On 23 March 2020, the high street shut its doors and Britain’s shoppers went online. As a

department store with 29,000 employees and a trusted heritage of quality and customer service,

John Lewis experienced 10 years of change in one. It was sink or swim. Together we decided to take

the entire brand and put it onto customers’ mobiles by the end of 2021. Online sales sat at 40%; we

needed them to be 100%. Mobile sales were just 12%. We had to be bold – and fast.

Our aim was to bring in expertise from our technology partner to keep the business running and

people in jobs while reinventing the department store digitally. We needed to compete with online

retailers like Amazon without compromising our human touch or long-standing commitment to social

purpose.

Ultimately, we needed to reconnect customers to the joy of shopping via the John Lewis mobile app.

The idea was to be joyfully bold.

Knowing it was the first place customers now experienced our brand, we reorganised and relaunched

our mobile app to reflect our new ethos. To achieve this, we collaborated to define a creative vision

focused on inspiration, curation, maximum convenience and expert advice.

We wanted our new design to stir emotions, just as the experience of shopping in a department

store had excited and engaged those very first John Lewis customers 100 years ago. We wanted

people to return to the app and spread the word.

We also wanted to make the most of change and explore new ways of fulfilling social purpose. Could

we speed up diversification into financial services to give customers a more joined up experience

across their lives and shopping habits? How quickly could we build a home insurance product?

Everything was about being creative, flexible and – above all – bold.

We wanted to reconnect virtually with our loyal high-street customers, those people who pre-Covid

had relied on John Lewis stores to experience quality and expert advice. And we wanted to

rejuvenate our brand to connect with new customers who habitually use other online retailers. That

meant tackling key customer pain points like availability, self-service and joined up journeys.

We fundamentally changed our ways of working and delivery. We pulled the best digital experts from

across Europe and put them into blended teams. We diversified to fit a lockdown lifestyle, including

into financial products. We delivered a new cloud-based e-commerce platform, a new content

management system and a new AI-driven search and recommendations engine. We embedded

experts to reinvent the ethos of the department store in the John Lewis mobile app. We made it our

mission to reconnect people to the joy of shopping.

We began in 2020 with the aim of being mobile-first and joyfully bold by the end of 2021.

John Lewis’ Mobile function was small and operated in the website’s shadow, so we added 26 digital

experts to empower it. We ran collaborative workshops that brought together the web designers and

developers, brand and content teams, and our technology partner’s Brand UI Refresh team. The

resulting app was simple, bold and joyful.  

We strengthened web analytics capabilities to better understand online performance, enhance

customer experience and reduce costs. This put more money back into the business. The platform

needed to take more traffic, so we entered a consortium with Google to scale quickly but safely. To

reduce cost, we collaborated with specialists in our European delivery centre. As part of our drive to

diversify, we built a home insurance product in just eight months and launched it in February 2021.

- Pre-tax profit increase of 38% (January 2022)

- 186% increase in app revenue

- 32% mobile online sales

- 3% annual bonus restored to all 29,000 employees

- Commitment to living wage to combat cost of living crisis

- 10,000 new houses under construction for ‘built to rent’ market

- Sustainable rental and recycle options for our customers, following the launch of a furniture

rental scheme in partnership with Fat Llama

- Committing £100m over five years to quadruple our financial services business, offering new

products and services like savings and accounts