QVCool? How the shopping channel became the number one global retail outlet

It has a uk warehouse the size of 8 football pitches. It is beamed to 250 million homes worldwide. Kelly Hoppen, Lulu and Prince Charles are all fans. 20 years on it is the number one global retailer

Talk about guilty pleasure: there was a time, 20 years ago, when I used to indulge my taste for home shopping by watching QVC on TV at 1am, just back from a nightclub, tired but not ready to sleep. I accumulated quite an array of cleaning gadgets, beauty bargains and the kind of useful storage solutions that a magazine junior living in a tiny flat needed.

This was before irony became cool when, if you had a fondness for, say, the music of Abba, you didn’t dare mention it, so I never told anyone about my secret shopping habit.

Now, as the channel celebrates its 20th anniversary, QVC is quite the name to drop among savvy shoppers as well as industry insiders, spoken in the same breath as Selfridges and Net-A-Porter.

Esteemed fashion journalist Lisa Armstrong mentioned QVC in her newspaper column recently, in relation to Lulu, who happens to have a bestselling skincare line, Time Bomb, on the channel. Lulu is in good company: designer Giles Deacon, handbag doyenne Lulu Guinness, interiors guru Kelly Hoppen, cosmetics queens Bobbi Brown and Liz Earle, leading electrical brands Dyson and KitchenAid, plus electronics companies including Apple, Bose and Sony all successfully sell their wares on the TV shopping channel. Vogue’s jewellery editor Carol Woolton promoted her latest book on QVC; Fifty Cent is launching his headphones exclusively with them. 

QVC FANS

Lulu on tv channel QVC promoting her anti-ageing beauty range Time Bomb

Lulu on tv channel QVC promoting her anti-ageing beauty range Time Bomb

Katherine Jenkins appears on QVC for the first time to promote her new album

Katherine Jenkins appears on QVC for the first time to promote her new album

Kelly Hoppen

QVC netted designer Kelly Hoppen £4 million last year

Fifty Cent is launching his headphones range exclusively with QVC

Fifty Cent is launching his headphones range exclusively with QVC

Liz Earle used the shopping channel to launch her hugely successful skincare  brand

Liz Earle used the shopping channel to launch her hugely successful skincare brand

Cosmetic queen Bobbi Brown sell successfully on the channel

Cosmetic queen Bobbi Brown sell successfully on the channel

HRH The Prince of Wales

'There are opportunities through QVC to speak to so many people' HRH The Prince of Wales

'What better way to tell people about your designs than doing it yourself?' Giles Deacon

'What better way to tell people about your designs than doing it yourself?' Giles Deacon

There’s more: it sells garden plants including the geranium ‘Rozanne’ from Thompson & Morgan, winner of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show Plant of the Centenary.

And food, such as Cambrian Mountains, a small Welsh lamb producer, part of a rural initiative backed by HRH The Prince of Wales.

At a reception at Clarence House to promote the campaign, Prince Charles commented: ‘There are huge opportunities, it seems to me, through something like QVC to communicate to so many people all these wonderful little stories that are going on so often in dark, unseen corners.’

In that one line, Prince Charles perfectly summed up the important and unique properties that make QVC successful: ‘So many people; so many wonderful little stories.’

How QVC made the big switch

June 1986
Reclusive entrepreneur Joseph Segel sets up QVC in the US after noting the success of the Home Shopping Network.

24 November 1986
QVC starts broadcasting in the US.

1 October 1993
British QVC, the UK’s first shopping channel, is launched. It reaches 2.7 million homes when it starts broadcasting live at 2pm.

20 August 1994
The channel reaches £100,000 sales in
one day in the UK.

December 1996
QVC starts broadcasting in Germany.

1 October 1998
British QVC launches its internet shopping site qvcuk.com.

April 2001
QVC begins broadcasting in Japan, and now reaches over 17 million households.

August 2001
The channel passes the £1 billion mark for gross sales in the UK.

20 July 2006
The highest number of calls answered in
the UK in one day to date — 167,864.

August 2007
100 millionth order is received in the UK.

October 2010
QVC launches in Italy.

5 December 2010
Qvcuk.com takes more than £1 million in a single day for the first time.

February 2011
QVC iPhone app launches.

July 2012
QVC taps into the Chinese market with a joint venture with China National Radio.

October 2012
Following the digital TV switchover, QVC is now available in 26 million UK homes.

2012
QVC’s net annual revenue in the UK is
£403.7 million.

QVC is the number one retailer globally, beamed into more than 250 million households, serving 11.5 million customers annually in the UK, the US, Germany, Italy, Japan and China. Each of the 600 brands (with 17,000 items) on offer in the UK has the chance to tell its story, whether it’s about a £27,000 South Sea Island pearl necklace, a £1,000 Miele washing machine (it can hand wash!) or a £20 bracelet.

