Transcript

Nick Sims: And we aggregated about 12 retailers on every single card. Pretty big retailers, like I said, it’s like Nike and Footlocker, those types of retailers who hadn’t been in the channel before but we knew would have appeal for consumers, and we create sort of gifting purposes and enable that retailer to be in the channel. Which is great for that retailer, it’s great for the customer because now they’ve got a broader choice.

So, my name’s Nick Sims from TCN, The Card Network. Card Network basically aggregates brands for cards, gift cards, that we sell into grocery, like Coles and Woolworths.

We’re building a new business basically, like a new category. And so, partnering with brands like Adairs, Footlocker, Nike, is exciting. Creating something that doesn’t exist in the market is really exciting, and weaving it all together because there’s obviously different challenges across all the different spectrums of the brand, partnerships, the grocery partnerships and then trying to find something that appeals to customers is exciting.

Yeah, absolutely. I started the business in February, and six of the staff we all worked together before. So we knew how we work together, we knew what we liked. And I think having a sort of family type atmosphere is really important. We all know each other really well. We all get along. We all have a lot of fun. And we really do work hard, play hard. There’s times when we’re head down and grinding and then there’s other times where you want to enjoy it together and have a bit of fun and a few laughs. So it’s critical.

Let’s shift to product specifically. Let’s talk about, you bought a multitude of, I guess, offers out there and kind of combined them together?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we’re in the gift card industry. So gift cards are a denominated gifting product, like an Apple iTunes card or a Village Cinemas gift card. We saw an opportunity in the market that big retailers, like David Jones, Myer, Rebel, Village Cinemas, those types of cards sell really well as a gifting product. But retailers smaller than that don’t really survive in grocery channels as a gifting product, or they don’t perform as well as they should.

There’s also a lot of retailers that weren’t in the channel like Nike, like Adidas, like Adairs, like Baby Bunting, that we thought they should be in the channel. And what we saw from overseas was by aggregating content under one category, i.e., you put all the baby content under the baby category and create that card, you could be successful and you would make it an easy gift proposition for the person buying the card and you’d make it a good gift for the person receiving the card. And then also it would sell well, so Coles and Woolworths would be happy with the sales and the performance of that type of card. If you’re a standalone retailer it was hard to pump that and hard to justify the peg space.

So we went about aggregating six cards, a card for him, her, active, baby, home and one for kids’ birthdays called birthday. And we aggregated about 12 retailers on every single card. Pretty big retailers, like I said, it’s like Nike and Footlocker, those types of retailers who hadn’t been in the channel before but we knew would have appeal for consumers, and we create sort of gifting purposes and enable that retailer to be in the channel. Which is great for that retailer, it’s great for the customer because now they’ve got a broader choice, and it’s great for grocery, Woolworths and Coles, because they’re attracting a broader customer could come in and buy that card and making the whole category more appealing.

So like I said at the start, we thought we are changing the market a little bit. We are growing the category a little bit because we’re bringing in new content and we’re creating new products that don’t exist. And so that’s been part of the excitement but also part of the challenge, because when you’re trying to create something brand new and you’re trying to educate great big partners on why they should be doing it, who aren’t even thinking about the category, then it’s hard. But then if it works, it’s obviously great for everybody. So we’ve got the six cards in Woolworths at the moment, and then we go into Coles late January.