Danish: Hey everyone, my name is Danish and I am back. I would like to say the session was really created by Kelly on how to build a personal brand that converts in e-commerce. The next session is on the value of older consumers in e-commerce, and the person who will present this, I would like to say about her, she is a senior B2C marketing and e-commerce expert, she is also expert in delivering revenue and growth, and advisory board member of the UK association for e-commerce retailers, none other than Janis Thomas. Hey Janis, how are you?

Janis Thomas: I’m great. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Danish: Thank you so much for your valuable time. I think we can start. The viewers are ready to ask their questions and for the presentation. So we can start. The floor is yours.

Janis Thomas: Excellent. Thank you very much. So yes, today I’d like to talk to you about the value of older consumers in e-commerce. I know there’s been a lot of discussion over the last few days around the value of Gen Z and Gen Alpha and how to target those new generations. But I think older consumers offer a massive opportunity which I am going to tell you about today.

So to start off with, I’d like you to think about how diverse is your customer base at the moment. So this is an issue particularly in beauty, which is the sector that I work in, that even very progressive brands like Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty, which has been incredibly groundbreaking in terms of the diversity of shades that she caters for. But in terms of the images that you see on her website, in the advertising, all of those things, age diversity is a big issue. And in fact, typically within the beauty industry, an older consumer is considered somebody over 25. So there’s a long way to go to combat that ageism.

So what I’d like you to think about is actually the value of older consumers. And older consumers are the fastest growing market in e-commerce. So the largest growing demographic in the next 10 years is going to be women over 50. It’s not going to be Gen Z. It’s not going to be Gen Alpha. It’s women over 50. So if you’re not thinking about that, you’re missing a huge opportunity. And women over 50 control 95% of their household purchasing decisions. So they have a huge impact.

And particularly if you think within the UK, over-50s hold 70% of the country’s disposable income. And those figures are reflected similarly elsewhere over the world, that actually if you’re chasing Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they have significantly less disposable income than older consumers have. And the number of over-65s is expected to double around the world by 2050. So, we’re going through this period that people are living longer, birth rates are declining, all of those things. So actually older consumers are a huge group and a hugely valuable affluent group with a significant proportion of disposable income. So if you’re not thinking about them, you’re really missing a massive opportunity.

So let’s take a step back and let me tell you about Look Fabulous Forever. So, Look Fabulous Forever, I’m managing director there. But our founder, Trisha Kusden, she started the brand in 2013. She was 65 at the time, so she is 77 today and the most incredible, inspiring woman. And essentially, as she got older, particularly after she’d been through menopause, the makeup and skin care products that she was using were less effective, that she wasn’t able to get the effect that she wanted from them, particularly from makeup, and she recognized that she needed something different. So she went out to try and find those products and they were just not out there, that just as far as mainstream beauty brands and retailers were concerned, at 65 she was just not a customer that was interesting to them.

Now if you’ve ever met Trisha, she’s not the kind of woman to take that sort of thing lying down. So she said, right, if these products aren’t out there for me, I’m going to work out how to formulate them, how to manufacture them, and how to distribute them. And the business has gone from strength to strength in the last 12 years. So she was really on to a good idea.

So we talk a lot now about diversity and to a certain extent inclusion, but the next step beyond that is belonging. And for so many years we as brands have aspired to exclusivity. We’ve said being exclusive is what we all want to aspire to. But what you end up with when you’re being exclusive, so this image here is a picture of when Hollister opened at Westfield in the UK, there’s no branding. You can’t see any products. You don’t know what it is unless you already know the brand. So they’re really trading on, well, if you don’t know who we are, then we’re not interested in attracting you.

And I want you to compare that kind of exclusive mentality with what our customers say about Look Fabulous Forever. So they say things like, finding Look Fabulous Forever has been a wonderful experience, like finding the right gang after feeling lost. Look Fabulous Forever doesn’t make me feel old, it makes me feel better. So the idea that our customers feel included, that they belong, that they are welcome is incredibly powerful. So I think as brands, while we’re tempted by exclusivity, inclusivity and making customers feel like they belong is incredibly powerful.

