What you missed at the Debenhams Partner Day

This week, Debenhams held their Partner Day in Manchester and as usual it was an event held in the way that only Debenhams can do.

From Paddy McGuinness as MC, to Baroness Karen Brady and Luke Littler, the day was peppered with some of the biggest names in the UK. On stage for the founders panel were Carol Kane, co-Founder of BooHoo, Karen Millen who founded her namesake Karen Millen, and Adam Minto, co-Founder of Revolution Beauty. And if that wasn’t enough, the day finished with a performance by the Sugababes!

And before we even got to the big name speakers, there was the fashion show, an amazing catwalk full of fashion from the Debenhams Group of brands, with makeup by L’Oreal and Lancôme!

And that perhaps brings me to the most important part of the day – the keynote from the Debenhams Group CEO, Dan Finley. Note I said the ‘Debenhams Group’, not the BooHoo group – the business is changing it’s name to reflect that Debenhams is Back!, and back in a big way.

So I guess I should address the elephant in the room, which is the amount of negative press surrounding the BooHoo group with assertions that their youth brands are falling out of favour with today’s consumers and that the group is in trouble. Well Dan faced this head on with two statements that are worth noting.

Firstly, as CEO, Dan turned Debenhams from a high street brand in administration to one of the fastest growing marketplaces. His attitude is to ignore the naysayers and simply make things happen and when you look at the success of Debenhams you can’t but believe he can do the same for the other brands in the group as they all become marketplaces.

Secondly, Debenhams are doing great thank you very much. Having rocketed from 10,000 merchants to 15,000 today and they reckon by May they’ll be hitting 20,000. The Rocketship that is Debenhams has left the launchpad and is accelerating like never before and there were announcements at the Partner Day that will also be significant in the future. If you attend their last Partner Day like I did, you’d have been seriously amazed at how much bigger it was this week – there were easily triple the number of merchants in attendance, but it was impossible to count and it could well have been four or five times as many in attendance!

Announcement #1 – Fulfilment by Debenhams is already live and as well as possibly being cheaper than many businesses could handle their own despatches, offers super late cut off times. If for example you order on PrettyLittleThing before midnight, you can receive your item the very next day regardless of where in the UK you live…. and Debenhams Group are offering the same service to their merchants.

Announcement #2 – DebenhamsPay+ is here, offering different ways for customers to complete their purchases and yes that includes marketplace sales. But I’m betting it won’t be long before you might even be able to offer DebenhamsPay+ on your own website… watch this space.

Ultimately the Debenhams Partner Day is like no other marketplace conference because Debenhams are different. They have a host of competing partners to please, from their own brands and stakeholders, to the big names they partner with like L’Oreal and Lancôme, their merchant partners selling on the marketplace and their channel technology partners including Mirakl, Rithum and EVRi.

I think it’s safe to say everyone got something out of the day and Debenhams aren’t just back, they’re here to stay and getting bigger than ever. Expect them to do the unexpected, to ignore people that say something can’t be done, and just get on and execute like never before.