Founder and chief executive Liam Young talks to Retail Week about his business Harper, which swaps delivery drivers for a style concierge.
As the brains behind Harper, Liam Young is a man on a mission. He wants to make online shopping a better experience for retailers and consumers by merging its convenience with the experiential benefits of in-store shopping.
With partners including Selfridges, Jigsaw, Rixo, Me + Em and LK Bennett among others, Young has found a way to drive sales through service for some of the biggest retailers.
“When I first started the business, I was a very stereotypical modern consumer and a lot of my shopping was online,” he says. “I’d place a big order, return half of it and probably be guilty of returning it too late.
“I thought it was such a poor experience and felt like I spent more time at the Post Office or with the delivery driver than I did with a sales associate.”
With extensive logistics experience under his belt, Young, along with co-founder Sarah Martin, decided to make things better. It was then that Harper was born.
Having since increased average transaction values by an average of 65% across all its partners, reduced the time stock is out of the business by 75% and decreased the number of orders with all items being returned by 30%, Young believes his model is the future of online shopping.
A gap in the market
As an idea that developed organically from his own experiences with deliveries, Young says the Harper journey has been very much about trial and error.
“There’s all these downsides of shopping for clothes online. You can’t touch and feel product, there’s no human element and the customer experience is poor.
“For retailers, it’s all about sales and making sure that the customer has a great experience, whereas delivery companies want to get the sale to the customer as cheaply as possible.”
Young’s solution was to send a style concierge, who is more like a sales associate than a delivery driver, to bring items for customers to try on at home and decide if they like them. If the customer doesn’t like the products, they can then be taken away.
“Now 50% of the time our associates will come into the home and give a second opinion,” he says. ”Our job is to offer advice, suggest some styles and send some additional items to make sure that the transaction happens.
“In terms of the actual model, it will be integrated within the retailer’s website,” he says, adding that the cost of the service varies by retailer from being free up to a maximum of £15.
“Using Jigsaw as an example, on the website you’ll see below the checkout button one that says ‘Try before you buy’. If you click that, you don’t pay upfront and the products are delivered at a time of your choosing by a brand-trained mobile sales associate.
“You have 40 minutes with the pieces, and they can either be delivered to the door or through the door. Some customers want to try on their own but some really need that second opinion.”
Trust is key
Young says building trust with retailers and brands has been the biggest challenge so far and that, while the business is growing considerably, it hasn’t been a quick process.
“Retailers are conservative and they need to see it work with somebody else first,” he says. “We started off launching with quite small brands and then we’d get a case study and manage to get someone bigger.
“One thing that did accelerate things quite quickly was the pandemic because everybody got quite innovative quite quickly. During the pandemic, we signed Dior and Selfridges because the stores were closed and they were looking for ways to deliver the in-store experience to customers at home.
“The sweet spot that we really landed on during the pandemic were the brands in between premium and luxury, so the likes of Me + Em. These businesses have a good average transaction value, but good volumes as well.
“When the option is on their website, the trust is there. Getting to that trust level takes a long time.”
Young compares the process to when online shopping first launched. He says just as some retailers took a long time to adopt it and catch up with the leaders such as Next and Asos, it’s been the same for Harper trying to grow its brand portfolio.
With a range of retailers offering the service already, Young says many more names are set to follow suit this year.
Barriers and benefits
When it comes to the Harper customer, Young says the range is broad. From shoppers aged 18 to 90, the business has the same goal regardless of who the consumer is: breaking down the barriers of size and fit.
“Usually shoppers are more confident after their first shop – it’s trying to get past that first purchase,” he says. ”For more premium brands, it’s so difficult to communicate on a screen the level of quality. It’s something that you need to feel.”
Harper also offers a Try for 5 service, which Young says really helps when it comes to consumers making a first purchase from a brand. It allows the consumer five days to decide whether or not to keep the items, returning the products faster than ever to the retailers.
“What we’re doing is making online a more profitable channel and building better customer relationships.
“I see today that there is a big distance between online retailers and their customers. It’s all very transactional, the brand doesn’t really know who you are as a customer and it’s not really serving you.”
Young says that with average return rates at between 30% and 40%, online as a channel is difficult to make profitable. But it’s the no-sale rate he says retailers should be more concerned by.
“It’s almost a hidden metric,” he says. “Let’s say a brand has a customer who’s got a 50% return rate – on the surface that looks bad. But if they’ve tried on eight and bought four, that’s a great shopper. That’s the biggest cost of online retail and nobody seems to be laser-focused on that.
“Making sure customers can find what they’re looking for is the first thing, which is what Harper is doing. Then it’s about making sure every order is profitable and there’s good transaction there.”
He adds that Harper is not only making the transaction more profitable, but the experience incentivises customers to come back.
With plans to take the service across the pond to the US next year, Young is keen to introduce Harper to as many people as far and wide as possible.
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