And I think it’s very easy for us to forget that we are not necessarily our customer. So this is some stats from the last UK census, but these stats are not wildly different around the world, that just 20% of the population are between 25 and 39. But we overpopulate our organizations with people in this group. Whereas over-50s are actually 40% of the population. But if you think about our organizations, we don’t see that demographic reflected. We see this cult of youth. And actually that means that our organizations are not inclusive, which means if we don’t have the right people around the table then we’re not thinking about our customer and we’re not thinking about the full potential.

So this is something, a few years back I worked at Birchbox, the beauty subscription box, and we did a big piece of research, that because we were offering personalized beauty subscriptions we had a huge amount of data about our existing customers. We knew did they have long hair or short hair, did they have curly hair or straight hair, blonde hair or brown hair, all of this data, but we knew comparatively little about the people who weren’t our customers. So, we did a proper nationally representative sample to understand who our customer was and who she could be. And that data came back and it was incredibly valuable. And it said that we had two key target customers and one of them we were serving extremely well. She was a young urban professional with a bit too much month at the end of her money, which meant she really looked like the women who worked in our office.

And the data showed that there was actually another customer who was a lot more profitable. She was a bit older. She was more likely to live outside London. She was more likely to have children. And in particular, she was more financially mature, which meant that she was more likely to buy from our full-size e-commerce offering and not just our subscription box. So, what we were able to do as a brand was, we didn’t want to alienate our core customer who we call Becky, but we wanted to be more inclusive of Sarah. And as a result, the business scaled up extremely quickly. So actually thinking about your customer more widely than you are and what you think and what you want can be incredibly powerful for accelerating your business growth.

And in particular older consumers are often ignored or stigmatized. They’re massively underrepresented both in imagery on websites and in advertising. And it becomes quite remarkable when there’s a brand like Airbnb and it shows an ad of older people just enjoying a holiday in the same way that everyone else does. It’s ridiculous that something like that is remarkable because that demographic is so overlooked and they are so often stereotyped when they’re included. When I say to people, oh, my target customer is typically women in their 60s, 70s, or 80s, and our typical customer is in her 70s, they say things like, do they even shop online? Do they know how to use the internet? Incredibly wrong things, that actually when I speak to people they say, oh, I’ve got this vision of a woman in her 70s as a gray-haired granny in a gray cardigan. And that’s just not true. Women in their 70s are the generation of the Beatles and Mary Quant and the miniskirt. They are colorful, vibrant women with rich lives and they want to buy fashion and luxury holidays and homewares and all of these things, but instead they find their social feeds full of ads for funeral homes and incontinence underwear, and that just is really frustrating for them.

So for us as a beauty brand that’s targeting them directly, showing them accurately, showing them as colorful, vibrant women with rich lives, it gets massive cut through. We see massive engagement in our advertising. Whereas, our products are all specifically designed for a use case that an older woman faces that a mainstream product doesn’t account for. So for example, our blusher. Typically, if you would buy a blusher, you would either buy a cream blush or a powder blush. But as you get older, if you wear a powder blush, it sits in the fine lines in your skin and it’s not very flattering. But older skin is very absorbent. So you put it on in the morning and you look amazing, but by lunchtime it’s completely disappeared. It’s like you never put it on in the first place. So our blusher is designed as a cream to powder formula. So, it goes on smoothly as a cream, but then it dries as a powder. So, the color sits on your skin and stays vibrant all day.

So, if you saw a picture of my blusher, it looks exactly the same as a blusher from Clinique or MAC or anyone else. So, if you just saw the product, you wouldn’t know why it was different. So actually accurately representing our customers helps them understand what the product is, why it’s different, why they should buy it. And here are some stats from our customers. 98% of them shop online. 39% do all or most of their shopping online. And this is really interesting, that I actually had a conversation with the young people who worked in our office the other day, and the majority of the team in their 20s said actually they prefer to shop in store than online. So within e-commerce that older consumer is a huge opportunity. 88% of them use online banking. 82% watch TV and movies online, and 72% listen to music, audio books, and podcasts. So, these customers are shopping online. They want to buy from you, but if you’re not accurately representing them or even not even targeting them at all, then it’s a massive missed opportunity.

