Retail is Detail Podcast

Ceri Griffiths took a job debt collecting in South Wales in 2002 and stayed the best part of a decade. He then spent the rest of his career selling the product he used to recover, through V12, Close Brothers, Klarna, Zip and Zopa, and now sells payments at Super Payments . He joins host Jamie Hamer to explain what actually separates one lender from another, why large merchants run a second one to...

Charlotte Pearce has run Inkpact for twelve years, sending physical mail for retail brands including Boden, OKA, Space NK and Victoria Beckham: handwritten notes, postcards and catalogues, triggered from a brand's CRM and written by hand at scale. It started with a client who wanted a hundred handwritten notes, a founder whose own handwriting was too slow to deliver them, and a cousin who finished...

Helen Murphy grew up in Salford, read engineering at Durham, and spent a decade in corporates: Procter & Gamble, in national accounts and ecommerce, then Bain. Alongside both she built a baby food brand of her own, grinding on it after midnight when she got home from consulting. She sold it to her co-manufacturer in the Middle East, having watched the cost of shipping a container from China qu...

Nick Beresford spent eighteen years at Procter & Gamble, working on the launch of Sunny Delight, running Fairy Liquid as UK commercial manager, taking premium brands into Britain's discounters, and finishing in Geneva on global strategy for the business behind Pantene and Head & Shoulders. In 2016 he handed back the badge and the stock options to run Enertor, a family orthotics business in...

Alex Ayin was on the founding team at Social Chain, the Manchester agency he helped Steven Bartlett and Dominic McGregor build into a global group with offices in Berlin and New York, before spending the year ahead of THG's £5.4 billion float inside the business behind Myprotein. In 2026, after five years advising Kraft Heinz, the BBC and L'Oréal on hiring, he founded Tomorrow's Potential , a priv...

Ashley Hainsworth was supposed to become a theatrical agent like his father. Instead, a university module needed an ecommerce website, a friend's family owned a mattress factory, and a £400 project run from his mum's front room in Liversedge became Flair Furniture Group: £34.3m in revenue last year, on record to hit £50m this year, and not a penny of outside money taken along the way. Ashley joins...

Chris Hayward spent 47 years at one company. He joined NMBS in 1977 as a teenage trainee on £18.50 a week and stepped down last year as chief executive of a co-operative transacting £2.2bn a year for over 1,200 independent merchants. He joins host Jamie Hamer to explain how a buying society actually works, why he put his people before his customers, and how NMBS moved to the cloud four weeks befor...

Rory Sutherland has spent three decades arguing that business fell in love with logic and forgot that customers are gloriously irrational. As Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK and founder of its behavioural science practice, he has made a career out of the small, illogical details that quietly decide what people buy. What they perceive as a "good deal" and why. He joins host Jamie Hamer for a wide-rangin...

Reid Archer, founder of pricing platform Pricemaster and MD of TradeCounter Direct, returns to Retail is Detail a year on from being our very first guest. This time it's an AI special: how he used AI to fight a legal dispute, why one counterfeit t-shirt wiped his 17-year-old site off Google, and what AI is really delivering across UK e-commerce. In this episode, host Jamie Hamer sits down with Rei...

Seven years ago, Toolden was an £11 million business competing in one of the most brutally thin-margin categories in e-commerce, up against Screwfix, Toolstation, and Amazon, with no stores, no outside investment, and no obvious right to win. Today the business is on track to turn over £70 million in 2026 and is growing at around 30% year on year. Jamie sits down with Eddie Grovu, Growth and E-Com...

Most e-commerce agencies are better at winning clients than keeping them. Ryan Copeland built Foundation Commerce in 2020 to do the opposite and five years on, the results speak for themselves. As Founder and MD of one of only two Hyvä Platinum Partners in the UK, Ryan joined Jamie to talk about what it actually takes to grow an e-commerce agency with integrity. They get into the work behind doubl...

Andrew Pickersgill, Managing Director of ECatering, has built his career on a specific niche: stepping into family businesses, in categories he's never worked in before, and scaling them. He's done it in building supplies, gaming, power tools, and now commercial catering equipment. ECatering is a multi-million pound B2B e-commerce operation supplying Costco, Nando's, Subway, the NHS, Emirates, and...

