BRAND HISTORY

Shop Direct are a company that own several brands including Littlewoods, Very, and Very exclusive. The original Littlewoods brand was a shopping catalogue based retail business who’s headquarters ran from Liverpool. In 2002 the Barclay brothers bought the company and in 2009 they recreated and re-branded Littlewoods as Very.co.uk. The re branding as well as the obvious changes to colour scheme, logo design and graphic approaches, the re-brand also saw a shift in focus from a catalogue brand to online retail.

This shift in focus was appropriate not only in accordance with technological advances, but also with the fact the re-brand introduced a new younger target market. The Barclay brothers would have been aware that Catalogues where becoming less popular and more brands where moving online, so by following the trend they have been able to keep up with competitors and make the brand more suitable for its new clientele of millennials. Very.co.uk as a website was finally officially launched in July 2009. A year later in 2010 a mobile friendly version of the website was created with an upgrade in 2011 to include images and video. This was a vital step for the brand as an online retailer and it paid of financially as in the first quarter of 2012 sales made on a mobile device accounted for over a third of total sales. Financially this was huge from the Barclay brothers as they finally began to make profit to recoup from their previous 57.7 million pound loss from 2011/12 (Reuters, 2013)