Having said that, older consumers are a wide demographic. If I’ve got customers in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, that could be mother and daughter. And if you think about your own parents, your own tastes can be very different. So, it is not a monolith. It is not a one-size-fits-all, but it’s actually representing a range of older consumers in their full diversity. And so these demographics alone are not enough. So for example, I’d like you to think of a man. He’s born in 1948. He grew up in England. He has two children and he’s been married twice. So this demographic information describes two very different men with very different tastes and purchasing habits, both King Charles and the late Ozzy Osbourne. Those people, they fit the same demographic description, but they are actually very different in terms of how you would appeal to them, the products they would want to buy, all of those things.

So, this is all very well, but how do you actually take that and put it into practice? It all starts with listening to our customers. Particularly at Look Fabulous Forever, we’re lucky, we have people in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s working within the organization. So, we have a big spread of age demographics, but it means that most of us are not our target customer. So we really have to embed that understanding of our customer and how she thinks and feels and what she wants into every aspect of our business. So one of the ways we do that, we have a private Facebook group that has about 10,000 members now. So, we originally started this in March 2020 because Trisha recognized that our customers were going to be disproportionately affected by lockdown. Because most of our customers are retired, their lives revolve around things like family and grandchildren or volunteer work or meeting friends for lunch and coffee, and all of those things went away for them overnight. So Trisha wanted to provide an environment where those customers could come together and speak with each other and support each other.

But this hasn’t been just a COVID flash in the pan. So fast forward five and a half years and we still see over 75% of that 10,000 members active in the group every month. That’s liking, commenting, posting, all of those things. And we know from talking to our customers, we have a huge proportion of lurkers who regularly engage with the content but don’t then actually post and the like. So that figure is even greater in terms of the reach of the group. And they do occasionally discuss our products and that’s really useful for us, but I would say about 99% of their discussions are not about us as a brand or our products. They might be sharing pictures of a holiday or a new fashion purchase or the pictures of their latest grandchild, or even really serious discussions around a medical diagnosis or the loss of a partner or concerns around a custody agreement for their grandchildren. So we have a whole wide-ranging discussion which really gives us an insight into our customers’ lives beyond their transactional relationship with us as a brand, which really helps us think of them as real people. They’re not some personas that sit in a drawer. They’re real people with real lives that we get to see.

And one of the things that I find really interesting is we track net promoter score, how likely our customers are to recommend us. And unsurprisingly, the 10,000 people who are in the group, their NPS score is much higher. They’re much more likely to recommend us than people who are not part of the group. But one of the things I find most surprising is that customers who know that we have the group but don’t choose to join it, their net promoter score is almost as high as people who are part of the group. So just knowing that this is something that we offer to our customers makes them more likely to recommend us, more likely to advocate for us.

We have an amazing customer services team and they reflect the demographic of the women that we serve, that they are not, if you call us up, you are not speaking to some 20-year-old who has no idea what product would be right for you. You’re going to speak to somebody who really understands the issues that you face. And they offer support over phone, over email, we have live chat, we have chatbots. Customers can book in a Zoom call so they can have a one-to-one conversation and the customer services team can actually see the customer and what their skin looks like, what products they’re using, all of those things. Our team feeds back issues to us in real time, that if we’ve got a problem with a product they will tell us straight away.

And one of the things that we really try to do as a business is that we try to solve problems upstream so that our customer services team can focus on adding value. So, for example, we have an amazing third-party logistics partner and typically they ship most orders on the day that they are placed. And that makes a massive difference because it means that our customers typically say that their order arrives when or before they expect it. Which means that our customer services team are not tied up with tens of thousand queries about where is my order. They can focus on giving that one-to-one service direct to our customers and our customers really appreciate that they are treated with humanity.

