Retail is Detail Podcast

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...

In this episode, Jamie sits down with Laura Simpson, the force behind My Bespoke Room, the UK’s number one rated interior design service. Laura explains how she built a tech-enabled design business that speaks to real people, not just the elite, and why simplicity and empathy are at the heart of every customer experience. They explore the rise of AI in retail design, the power of process and techn...

What if your website isn’t the future of e-commerce? In this episode of the Retail is Detail Podcast , Jamie chats with Sam Wright , founder of Blink SEO and Macalytics , to unpack why most retailers are still leaving 20% growth on the table. From killing the obsession with shiny growth hacks to showing why structure, taxonomy, and data hygiene are the real retail game-changers, Sam cuts through t...

Cas Paton , Founder and CEO of OnBuy and Comet , joins Jamie Hamer for a fast-paced deep dive into building one of Europe’s fastest-growing marketplaces whilst reviving one of the UK’s most iconic retail brands. From launching in 21 countries to introducing instant cashback and planning a US expansion, Cas shares how OnBuy is redefining customer value while competing head-to-head with global giant...

What does it take to build an AI-driven marketing platform that retailers can truly trust? In this episode, Jamie Hamer is joined by John Readman , founder of Modo25 and Ask Bosco , to unpack his journey from early days in postcode software to scaling agencies for some of the UK’s biggest fashion brands, before launching a platform that solves the age-old question: where should you spend your next...

Retailers today face an overwhelming amount of advice, tools, and pressure to keep up with the competition. In this episode, Jamie Hamer is joined by Chloë Thomas — e-commerce expert, author, and host of the globally recognised E-Commerce Masterplan podcast. Drawing from two decades in retail and over 500 podcast interviews, Chloë explains why customer data should guide strategy, how retailers can...

Running an Ironman and scaling a tech startup may seem worlds apart, but for Daniel Parekh-Hill, the founder of Flare, they demand the same mindset: discipline, resilience, and an ability to push through challenges. Recently named in Forbes 30 Under 30 for e-commerce and retail, Daniel joins Jamie to share his journey from pitch competitions and accelerators to building a fast-growing SaaS company...

What does the future of retail really look like when AI knows your customers better than you do? In this episode of Retail is Detail, Jamie Hamer sits down with Brad Houldsworth, Strategy Director at Remarkable Commerce, to unpack the bold shifts reshaping e-commerce. From dynamic pricing that charges different shoppers different amounts, to retailers discovering that not going omnichannel can som...

In this episode of Retail is Detail, Jamie Hamer is joined by Oliver Spark, founder of Sweet Analytics and former CEO of The White Company, where he grew the business from £6m to £50m. Oliver shares the five levers of e-commerce growth he’s developed from his retail career, why customer data is the first lever every brand should master, and the critical metrics he believes too many retailers overl...