Tommy Kelly
After women’s fashion retailer LK Bennett went into administration in 2019, the business was bought for a knockdown £10m by the company’s Chinese franchise partner. The buyers retained most stores in the UK and Europe but chose not to take on the retail presence in the United States. Instead they turned to Tommy Kelly’s eShopWorld in Swords to implement an e-commerce sales solution to service the US market from England.
The ESW team delivered what LK Bennett wanted in two months, with dollar-localised pricing, checkout, duty and tax calculation. The other part of the service is that ESW takes care of the delivery and the returns for goods purchased by US consumers on the LK Bennett site.
Kelly founded a freight forwarding business in 1988 and sold it to Aramex in 2006. He was CEO of Aramex Europe and North America before using his logistics expertise to establish eShopWorld in 2010, starting with six people.
The cross-border model is interesting. ESW is the principal for transactions that flow through its platform. This volume amounted to €525m in 2019, from which you subtract the cost of returns (€34m) and the cost of goods supplied by clients such as LK Bennett (€453m) to arrive at the gross profit of €38m (margin 7.2%). That had to pay for the €35m cost of staff overheads and the cost of the technology, shipping and returns infrastructure.
Thanks to booming e-commerce in lockdown, the company says annualised revenue of c.€1bn was achieved in October 2020. Headcount currently stands at c.500 people, and would be higher if Kelly could find more of the right staff to hire.
It’s the type of business that postal companies like as they grow their parcels activity. A few years ago Asendia, a joint venture between France’s La Poste and SwissPost, took a controlling 50.1% stake in ESW. In April they mopped up the rest of the founder’s shares for undisclosed consideration, and Kelly (61) is staying on in his CEO role.
People whose careers in hospitality, tourism and retail have been dislocated by Covid should pay attention to the job vacancies currently advertised by ESW. The job titles may not be familiar - Solution Architect, Lead Lane Manager, Fraud R&D Analyst, Revenue Accountant – but they point to where the postCovid world is headed.