We had an instance a few years back where we had a call to the customer services line, but the customer hung up before Caroline was able to take the call. Caroline, being incredibly diligent, made an effort when she had a spare moment to call that customer back to see what they needed and why they’d called. And the customer said that she had tried to call but she’d become overwhelmed while she was waiting because she wanted to redeem a gift voucher that her husband had bought for her birthday. But unfortunately in the meantime her husband had died and she was just too upset to carry on with the call. So it was enormously meaningful to her that Caroline had made that effort to call her back and speak with her and take time to understand what she needed. So because we solve problems upstream, we’re able to provide that level of depth and care, genuine care for our customers.

And we’re really about getting as much feedback from our customers as we possibly can. So we do social listening. Obviously our customer services team feed things back. So for example, Julie on the customer services team did a Zoom consultation with a customer who had recently been through chemotherapy and was facing some very specific issues. And this was something she was like, oh, we should have more content on our site specifically to help people facing that particular issue. We collect reviews so we find out are our customers happy with us, what’s going wrong. Trisha writes a weekly blog. It’s much more about her experience as an older woman in society rather than specifically about the company or our products. But we get huge amounts of engagement with that blog. So we get to understand what issues our customers are engaging with in the wider world.

We also do formal quarterly customer surveys that go to everyone who’s bought from us in the last three months. They enable us to do benchmarking. So for example, we have a very generous returns policy. So you can buy any of our products and try it and if the color doesn’t suit you or it doesn’t suit your skin or for whatever reason you can return that to us free of charge for either a full refund or an exchange for another product or color. And try going into a high street beauty retailer and buying a lipstick and trying it and being like oh that didn’t work, you know, you’re not getting your money back. But we have this incredibly generous returns policy. So that’s one of the things we benchmark in our quarterly customer service survey. What proportion of our customers know that we have this? So we’re able to check, are we communicating well?

We ask a mix of quantitative things like, do they know about our generous returns policy? Do they know about our recycling program? Do they know that we’re cruelty-free? All of these things. We also ask very qualitative things like, what kind of content would they like to see from us in the future? What do they think we’re doing well? What could we improve? What kind of products do they want to see from us in the future? All of those things. And there’s lots of things that research is good for. But people are not very good at reporting their behavior. What people think they do and what they actually do are often very different. So we combine that kind of asking customers alongside observing their behavior. What do they do on our site? What’s their purchase frequency? All of those things, using observational data as well as reported data from our customers.

And then when we do these surveys in particular, this is not something that only I see or that ends up in a drawer and nobody looks at. We circulate it around the entire company and then we come together as an organization to share and discuss what did we see in the latest survey, what did we find interesting or surprising, what are we going to go do differently, all of those things. We also facilitate direct interaction with our customers. So, for example, Trisha has a fortnightly film club where they watch a film and they discuss it afterwards. So, if we’ve got a new person join the organization, they’ll often join Trisha’s film club so they can have sort of one-to-one conversation with our customers, they’ll join the private Facebook group so they can get this insight into their lives. And all of this gives us a really rich multifaceted understanding of our customer.

So we can understand her pain points, we can understand how their needs are changing and evolving, and we use that data to make decisions. So for example, do customers want buy now pay later services from us? Are they on TikTok? We don’t make assumptions about these things. We ask those questions. We track them regularly over time, and particularly for new product launches. Before we launch any new product, we ask our customers, are they interested in buying this product? What price would they be willing to pay for it? What would they want this product to do? What qualities would they want it to have? What would they need to know about it before they decided to buy it? So before we go into production of any product, we know, are we formulating it in the right way, is there enough demand for it, can we produce it at a price that our customers are willing to pay so we can make enough margin so it will be profitable and a success. And it’s really helpful for us to understand rather than making expensive mistakes.

And all this data is coming into us all the time. It’s not a one-and-done, oh, we did a customer survey once. It’s like, no, we’re doing this every quarter. So, we’re able to continuously improve and also feed that back to our customers. We get huge response rates to our customer surveys, typically about 10% of customers respond, which considering we ask them every quarter is absolutely massive. And part of that is that we give them some feedback. People will say, oh, we’re reformulating our mascara because you told us it was clumpy, or that we’ve just launched this new product because you told us that you’d like to see a lip oil. All of these things, we give them feedback so they feel like they’re not just giving us this feedback and it goes into a void, that we actually listen to them and take it on board and change what we’re doing as a result.