As designer Giles Deacon, who created his Libertine range of jewellery exclusively for the channel, says: ‘What better way to tell people about your designs than doing it yourself?’

In the UK, the channel is available in 26 million homes, and the company has one million customers. Fifteen million packages are delivered each year from a warehouse and call centre in Knowsley, Liverpool, that is the size of eight Wembley stadia and employs 2,000 people.

The company’s nerve centre is in Chiswick Park, West London, where £33 million was invested to fill an empty shell with four television studios, dressing rooms with day beds so that presenters on the
late-night slots can snooze before they go on air, wardrobe, hair and make-up rooms, buying and admin offices, a staff restaurant, a green room with the style and comfort of a first-class airline lounge, a product store so huge you can’t see to the end of it, and – most importantly – only one set of doors between that product store and the studio floor.

The channel broadcasts live for 17 hours each day from 9am to 2am, and boasts nearly 70,000 fans on Facebook with 41,000 of them commenting on the shows and the products (in comparison, John Lewis has 500,000 fans but fewer than 8,000 comments).

Yet, despite the impressive figures, QVC is still something of a best-kept secret. ‘Until people shop on the channel, their perception of QVC is very different,’ says Kelly Hoppen, who recently let slip in an interview that her stints on QVC netted her £4 million last year. It’s a nice way of saying they’re snobby about it, and this is usually among people who have never watched a show.

Perhaps they believe that the parody shown in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary is close to the truth: tacky products flogged by overly made-up presenters sitting in cheap room sets.

There may have been a grain of truth in that at one point in the company’s history, but not any longer. With fashion designers, cult brands and prestige labels embracing the QVC format, the reality is closer to the fashion story shot by leading international fashion photographer Steven Meisel for the February issue of Vogue Italia, which spoofed QVC’s telly shopping style.

QVC’s turning point came in the early 2000s when certain forward-thinking beauty companies recognised the value of engaging with (and selling to) a captive audience.

Leading the way was Decléor, traditionally a premium salon brand. Elemis came next, followed by Ren and Nails Inc. Beauty now represents more than 30 per cent of QVC’s sales in the UK.

The channel now sells everything from garden plants, including this Chelsea  award-winning geranium, to lamb from a small producer in Wales, right
The channel now sells everything from garden plants, including this Chelsea  award-winning geranium, to lamb from a small producer in Wales, right

The channel now sells everything from garden plants, including this Chelsea award-winning geranium, to lamb from a small producer in Wales, right

As a long-standing secret QVC fan, I was prepared to champion what I considered to be an exciting retail channel, so I wrote an article for Vogue (I was beauty director there at the time) celebrating QVC as the ‘under the radar’ shopping mecca for beauty fans.

Lorna McKay, QVC’s original beauty buyer, comments: ‘Until then, we were like a gigging musician. That article gave us our vital big break.’

It may have been the catalyst for change, but QVC has achieved its current stellar position by staying true to its founding principles: selling quality products; offering value to its customers – QVC’s prices are RRP minus postage, apart from TSV (today’s special value, where packages are offered at less than RRP) – with the convenience of home shopping.

What’s more, with the channel attracting more premium brands, the quality of products has increased: the buying department mantra is ‘good, better, best, luxury’. ‘Over the years, the original concept of “value” has changed,’ says Steve Bridgeman, chief merchandising officer at QVC. ‘Value used to be perceived as meaning cheaper, now it’s about investment – once you’ve tried something better, you don’t want to settle for less.’

Giles Deacon
Giles Deacon

In March this year, British fashion designer Giles Deacon (pictured here with TV presenter Amal Fashanu) appeared on QVC urging viewers to buy pieces from his new jewellery collection. All seven lines sold out during the show, with the £36 Swarovski-crystal Tetris ring (right) selling out in just one minute 20 seconds

And the third pillar of QVC’s name: convenience? Sitting on the sofa, clicking a few buttons and waiting for your purchase to land on the doormat is what QVC has always promised; you can’t help feeling that every other retailer is playing catch-up.

Lorna McKay believes that ‘it isn’t QVC that has changed, but the customer. To start with, people weren’t accustomed to buying from a TV channel; now most of us shop online or on QVC.’ The challenge is to please the post-recession consumer who is shopping smarter by going online to do research before buying. With online nipping at the heels of bricks and mortar, the company offers an omni-channel experience with a website and mobile app too.

Add to the mix the rise of celebrity culture and you have brand owners understanding the need to form a relationship with their customer that relies on personality.

