Naked Wines & Customer Lifetime Value

My name is Neil Campbell and I am currently the VP of Growth, at Moneybox, who are a financial management app, focusing on wealth management, ISAs, lifetime ISAs, etc., for young people. My background, in general, has always been in consumer internet. I started off at OC&C Strategy Consultants and after a stint there and an MBA at Harvard, I worked at Amazon for many years. I ran handheld electronics, in the UK – mobile phones, cameras and satnavs. After that, I did a startup with a bunch of Amazon guys, called Rangespan, which was eventually sold to Google. Then I had a brief stint at Betfair and three years at Naked Wines, before joining Moneybox about a year and a half ago.

Yes; it was probably about six months after the deal had gone through. Rowan was in place as the CEO and he was at that point where he was filling out the management team with various people; some Naked people he had brought over but also some external hires, like myself.

Yes; I had a whole range of roles at Naked. A lot of the time, I headed up the structure of things that Rowan was thinking of and how we could approach it. I’m quite a data-led person, so a lot of it was, do we have the right kind of data stuff in place. But really, a whole range of things.

That’s an interesting question and it probably points to the reason that, ultimately, the two were separated, which was just a management time thing. Taking on two very different organizations, with very different cultures and very different approaches to their business and different challenges, is just a bit of a distraction. One of the reasons that the Majestic deal happened when it did was that, essentially, the realization was that Naked Wines USA, as led by the current CEO of the group, Nick Devlin, was just absolutely flying. They realized that was the big opportunity here and, if we’re going to go after that, then you need the focus on it and you need all your resources to be put towards that.

That was really part of the reason that Naked grew slower than it could have done, under the Majestic ownership and has boomed since. Obviously, it has been helped very much by coronavirus, as being a pure, online business. But yes, that is probably one of the reasons.

I think the main impact of coronavirus has been to accelerate a bunch of trends that were already happening. Working from home and doing Zoom calls like this was always something that was happening and, for a proportion of the population, it just happened a lot quicker and became a new thing, very quickly. Once we get past the vaccine stage, we’ll be back to a point where it will settle down at a much higher level. I think you have seen the same in internet retailing, in the UK. One of the most advanced markets and it was sitting at about 25% penetration, ex-grocery. The word on the street now is that it has jumped to 40%. It was always increasing, but you’ve just seen that jump come a lot quicker.