Q&A: Online Home Shop chief executive Moshe Cohen on its explosive growth

The now third-generation family business has been quietly racking up incredible growth selling value home décor, textiles and now garden furniture from its HQ in Worsley, Greater Manchester.

After featuring in the Times 100 ranking of the fastest-growing private UK companies two years in a row, OHS chief executive Moshe Cohen sat down with Retail Week to discuss its new board, managing rapid growth and keeping ahead of the competition.

Tell us about how the business started.

”It’s a family business that was started in 1952 by my grandfather. Then in the 1980s, my father took over and he ran it together with his business partner. At that time, the business was known as Pin Mill Textiles and predominately sold home textiles to value retailers in the UK and Ireland.

“Just over 10 years ago, the retailers started to become more difficult to deal with and a lot of them started going direct, so my dad decided to put the business online.

“When he made that decision, I wasn’t working for this business but I’d had a lot of previous ecommerce experience. While I was at uni, as a hobby I started buying Argos clearance returns and selling them on eBay from my bedroom, then I worked as head of ecommerce for an online DIY business. So with my ecomm experience and then the direction OHS took, it made sense to come over and help out my dad.”

How big is OHS now? 

“We’re based in Manchester and employ about 200 people; turnover is just over £50m and we’re looking to grow that further. We’ve invested £6m in our HQ and we’ve just about outgrown it and we’re looking to expand again. We’ve also been featured twice in a row in The Times’ top 100 list of private, fastest-growing companies in the UK.”

How have the priorities changed over the last 10 years?

“The main priority change has been the shift from B2B to online retail. At the start, we mainly sold through eBay and Amazon. The next stage was to get our own website, so that’s when we launched onlinehomeshop.com.

“It was quite slow for the first year or so, but then once it started to gain traction there was a crazy snowball effect of growth and even to this day, we’re seeing the biggest ever growth in the business. Every year, there’s over 100% growth.”

What are some of the most recent developments to support that growth? 

“Over the last 12 months, we’ve been building out the senior management team. Up until about two or three years ago, pretty much everything was done by myself, my dad and my brother Gav, but our wives want to see us more so we’ve brought on a few different people. 

“We’ve now brought on a chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, a head of data and a head of merchandise. An operations director is joining us very soon to improve that area and that’s going to be the main focus for this year: operations logistics and customer service.”

There’s lots of competition in the ecommerce space from retailers like Temu, do you consider that a threat? 

“Temu’s business model is to ship direct from overseas but we’re keeping products in the UK. Our products are also a bit bulkier than Temu’s standard items, so it’s probably not the same threat. 

“As I said, one of our big strategies this year is operations, logistics and customer service. Temu will not be able to offer that customer experience. You might get something very, very cheap but it will take a while to get here and if you’ve got an issue with it, who do you go to?”