Award-winning EziBuy celebrates 35 years of retail success

June 2013
News release

Award-winning EziBuy celebrates 35 years of retail success

Ground-breaking multi-channel retailer EziBuy is celebrating 35 years of retail success this month.

EziBuy is one of New Zealand’s great business achievers - in 35 years, the company has grown from humble beginnings in Palmerston North to become New Zealand’s largest direct marketing organisation and a market leader in women’s fashion e-tailing across Australasia.

Offering quality and affordable fashion for women, men and home decor, EziBuy also now has a contemporary range of children’s clothing (via UK label Next).
Established by brothers Peter and Gerard Gillespie, with friend John Robinson, EziBuy launched in 1978 with an A3 black and white sheet selling women’s fashion and hardware. The first mailing list was compiled using phone books and was a hit from the outset, receiving 638 orders. Today, EziBuy receives over 480,000 orders every month and is the largest fashion and home decor multi-channel retailer in Australasia. More than 15,000 items per day are dispatched to customers on both sides of the Tasman.

“Our philosophy in the 70’s was about convenience, ease and value, and these core values remain today. We are committed to providing an exceptional customer experience for our shoppers and are continually innovating our product offering and the technology to serve them in a more personalised way. We want our customers to feel special and enjoy each and every interaction with us,” says Chief Executive Simon West.

Since 1978, EziBuy’s progression has been impressive. It opened its first store in Palmerston North in 1978 and launched into Australia in 1992. It expanded its homewares offering in 1995 and, in 2006, opened the largest Distribution Centre in the Southern Hemisphere at 25,000m2.

EziBuy’s history of becoming a leading heavy-weight e-tailer all started in 1998 when it launched its first e-commerce site. Today the website receives over 18 million visits every year and is responsible for around 70% of sales. 75% of all new customers shop online. The company launched a mobile site in early 2013.

Despite technological advances, EziBuy continues its heavy investment in catalogues today, recognising it as an integral part of the overall marketing strategy in communicating its product offering to customers. The company mails over 23 million copies to Australasian customers each year.

EziBuy’s success saw it clinch two highly-acclaimed awards this year – the inaugural Keith Norris Award for NZ Direct Marketing Organisation of the Year at the 2013 NZ Direct Marketing Awards and, just days later, it was named one of the Top 10 International e-Commerce sites by Australian magazine, Inside Retail, putting it in the company of eBay, Apple and Amazon.

The judges of the NZ Direct Marketing Awards were inspired, saying “EziBuy is a world-class organisation that embraces modern direct marketing at its best. An industry leader driven by innovation, EziBuy is aggressively pursuing growth in a unique kiwi way”. The commitment to understanding its customers has resulted in intuitive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology which understands each and every customer’s buyer behavior. This enables EziBuy to serve at a more personalised level the appropriate array of product offers and promotions to customers.

“After 35 years of evolution, EziBuy today is a genuine multi-channel retailer, offering customers the option to buy online, via the contact centre, catalogue, retail store, ipad, or mobile device. We strive for the ultimate in customer experience in any medium they choose to buy from,” says West.

With annual turnover running into hundreds of millions of dollars, more than 800 staff, a strong database of active customers and a year-on-year retention rate of 70%, EziBuy is a hugely successful and progressive direct marketing business.

“We’re proud of what we’ve achieved at EziBuy. We’re driven by a strong culture of innovation and our dedication to impeccable customer service has been our secret to success,” says West.

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