Context
Online marketplace, Not On The High Street, has had the same, strong proposition for twenty years:
Shop with us to buy unique gifts from small, independent businesses.
But over those 2 decades, the way people shop online has changed, and Not On The High Street were struggling to adapt…
This problem was mostly cultural.
Notably, the company saw itself as a commercial business rather than a technology company.
This was evidenced by company veterans benchmarking us against high-street retailers like John Lewis and Oliver Bonas more so than the likes of Amazon and Etsy which has meant neglecting the growth playbooks those technology companies have deployed to scale during the last 20 years.
Michelle De Mott, Head of Product at NOTHS and someone I'd worked with before, was crystal clear about the situation when headhunting me in 2025: stressing the need for new ideas, and people willing to bring them up to leadership.
The CEO, whom I met in my first few days, also told me to keep my "fresh eyes open."
Within a few months, those eyes had landed on the one thing everyone else had stopped seeing...
Problem
People only thought of us at Christmas
But even then, 'thought' might not be quite accurate.
It'd be more accurate to say Christmas is just when the most amount of people look to buy gifts, a share of which we capture.
And whilst we have some other smaller spikes around other big occasions, the majority of our annual revenue arrived in the run-up to Christmas.
This kind of dependence is not ideal for one specific reason:
These gifting moments, Christmas and the like, are (what retention experts call) 'natural triggers' - which means that the behaviour (to buy a gift) occurs naturally, without our need to prompt them.
The problem with our once-a-year natural trigger is that it falls outside of what's known as the "habit zone" and into the "forgettable zone"…
A space where you're not top of mind for customers. Far from the kind of engagement frequency that tech companies find ways to get their users which leads to a habit.
Which ultimately leaves us bidding against every other retailer, at the exact moment the customer is looking for a gift, to reacquire them.
As a result we're unimaginatively left making the same set of moves every year:
Buy more media before Christmas.
Merchandise harder into Mother's Day (and other gifting moments).
Discount into the flat months between.
All costly activities. But this didn't need to be the only way…
The Reframe
You don't want to sell gifts. You want to sell gifting.
People don't wake up suddenly wanting a scented candle.
They realise a friend's birthday is coming up, and they want to show up looking thoughtful.
This is what the 'Jobs-To-Be-Done' framework recognises:
You don't sell things to customers, you help them solve a 'job'.
Two weeks before Slack launched, founder Stewart Butterfield told his team to think about a saddle company:
Sell saddles and you compete on leather and price. Sell horseback riding and you create the customers who need a saddle, and become the obvious place to buy one.
A gift is one transaction, but gifting is an ongoing relationship with the people and dates that matter to you.
We were selling saddles. We were showing up as a shop, useful only to someone who has already decided to buy.
But between occasions there was no reason to open our app or website.
The forgettable zone was the price of being a shop.
I'd taken Reforge's Retention + Engagement course, which teaches one move for this.
Layer a higher-frequency job over your low-frequency core.
For example, people buy a house only (at the least) every several years…
So Zillow (home buy-and-sell marketplace) built the Zestimate, a home-valuation tool that gives you a reason to open the app more frequently.
I spotted that we needed to build our Zestimate - a tool (or set of tools) that could help customers interact with gifting even when they aren't looking to buy anything.
A set of tools that helped you, and thus reminded you, that there are so many more moments in life where a gift could be given.
We all know that great gifter. That person who never shows up to a dinner party empty handed. Who makes you feel special with their displays of thoughtful.
That's the transformation we had to sell to our users.
That we weren't going to sell them gifts. We were going to make them great gifters.
This was to be my proposed product strategy, and it was going to be built on a surface we already owned, one we had been collectively ignoring…
The Channel
Quickly after joining NOTHS, I noticed no one mentioning the mobile apps in meetings.
The culture was very web-centric and the result was that the app's development was being neglected.
Then product manager, Lorin Minxhozi, who had spotted the same thing showed me what the app was already doing without leadership attention on it:
Year-on-year retention
on app vs web
Average order value
on app vs web
Orders placed per year
on app vs 1.3 on web
It was clear that the app was a channel worth investing in.
But more specifically, as the data showed…
This was the channel where customers were more bought in on NOTHS value proposition, the ideal place to place tools aimed at creating deeper retention.
The strategy was clear, but selling that to a company that still measured itself against John Lewis, and neglected its app was the harder job...
Process
Show, before tell
I knew that getting the leadership team to invest in the app was something I couldn't just verbally convince them of.
Even showing them the data, was only partially going to do the job.
I first had to start visually showing them its potential for playing an important role in our ecosystem.
So I started by first redesigning the app's product detail page, and worked closely with the app team to get it built.
Doing this bought me the permission to be heard, but also reinvigorated the potential the app had.
Only then did I pitch the full vision…
A vision where the app met customers who wanted to become great gifters with every tool they needed to do just that.
