Head of the queue

Categorized | Corporate Profile

Posted on 21 February 2011.

The Gift Voucher Shop has grown its business by building on the appeal of its products to Post Office customers

As captive audiences go, the 21 million people each week who queue up to usethe UK’s Post Office network is a pretty attractive target.

Post Office customers give an estimated 340 million gifts each year, and developing products and services that meet their needs has been a key driver of growth for the Gift Voucher Shop (GVS), the company behind the One4all brand.

Launched in the UK last year, the One4all Gift Card brings together a range of retail partners including some of the best-known UK brand names, such as Argos, Boots, B&Q, Currys, Debenhams, Ernest Jones, House of Fraser,Toys R Us, Topshop and WHSmith.

Although it entered the UK market in 2006, GVS was launched in Ireland in 2002, with Michael Dawson, founder and group CEO, setting out to provide choice, convenience and flexibility in gifting.

Dawson said: “Our initial market was Ireland. We expanded into the Maltese market in 2004, and into the UK market in 2006 in association with the respective national Post Offices.

“Our core business still revolves around supplying gifting solutions to the public and corporate markets in the UK, Ireland and Malta.”

In the UK, the company’s sales channels cover the 11,500-strong Post Office branch network, as well as a corporate sales team, website and call centre.

GVS has undoubtedly shown a flair for innovation in the competitive gifting market. It was the first to distribute a consumer-focused multi-retail gift card through a large nationwide retail chain when it launched the One4all Gift Card in the Irish Post Office in 2007.

The company was also the first prepaid programme manager to merge prepaid and deposit to deliver fully guaranteed deposit protection to consumers of prepaid budgeting products – a key consideration in the wake of concerns over the traditional Christmas Club model.

GVS was the first to offer corporate clients customised multi-retail gift cards, and is the largest distributor of white-labelled Visa cards in the UK and Ireland.

Declan Byrne, managing director of GVS UK, said: “Over the past three years, we have developed from the gifting market into the budgeting market in the UK, bringing simple savings solutions to millions of consumers through the Post Office and their workplaces.”

The Post Office demographic means that GVS is able to target women, who tend to be heavy gift givers, and also influence the gifting choice of partners and children.

Equally, the majority of the 10 million Britons who operate outside mainstream banking are also frequent Post Office users and “need structured locally-based budget accounts to provide for heavy spending periods such as when a large bill lands or when Christmas comes about. With the changing economy this concept is appealing to more and more people,” added Byrne.

GVS has three budgeting products in the UK market. Smart Planner is an employee savings plan distributed through corporate customers. In the consumer market, GVS provides the Post Office Christmas Club, which allows customers to put aside money at the Post Office, locked away until 1 November. This was launched as a direct response to the collapse of Farepak in 2008. Once the funds are available, they can be spent with a range of retailers.

GVS launched the Post Office Budget Card product in association with the Post Office. More than 300,000 people currently use the card to budget for utility bill payments and other products and services available through the Post Office network.“We’ve developed the Post Office channel as a gift card distribution chain, linking the millions of customers that frequent that channel with the gift card offering, thus delivering real incremental value to our retail partners.“

As a result in Ireland and Malta, and increasingly in the UK, the Post Office is recognised as a place to buy gifts,” said Dawson.“Building on our expertise in prepaid gifting, we’ve successfully and uniquely fused the prepaid and the deposit-taking aspects of financial services to develop a range of secure and flexible budget savings schemes in conjunction with our retail partners, our partner bank and the UK Post Office.”

Both the Christmas Club and Budget Card products operate on a scheme-based prepaid platform, while operating as deposit account products, delivering customers the same protection as mainstream deposit products.

“The UK Prepaid market is an extremely competitive marketplace both in the consumer and corporate markets. We needed a clear competitive advantage with an excellent retail offering,” said Byrne.

“We launched in the UK in 2006 with a range of single retail branded vouchers on sale in the Post Office. With the launch of the One4all multi-store Gift Card in the UK in August 2009, we delivered a product with a real competitive edge, and this has been reflected in our salesgrowth in the Post Office.”

In the corporate market, GVS provides trade marketing, loyalty programmes, employee incentives, customised gift cards and software solutions supporting ongoing incentives and points-based reward schemes.

“We work to increase and develop the gift card market in all our markets and to drive a greater share of that market to our retail partners through provision of choice, convenience of purchase, and development of non-standard distribution channels while delivering an excellent service,” said Byrne.

Underpinning development of the company’s products is an email database of more than 10,000 customers, with quarterly surveys to gauge their reaction to new product launches and card designs, as well as to measure satisfaction with level of customer service.

Bi-annual focus groups give a more in-depth understanding of consumer gifting habits and emerging trends. This has led directly to the launch of a One4all Gift Card iPhone app, developed to address the growing importance of smartphone technology. The app provides details of every One4all retailer partner outlets and Post Office location as well as access to special offers.

The One4all Employee Savings Club, Smart Planner was also borne out of focus groups, to meet the need for a reliable and hassle-free Christmas savings scheme.

This has helped to improve GVS’s appeal to the corporate market. In Ireland, corporate sales account for 50% of business, while in the UK, it is currently 20%.

“Generally we develop the Post Office channel first and then address the corporate market as the awareness of the product grows and as the SME sector experience the product through that channel.“Already in the UK, we are supplying a number of large UK corporates with their full rewards needs such as Royal Mail Group,” explained Byrne.

The business has strengthened its corporate focus recently with Paul Byrne’s addition to the team to head up development of this channel. GVS sees scope to increase its corporate business with solutions for employee and trade marketing purposes.

“We’ll bring the facilities for fulfilment of such programmes in the SME market that are normally associated with larger corporate based schemes to this market. For the large corporate, we will innovate in both service and product and deliver new ways to reward and motivate in an ever-changing business environment,” promised Byrne.