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Q&A with... D


espite the continued woes on the high street, online retail continues to grow. One of this year’s success stories online is Feelunique. com. Founded in 2005, beauty


products etailer Feelunique saw turnover grow to £16.1 million in the year to 31st March 2011—up from £11 million in 2009/10. Earnings were also up, growing 64 percent to £985,000 during the year. Here, cofounder and chief executive Aaron Chatterley lets us into what we can expect from the online beauty products and cosmetics retailer in 2011 and beyond.


Tell us a bit about your background. How did you end up as cofounder of Feelunique? Prior to launching feelunique.com I’d had a web design company in Oxford, so I had a background in ecommerce, albeit agency-side. After selling that business I was looking for an opportunity to get into online retail with Richard Schiessl, our managing director and cofounder. We hit upon the beauty industry, which we chose largely because there was no dominant player in the space back in 2004.


We heard you’re forecasting £25 million in turnover over the next 12 months—what can you tell us about your growth plans? In the first five years of trading we saw average year-on-year growth of around 150 percent. In the financial year 2010/11 that rate slowed to a shade under 60 percent due to a combination of economic conditions and a strategic decision we took to remove all non-directly sourced products from the site. The online beauty product market still only makes up a small percentage of total cosmetics sales, so we strongly believe that we can achieve rapid growth moving forward.


Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently? I’d have used all the money from the sale of my previous company to buy shares in Apple and Google and retired to the Bahamas!


What plans do you have for the business in the near future? We started the business with the single-minded and slightly arrogant goal of owning the online beauty retail space in the way Amazon does


with books or Asos does with clothes. Six years later, we are much closer to achieving that goal, but much more hard work is still required. Nevertheless, that ambition remains our absolute focus. To that end we are continuing to reinvest heavily in building awareness of our own brand and we are also working tirelessly to attract the last remaining beauty product brands to our store.


You ship worldwide and have a French-language site, any plans for more international expansion? We’re currently ironing out the bugs with the French site and plans are well under way now for the next couple of international sites.


Last year you tested TV advertising—how did it go? What do you find are the most effective forms of advertising you do? We actually started testing TV in late 2009. We then ran intermittently during 2010 and this year have a year-round campaign running with double the budget. As well as TV, we use a strong mix of paid search, PR and two affiliate programmes, all of which are effective in reaching different types of customers.


What advice would you give to someone new to the online retail sector? Understand very early on that the “if you


Tactics Views


Aaron Chatterley of Feelunique.com


build it they will come” attitude is entirely wrong. It is very definitely not enough to have a great website selling great products. You really have to know how to reach customers online and be prepared to spend money doing so. I think it was this fundamental understanding that helped make Feelunique.com so successful.


Whom in the business world do you most admire and why? This is cheesy but I think anyone who is brave enough to start their own business and make a success of it, whether it’s a corner shop or a billion pound international software company, deserves congratulating.


What was the last purchase you made online? It was a pirate hat for India, one of my two-year-old twin girls. She loves pirates. It’s amazing what you can buy online in a matter of minutes!


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