The proposal was received well, with one person in particular, keen to champion it to the wider company…
The CEO, who initially wanted to feature my vision as part of a board update—
Then asked me to present the vision the following week to the entire company at an
all-hands.
As part of this presentation, I made it clear that a strategy is just as much about what NOT to do, just as much as it is, what to do.
And so, within 3 months of my arrival, I was starting to shape the 20-year-old company's focus.
So what were those tools? Let me break it down…
Solution
Tools that make great gifters
We claimed to be the home of gifting—
Yet when you inspected what we offered more closely (beyond our brand promise),
we didn't actually serve many of the jobs that come with gifting very well…
Maybe 2 at best…
My vision for the app contained some tools that looked to serve a whole lot more…
To allow us to truly become the secret weapon in your pocket for great gifters.
Here are those tools:
A gift finder, discover the perfect gift for the person who's hard to buy for
This would be the most actionable tool for users landing in the app.
Got a person or occasion in mind but don't know what to get?
Use the gift finder.
Occasions calendar, never miss an upcoming gifting moment
A gifting hub, store and populate your recipients for dedicated recommendations
For Not On The High Street customers, providing recommendations based solely on what you previously looked at or bought wasn't the ideal solution—
Since the relevance of what you are recommended depended entirely on whether you were still looking for something for that person again.
Essentially, who you were buying for, and why you were buying, are actually quite important for whether you want those purchases to drive future recommendations…
So a recipient hub would make it so that the recommendations you got, were organised neatly under dedicated recipient profiles—
—An idea mapped around a behaviour I had previously observed in customer interviews where many people were already using favourites folders to separate their saved products based on recipients they had in mind.
A dynamic inspiration feed, discover new brands, and gifting ideas everyday
And since retention is also so tied to the human need to seek novelty,
I proposed that the static and merchandiser team dependent homepage content be replaced by one that refreshes everyday with an algorithm that populates an endless scroll feed…
Giving users a Pinterest-like experience, to inspire more gifting opportunities.
And lastly, I wanted to call out the fact that this approach of going deep on a vertical like gifting would not limit us now to this niche…
That in fact, it would give us the ability to go wide and start building out tools for other verticals that we already sold products in like events, home decor, gardening,
and fashion.
After all, our problem wasn't inventory, it was the mindshare we owned with customers—
Something we can earn by setting an expectation about the level at which we served each job…
Impact
The next 3 months, and beyond…
A week later, we were asked to look at building the gift finder, deemed to be the most impactful tool we could build first…
And the CEO explicitly wanted it to launch in time for Christmas.
What we shipped (in time), was 'The Curator' - a conversational AI tool which found customers the perfect recommendations.
I designed this closely with Product Lead, Lorin Minxhozi and a team of engineers who built the tool using both OpenAI's API and with a new service they built internally called the 'Unified Product Service'—
Which provided one clean feed of every product on the site for the AI tool to draw its suggestions from.
Whilst a series of simple chats would have been an expected execution…
Both after noticing what customers were already doing with their favourites folders—
And also recognising amongst the team that we found going back to old chats and the context switch that often happened within a chat, difficult to rely on to get a purchase complete.
So we ended up designing the tool to be launched within a 'project', in what we ended up calling a 'Shortlist'.
Each of these shortlists would have its own AI tool, making it clear the layer you were adding products to what the shortlist, and not that the whole experience had to live within the chat.
Which made it particularly easy to take action on a choice when returning to your shortlists, since you wouldn't have to scroll back through a chat and would instead, just see a set of products you had shortlisted for your project.
[ If available, add engagement here: e.g. [X%] of app sessions using The Curator, or [X%] lift in [return rate / saves per user] for customers who built a Shortlist. ]
And in the new year, to set the direction for new initiatives…
The company refined its strategic pillars, with one prominent being:
"Be the best at gifting."
And, equally important, came a metric that the company could measure our success by:
180-day retention.
The longest-term metric Not On The High Street had ever outlined, and one that finally aligned the company around the ways in which we can keep showing up for our customers beyond getting that first sale.
Learnings
A designer's impact starts when they stop waiting for a brief
Strategy work begins by earning the right to propose it. Nobody was going to back a positioning shift that ran through a channel they'd written off, so the unlock was a rebuilt PDP that made people look again. I'd underweighted how much of the job that is.
A company that isn't the best at its core job has no business chasing adjacent ones. I pitched a lifestyle platform and what landed was a sharper commitment to gifting. The narrowing was the healthier move.
The hardest thing to fund is a tool that doesn't sell anything today. Tools I proposed don't always end in a sale on the day they're used. They keep us present for the occasion where the sale happens, and winning that argument internally took presenting a complete vision.
“Justin more than a designer - he is a true product partner. Someone who take lead of initiatives and helps define the strategic roadmap. With Justin, you get someone who treats your business like his own.”
Michelle De Mott
Head of Product & Data, NOTHS