Dan Beckles dropped out of a confirmed university place at 17 to sell furniture on eBay from a mate's garden in Wiltshire. A decade on, he is the co-founder of Furniturebox, a £25M bootstrapped online furniture retailer with 80 staff, a 4.9 Trustpilot score from nearly 10,000 reviews, and a US business that tripled to $6M last year entirely through marketplaces. In this episode, Jamie sits down wi...

Jack Hopkins was a qualified electrician who got so frustrated watching jobs grind to a halt that he put £200K of his own savings on the line, got on a bike, and started delivering bricks himself. That experiment became Tradeaze, now a UK construction logistics marketplace with nearly 3,000 drivers, partnerships with Travis Perkins and Jewson, and £3M raised to date. The origin story is just the b...

Anthony Joshua and James Watt backed her, she has raised £2.8M, and Laura Fullerton is building Monk, the world's first smart ice bath. Laura is a former Saatchi & Saatchi copywriter turned serial hardware founder who spotted a gap in the market that nobody else was willing to fill, built a 3,000 person waitlist with almost no ad spend, and created a product that has been described as the love...

Zsuzsa Kecsmar didn't set out to build a software company. She set out to be a journalist. She won Young Journalist of the Year in Hungary, hosted her own radio show, and spent five years honing her craft before quietly concluding she had hit her ceiling and should do something else entirely. That pivot led to co-founding Antavo in London's Silicon Roundabout, writing the business plan as her univ...

Keiran Hewkin did not come from retail. He came from oil rigs, petrochemical plants and automotive production lines where getting a tolerance wrong means someone gets hurt. When he walked into furniture manufacturing and discovered that plus or minus five centimetres was considered acceptable precision, he saw an industry that had tolerated unnecessary friction for decades simply because nobody wi...

What does it take to turn a local guitar shop into the world's best music store? Jamie Hamer sits down with Ben Greener, Head of Technology and Marketing at Andertons, to find out. Ben has spent 11 years at Andertons, starting as a content writer at 20 and growing into the role that now drives one of the most impressive e-commerce and content operations in retail. In this episode they get into how...

Retail moves fast and everyone claims to have the answer. But few can actually see what’s broken and why. In this episode, Dan Coleman joins the show to deliver the clarity retailers desperately need. Dan has been building ecommerce since Google launched, helping brands of every size get real commercial results from platforms like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. He dives into the bi...

Most retail CRM is busy work dressed up as strategy. Personalisation is talked about constantly, yet customers are still served generic emails, lazy welcome flows and relentless discounting. The result is short-term conversion at the expense of long-term trust. This conversation with Ethan Burnett, Senior Email Strategist at SalesFire, challenges many of the habits retailers treat as best practice...

AI is everywhere in retail, but very few teams are using it in the right way. In this episode of the Retail is Detail podcast, Jamie Hamer sits down with Thomas Hill , Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer of Hyperfinity , to unpack the biggest myths around AI, data and customer understanding. Tom explains why AI cannot replace strategy, why most retailers are asking the wrong questions of their...

Paul Ryazanov has spent almost two decades inside ecommerce. He has built platforms, scaled an agency and launched his own brands. In this episode he takes us from his early days coding OS Commerce stores to leading MageCloud and advising more than 100 retailers. Paul explains how ecommerce has evolved and why there are rarely big breakthrough moments. He shares the lessons he learned by operating...

In this episode, David Woodland, COO of Rowen Group, lifts the lid on what it really takes to run two of the fastest growing digital retail brands in the UK. From warehouse capacity problems to the reality of ERP switchouts, David shares the operational challenges that force leaders to rethink how their business actually works. He talks through the messy middle of tech projects, why the basics mat...

Murray Van Wyk is one of the most quietly influential data scientists in retail, helping brands from Sainsbury’s to global scale-ups unlock hundreds of millions in value. In this conversation with Jamie Hamer, he cuts through the noise to reveal why most retailers are stuck in complexity, drowning in bad processes and overspending on data they do not actually need. Jamie and Murray dig into:• Why...

Alex Schlagman, founder of SaveTheHighStreet.org, JoinJo, and Thriver, has spent years reimagining what the future of retail could look like. In this episode, he shares his vision for a High Street that blends digital innovation with the passion of local entrepreneurs. From incubator programs that turn empty Debenhams into vibrant hubs, to AI agents running back-office tasks for independents, Alex...