In QVC’s case, the persona that fronts the brand has to be welcome in a customer’s home. Cue Lisa Snowdon and her jewellery collection, Trinny & Susannah with their fashion range, Dr Who and Torchwood star John Barrowman’s haircare line for women, all hosted by QVC’s own star presenters including Julia Roberts (not the actress), Alison Young who has been with QVC since the start, and gardening expert Richard Jackson. 

Jo Fairley on the thrill of promoting her beauty book on QVC...

Jo Fairley on the thrill of promoting her beauty book on QVC

Jo Fairley on the thrill of promoting her beauty book on QVC

Some people get their kick from Formula 1 racing; others from skydiving. But for those of us who take to the airwaves on QVC, I’m sure that selling our products on live TV with a feed into the left ear — ‘2,000 books have already sold, we’ve another 700 on the phones’ — is the biggest kick in town.

It’s terrifying, before the first time. It’s the ‘live feed’ that is so scary: a moment-by-moment update coming into your left ear from the control suite, letting you know how well your product — in my case The Anti-Ageing Beauty Bible, co-authored with YOU health editor Sarah Stacey — is doing.

The real fear is that instead of talking the viewer through our readers’ verdicts on hundreds of award-winning products which appear in the book, I will repeat what’s coming into my headset, in front of the audience at home.

But it’s certainly made me appreciate the wonders of the human brain: it is actually possible to say one perfectly sensible thing while quite another is being excitedly uttered into your aural cavity. And does it pump me up?

Like almost nothing else I’ve ever done. (I completely ‘get’ why my friend Liz Earle, who launched her hugely successful brand on QVC, has always been such a fan of appearing.)

For the past 18 months, we’ve had quite a few one-hour shows focused around The Anti-Ageing Beauty Bible on QVC, bringing its pages to life for the viewer, not just through me chatting about it in-depth to a presenter, but by inviting on other QVC brands which have won awards in the book: Bobbi Brown, L’Occitane, BareMinerals, Balance Me, among many others.

And in a world where we all have to make purchasing decisions in a flash, in store, to me QVC enables viewers to hear everything explained before making a decision. All from the comfort of their own sofa. What’s not to love?

Backstage is fun, too. You never know who you’re going to run into. Like the time I saw the name ‘Martha Stewart’ on a dressing-room door, reasoned that it couldn’t possibly be the American lifestyle guru herself, looked at the monitor in my suite and realised: YESSSS!! Martha was in the building. Cue hideous, fan-like stalking after she finished her show.

Whiling away those pre-show hours can be expensive, too — although I’m thrilled with the life-changing e-cloth floor steamer, the jewellery and plants I’ve bought while waiting to go on air. For someone who never has much time to shop, it’s a delicious luxury. (And at least I’m not as bad as actor John Barrowman, who I’m told snaps up almost everything that comes on air while he’s waiting in the green room.)

The bottom line? We sell more copies of The Anti-Ageing Beauty Bible in an hour on QVC than in weeks on the shelves of bookshops, or even Amazon — most of them to a whole new readership. So while mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all, selling on QVC certainly does. Or to put it another way: it’s the most fun you can have with your best clothes on.

At a time when shop rents for prime locations are reaching stratospheric levels, QVC has a business model that works for both consumer and brand.

Retail overheads are negated and the customer gets to make an informed choice before committing to buy, secure in the knowledge that what they are buying is worth the money (as a broadcaster, the channel is answerable to the Advertising Standards Authority, the UK’s stringent watchdog). Then, after all this, if a customer should change their mind, QVC’s 30-day no-quibble money-back guarantee kicks in.

QVC offers 96 hours’ worth of product demonstrations per week; customers react to what they see with Tweets and Facebook messages appearing on screen or by phoning in to speak to the presenters on air.

Products are shown in context  – the 800-thread-count Egyptian cotton Kelly Hoppen six-piece bed set at £144, for example, is shown dressing a bed in a bedroom setting, with Kelly explaining why it’s the best thing in bedlinen that money can buy. And buy the viewers do: ‘Per minute, we can sell from £500 to £2,000, so over a year that’s millions of pounds’ worth of product,’ says Kelly.

‘The economics of QVC works,’ agrees Dr Marko Lens, the plastic surgeon and expert in skin ageing behind the Zelens skincare range that is new to QVC.

‘In five minutes I can sell thousands of products. No other retailer can compete with that. For a brand, it’s the modern way to sell; for a consumer, it’s the modern way to shop.’ 

It may have taken more than 20 years but, finally, it  looks as though the world is coming round to QVC’s way of thinking.

Anna-Marie Solowij is co-founder of Beauty Mart

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