RichRelevance reports milestone UK growth in 2012
Major customer wins, additional financing and industry accolades underscore the company’s leadership in the commerce industry
Reading, UK – 17 December 2012 – RichRelevance, the leading provider of dynamic personalisation for the world’s largest retailers, finished 2012 with a strong roster of leading UK retailers and 100 per cent growth of its UK office. This year’s highlights for RichRelevance included new partnerships with Marks and Spencer, John Lewis and Matalan, recognition for the most innovative technology of the year and the kick-off of its global roadshow on ‘The Future of Shopping’ in London.
Leading retailers partner with RichRelevance to personalise the customer experience
Several of the UK’s leading retailers awarded contracts to RichRelevance this year. In January, RichRelevance integrated its personalisation and analytics technology online at Marks and Spencer to create a more customer-centric user experience. In February, it launched its partnership with John Lewis on both the website and via its email strategy. About the partnership, Sean O’Connor, Head of Online Delivery & Customer Experience at John Lewis said: “We chose RichRelevance as our personalisation partner because their technology provides our customers with increasingly relevant product recommendations, so that they’re able to find related products they want to buy more easily. We’ve seen a substantial lift in sales and order volume.” Later in the summer, Matalan deployed RichRelevance with the specific goal of increasing merchandising control and extending its personalisation across multiple channels. Mark Russell, Head of eCommerce at new customer Sit-Up Channels was already familiar with the power of RichRelevance: “Having partnered with RichRelevance at my previous company, I knew that I could count on a speedy implementation in time for our peak shopping period; indeed, RichRelevance was live on our site within three weeks,” said Russell.
New financing enables RichRelevance to expand global footprint
Globally, RichRelevance expanded every single one of their offices in 2012. The UK and EU team alone has more than doubled in size and moved twice to brand new offices to accommodate growing operations. To further this momentum, RichRelevance finalised a $28 million round of venture capital financing in August committed to infrastructure investment, technology to support new product innovations and global expansion. In 2013, RichRelevance will be focussed on building new partnerships across EMEA, having expanded its customer footprint to Coolstuff in the Nordics and kalahari.com in South Africa. Matthew Roux, CTO at kalahari.com – South Africa’s largest online retailer – said: “Our partnership with RichRelevance was greatly enhanced by our close alignment on IT operations. Both organisations leveraged scrum and an agile operations environment, which enabled us rapidly implement RichRelevance technology and immediately see the results.”
RichRelevance increases presence in British retail community
Commencing in London in May 2012, RichRelevance hosted a three-city global roadshow on ‘The Future of Shopping.’ More than 100 of the UK’s largest retailers attended the event to share best practices in the rapidly changing omni-channel commerce sector. RichRelevance was also honoured with industry awards this year: in March 2012, the company was voted the most Innovative Technology of 2012 by the 140,000 members of UTalkMarketing at the Marketing Innovation Awards in London. Further to this, RichRelevance was also shortlisted as the Retail Systems Awards’ Online Technology Vendor of the Year.
“2012 has been a great success for RichRelevance and we are thrilled with the growth that we’ve seen this year,” said Darren Hitchcock, VP of the UK and European Region, RichRelevance. “We place great importance on all of our partnerships, and each of the retailers that we work with are at very different but crucial stages of their journey. We are looking forward to 2013 and seeing omni-channel innovation evolve through our existing and new customers in the UK and Europe”.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance delivers over 850 million product recommendations daily, powering the personalized shopping experiences for consumers shopping the world’s largest and most innovative retail brands like Walmart, Sears, Target, Marks & Spencer and John Lewis. Founded and led by the e-commerce expert who helped pioneer personalization at Amazon.com, RichRelevance helps retailers increase sales and customer engagement by recommending the most relevant products to consumers regardless of the channel they are shopping. RichRelevance has delivered more than $5.5 billion in attributable sales for its retail clients to date, and is accelerating these results with the introduction of a new form of digital advertising called Shopping Media which allows brands to engage consumers where it matters most—in the digital aisles on the largest retail sites in world. RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York, Seattle, Boston and London. For more information, please visit www.richrelevance.com.
