Retail is Detail Podcast
Retail is Detail is a interview-driven podcast that explores the trends, technologies and strategies shaping the future of retail. Host Jamie Hamer, an entrepreneur and sales leader who co-founded Loxa, talks with industry leaders about how retail businesses are evolving. Episodes dig into practical detail on areas such as customer experience, store operations, data and technology adoption. The show is aimed at retail professionals and founders looking for insight from people working inside the industry.
Episodes
David Hicks, TribeCX, on What Retail Gets Wrong About How Customers Feel
David Hicks has spent forty years connecting how customers feel to what they spend. Not the sentiment, the money: whether a better experience moved cost, margin or sales, and whether anyone in finance believed it. He ran marketing and strategy at Royal Mail, spent around twelve years building and running a global customer experience consultancy, and now coaches experience teams through TribeCX.Dav
Ceri Griffiths, Super Payments, on the Checkout Playbook for UK Retailers
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 ca
Charlotte Pearce, Inkpact, on Why Analogue Is Winning in Retail Marketing
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, Opply, on Why DTC Brands Miss 80% of the Market
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, Enertor, on Signing Usain Bolt and Unlearning P&G
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, Tomorrow's Potential, on the Critical Non-Essentials That Win Retail
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 priva
Ashley Hainsworth, Bed Kingdom, on What AI Should Never Replace in Retail
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, NMBS, from Teenage Trainee to CEO of a £2.2bn Business
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 before
Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy, on the Psychology of a Good Deal
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-ranging
Reid Archer, Pricemaster, on What AI Has and Hasn't Delivered
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 Reid
Eddie Grovu, Toolden, on Scaling a Retail Business from £11m to £70m With No Stores
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
Ryan Copeland, Foundation Commerce, the Magento Developer Who Took On Shopify
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 doubli
Andrew Pickersgill, ECatering: The MD Who Scales Family Businesses
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, Furniturebox, on Bootstrapping to £25M at 17 With No Investors
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 wit
From Electrician to £3M-Backed Startup: Jack Hopkins Built Tradeaze Delivering Bricks Himself
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 be
Anthony Joshua, James Watt and a £2.8M Raise: Laura Fullerton on Building Monk, the World's First Smart Ice Bath
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 Reveals Why Loyal Customers Spend 7x More and How to Keep Them
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 on Building a £32M Furniture Business from a Single Sofa
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
Ben Greener Reveals How a Guitar Shop Became the World's Best Music Store
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
Dan Coleman reveals how profit, platforms and AI search will define the future of ecommerce.
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
Ethan Burnett on Customer Retention, Post-Purchase Growth and Smarter CRM
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.
Tom Hill on AI Myths, Retail Media Shifts and Building Real Decision Intelligence
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 da
Paul Ryazanov on Security, Conversion and Smarter Retail Execution
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
ERP Chaos, Culture Wins and the Future of Retail with David Woodland
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
Bad Data, Big Waste and the AI Reality Check Retail Needs with Murray Van Wyk
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 8
Alex Schlagman talks Saving the High Street, AI Agents, and Future Retail Movements
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
Laura Simpson on Building a Tech-powered Design Business that’s Human, Innovative and Trusted
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 techno
Sam Wright Talks Data, Structure and Why Retail is Really a Wicked Problem
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 the n
Cas Paton on Global Marketplaces, Cashback Innovation & Reviving Comet
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 giants.
John Readman talks scaling agencies, AI-driven ad spend and Ride25’s marathon mindset
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 p
Chloë Thomas talks Data, Ethical Marketing and Smarter Decisions in Retail
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
Daniel Parekh-Hill talks Shopify Apps, Delivery Innovation and Competing with Amazon
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
Bradlie Houldsworth talks Retail Innovation, Agency Strategy and the Future of E-Commerce
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
Oliver Spark talks Customer Data, Growth Levers and Retail Lessons from The White Company
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
Episode 5: Sal Mohammed talks AI Partnerships, LangSync and One-Click Partnership Generation
What happens when one of Google's youngest partnership managers discovers he can generate the perfect partnership in seconds using AI? Meet Sal Mohammed, founder of Quick to Act (QTA) and LangSync, who's driven over £200 million in incremental revenue through partnerships and is now revolutionising how businesses find each other using AI. From his early days at Telefonica O2's B2B division to lead
Episode 4: Megan Bingham-Walker talks Shipping Insurance, Claims Automation and Delivery Resilience
What happens when a government energy policy advisor discovers the brutal reality of e-commerce insurance while selling stainless steel straws? Megan Bingham-Walker, CEO of Anansi, revolutionised shipping insurance with a jaw-dropping 98% claims success rate - versus the industry standard 15%.From UK government corridors to venture capital, her path to insurtech began with a shocking discovery: th
Episode 3: Isabella Sumner talks talks about fashion tech, fundraising, and creative content at scale
In this episode, Jamie Hamer is joined by Isabella Sumner, Co-Founder and CEO of InHaus, to explore how mobile technology is transforming product video for fashion e-commerce. Isabella shares the journey from concept to scaling with global retailers, the realities of building a business with your spouse, and the challenges of fundraising as a female founder. They dive into the creative and operati
Episode 2: Andrew Waldron talks Brand Storytelling, Building Community and crafting a Curated Marketplace
Dive into the world of DesignSnitch with founder Andrew Waldron as he unveils the journey of creating a marketplace that champions exclusive design and craftsmanship. Discover how storytelling and community-building are key to fostering consumer trust and loyalty. Andrew shares his vision for the future of retail, highlighting the transformative role of curated platforms and AI in enhancing shoppi
Episode 1: Reid Archer talks Pricing, Automation, Powertools and AI Agents.
The FIRST EVER episode of Retail is Detail - The Retail Tech Podcast! Join host Jamie Hamer for an explosive conversation with Reid Archer, the mastermind behind Trade Counter Direct and the revolutionary pricing tool Pricemaster. What happens when a designer turned entrepreneur builds a 75,000-product tool retail empire from scratch? This isn't your typical business podcast - it's a deep dive int
