Must Have Ideas: The online retailer dominating social media and consumer trends
Gut feeling and a keen eye for customers has helped Must Have Ideas go from homebased start-up to an online success story
Must Have Ideas is one of the fastest-growing online retailers, shipping around 7,000 items a day, with products ranging from mould-cleaning brushes to adjustable tables. It hangs its customer proposition on two bold promises: if it’s not delivered within two working days, it’s free; and a no-questions-asked, 100-day money-back guarantee. With a 4.7-star rating from 115,000 reviews on Trustpilot and a 4.7-star rating from 6,000 reviews on Google, it seems to be working.
Customer traction and loyalty saw it achieve £26.8m in sales last year. This does not happen without an understanding of its customers and knowing how to maximise a sales funnel. Amy Knight began Must Have Ideas with her husband, Rob Knight, and Chris Finch. The trio had worked together at Ecoegg, a laundry egg business Rob co-founded.
After Rob sold his share in 2018, the couple saw first-hand the power of digital marketing and were inspired to launch their own venture. Amy and Rob went to the US on holiday and sourced their first product: Hygiene Hero. What made this antibacterial sponge stand out?
“We had previously worked in cleaning products,” Amy says, “so there was a comfort zone about it because we knew how to sell it. But we thought it was really clever and innovative and had loads of USPs for us to work with. It was also small. So when cash was tight, it was easier to freight, ship to customers and store in our spare room.” With an enormous warehouse in Snodland, Kent, space isn’t an issue these days, which is a good thing considering the company sells more than 200 different items.
What makes a good product? A mix of gut feeling and experience goes a long way, says Knight. “If it’s on every aisle in Tesco, it’s probably not the product for us. We want something that people may have not seen before so when they see our video on social media, they say ‘Oh, that’s a great idea’.”
Since the start of Must Have Ideas in 2018, the company has developed a community that looks forward to the six new products it launches every month. Must Have Ideas has more than 200,000 followers on Instagram and more than 360,000 on Facebook.
Understanding the needs of customers sometimes means that the products they source aren’t always new to the market. Knight says: “It’s obviously got to solve a problem, but it also has to be really demonstrable. Because of the way we sell, we’ve got to be able to create compelling videos or it just isn’t going to work.”
Social media advertising is one of the main focuses of the company – it pays around £1.5m a month to Meta. Where some may lean towards using an agency, Amy says they like to keep things in-house. “We’re control freaks at heart. At an agency, you’re just another client. At the end of the day, it’s our business and our brand and nobody cares about it more than we do,” she explains.
Amy admits that, like all business owners, she hasn’t always found it easy to give up control. “When you’ve done something for so long,” she says, “it’s just so hard to just go, ‘Yeah okay, you’re responsible for that now’. Especially with Meta ads, for example. How they perform is literally the difference between us making or losing money.”
However, she credits her two co-founders for making the job a little easier, especially because each of them is responsible for their own area of the business. This collaborative culture has been cultivated over a period of time, but most importantly, the whole team is open to testing and trying new things.
“As a business, we’re constantly testing ads, website changes, emails… everything,” Knight says. “We empower people to speak up and give their ideas a go. This has meant that there are a lot more suggestions in the building and in the business.”
Amy’s main tip to leaders when it comes to maximising a sales funnel? Test.
“You’ve got to be open to blowing it all up and starting again,” she says, “but whatever the data is telling you, that’s what you’ve got to move forward with. We’ve had various tests where we’ve thought ‘Really? I don’t like the look of that so much.’ But we have to go by the data. Sometimes it depends: do you want a nice-looking website or a website that converts? You can’t always have both.”
Whatever they are doing is clearly working – the company expects to hit its goal of £60m turnover this financial year. Amy Knight and her team are a serious case study of how to identify consumer trends and maximise a sales funnel within a must-have fashion.
