with a new strategy and a new vision to be the great British digital department store. And we're making good progress. We tell great brands at great prices and work with more and more partners every day.

Yeah, Debenhams has always been known for offering a great selection of brands. One of the challenges that physical retail can have is just the sheer space and the cost of operating that space. As we're now a digital-first digital department store, it provides us with a great opportunity to offer more brands than ever to our consumers. Today we have 1,500 great brands available to buy, all offered through our Marketplace solution. We want to provide great choice to our consumers, we want to be the customer destination of choice, but also we want to be the brand partner of choice because we offer access to a community of tens of millions of consumers. We should be considered as being complementary to a brand or retailer's direct consumer offer, and by showcasing their great brand and products to our consumers, we play a small role in acquiring new consumers for brands and retailers, and for our consumers, introducing them to great brands and products that make a difference to their everyday lives.

Yeah, so Debenhams is a genuine department store, and over the course of its history has sold everything from grocery to flowers and books and everything in between. We want to be that digital department store. For us, we're open to all categories, all product types, all brands, retailers of all different sizes and scales. We're anchored today in fashion, home, and beauty and have a great array of brands there. Anybody in that space is welcome to come on board, but anybody in adjacent categories too, we'd love to talk to you about it. One of the great things about Debenhams is because so many consumers come to it and so many people know it, it's a great way if you're a small to medium-sized enterprise, new brand, UK-oriented, to put your product in front of literally millions of consumers. We want to operate with brands, retailers, resellers, partners, aggregators of all different sizes and scales because we want to offer the ultimate choice to consumers. And our skill and our challenge is to make that choice personalized, relevant to our consumer so that nobody feels overwhelmed. I think the great thing that Spotify and Apple Music do is they have access to so many songs and titles but nobody ever feels overwhelmed. That's what we're trying to replicate on Debenhams: great destination, huge choice from brands of all different sizes and scale, and our job is to make it easy for our consumers to discover the brands that they love and want to buy.

Yeah, we really want to be that brand partner of choice, so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to join our ecosystem, join our community, and engage with our consumers. Our fastest partner has gone live in two hours. Typically it takes 10 to 14 days, but some customers take a little bit longer too. Our commitment is to work with you to make that as quick and seamless and easy as possible. We want to do the heavy lifting, make it as easy as possible for you to get up and running and accessing our consumers as quickly as possible.

Yeah, we work with all of the big integrators, all of the smaller integrators as well. So whether you're with Mirakl or ChannelAdvisor or Tradebyte or Annata, or anything in between — whatever your tech is, we can work with you. And equally, if you don't have any tech, we can work with you too. Our job is to make that as simple and easy as possible.

No, I think we've got a good broad assortment today and we're open to new partners in all categories. Whether that's sportswear, outdoor, toys and games, gaming more generally, or health and wellness and nutrition — we're open-minded. We're building out Debenhams to be a destination for not just fashion, home, and beauty, but all of the key subcategories within that. And we want to extend it from just being those three categories to maybe being five, six, seven different categories as well.

Yeah, we're really pleased with the progress that we're making. Things that we've announced more recently as we doubled down on our vision to be the great British digital department store is that some of our wider brands within the group are now forming part of our Debenhams business. So Dorothy Perkins, Burton, Wallis, and Coast, Oasis — for example, all great, well-recognized fashion brands, all now forming part of that Debenhams business. And Debenhams today being as big, if not bigger, than it was online ever before. And that's a great foundation on which to build — many millions of consumers for brands and retailers to interact with and ultimately to showcase your products to.

Yeah, great question. It's a really broad church, and it's different to what people perceive it to be. It's not that destination that just your mum, your dad, or your grandparents are going to. Actually, it's a really broad church of 16 to 65 plus, and we've got as many customers at 16 to 32 as we have between 65 plus, for example. So it's a really broad church of consumers — young, old, everything in between. And I think that's what Debenhams was; it was a department store that everybody went to to find products and services that they wanted to buy for themselves and their loved ones.

Yeah, and really great to see it still here. And look, everybody knows Debenhams. The challenging opportunity that we have is reminding people that people can still shop with Debenhams today on debenhams.com. And we want to provide great products and brands to consumers as we've always done, but we're just doing it in a different way now, and that's digitally through debenhams.com.

Yeah, so we are first and foremost a marketplace. That's our point of difference, that's our raison d'être, that's what we get up every day focused on. We are a marketplace — it's not a side hustle for us, it's not item number nine on the strategy pad, it's not a new incremental income stream for us. It's all of our business, that's what we are focused on. So we are specialists in that and experts in working with brands and partners on these things. From our perspective, it's fair game — brands come on and we're agnostic to which brands sell and how we promote them. So everybody has a fair and even playing field in that respect. Of course we have partnership programs, advertising programs, marketing programs where people can work with us so that we can showcase the brand at the very best. We might feature them in our TV campaigns, which some of our partners had over Christmas and we're doing with more of our partners in the run-up to Easter. They might be featured in our CRM campaigns where they get dedicated email and social activity. They might get sponsored spots on the site. So yeah, we have a comprehensive range of options that we work with partners to make sure that we tailor the branding and the marketing so it complements what they're doing through their direct-to-consumer channels, showcases their brand and products at the best, and engages with our consumers in the way that we know best.

Great, email Dan at debenhams.com. That comes through directly to me. We'll respond to you straight away and we can get you going in a couple of hours or a couple of weeks if that's preferable for you. We're making great progress, we're really pleased with the progress that we're making, we're looking for new partners and new brands coming on board every single week. And so that you can join our community, we can showcase your great brand and products to our huge community of customers.

Thank you very much.