This is great, but I think it’s also really important to talk to people who aren’t your customers. Like that Birchbox example earlier, that if you just talk to people who are already your customers, you might be missing a trick. It’s very easy to make assumptions about who your customer is. It’s great to ask them what’s stopping them. Why haven’t they bought from you yet? What do they need to be convinced on? And looking at how are they different from your existing customers. What do you need to do in your marketing differently or your product offering differently to attract those people who don’t buy from you already?

It’s really valuable to understand their wider interests. So, as part of that acquisition strategy at Birchbox where we were understanding how to reach people who weren’t our customers already, one of the things that we did was that we asked our existing customers a lot about what they like to do, what their interests were beyond beauty. And the top answers were they liked eating out, they liked drinking out, and they liked shopping. Which meant that when we decided to run an outdoor advertising campaign, we ran those ads in women’s washrooms, in restaurants, in bars, and in shopping malls. And those outdoor ads were incredibly successful because they were in women’s washrooms, there was no wastage. And because they were in venues that we already knew our existing customers were very interested in, it meant that that media was much more successful than it would have been if we just decided to run outdoor ads at random.

And I think it’s also useful because it helps you understand how easy it is to reach them and persuade them, that on the surface potentially anyone could be your potential customer, but it might be really hard and expensive to persuade them. In which case it’s better to go after the people who are easier to reach and easier to persuade. I think accessibility is really important, that your users’ needs, particularly because I have an older audience, I am concerned about, for example, hearing difficulties. But then if we’re more inclusive more generally, all of us have some kind of situational accessibility needs. For example, you might want to watch a video on your phone and you can’t find your headphones so you want subtitles. You might be trying to navigate your phone while it’s raining and you’re holding an umbrella. We all have these situational accessibility needs. So being more accessible is just good practice. It’s just removing that friction for customers that have specific accessibility needs, then makes your site easier to use for everyone.

So this is all very nice and it sounds like these are all great important things. We all want to be more inclusive. We all want to reach a wider range of customers, but at the end of the day we care about what impact does it have on our business. So I’m going to start with, this is a survey we sent to our customers, and this is how it makes them feel. So, they appreciate that our founder advocates for them. They feel glad that there’s a brand that understands them. They feel supported to look like the best version of themselves. They feel valued and recognized as important. And my favorite stat, 85% of our customers say that being a customer of Look Fabulous Forever has had a positive impact on their life. And wouldn’t every brand like to be able to say that they are genuinely having a positive impact on their customers’ lives?

So we make our customers feel valued and important and special. But what does that mean in terms of the commercials? So 80% of our revenue comes from existing customers. 76% of our customers have recommended us to other people. So while we do connect NPS score, that is a hypothetical question, how likely on a scale of 1 to 10 are you to recommend somebody, we also alongside that ask our customers, have you actually recommended us? And 76% of our customers say yes, they have. And what’s interesting to me is 93% of those conversations have taken place in person. So they have actually had a conversation with another woman about us and our products and recommended us.

Most of our customers return. So we have over 50% repeat purchase rate. And if we can get customers past the second purchase point, on average they go on to buy from us at least seven times. So we invest in accurately representing our customers. We invest in being helpful. We invest in making them feel welcome and included and like they belong to something. And then that pays back massively in not hypothetical loyalty but actual loyalty.

So in conclusion, over-65s are going to be the fastest growing market in e-commerce. Making your customer feel like they belong is really powerful. You are not necessarily your customer. Collect data and use it to make your decisions, not assumptions. Older audiences are far more than stereotypes. Making your site accessible is good business sense, not just box ticking. And widening your customer base could have a massive impact on your business. Thank you very much.

Danish: Thank you so much Janis. And I think it was a great, insightful session and I hope our viewers have a lot of takeaways they can implement in their business. So we have some questions. So let’s move on to the Q&A session and let’s address some of the questions. I can see some of the questions here. So the first one is from Nibin. So he is asking, which channels are your top performers for 50-plus discovery today, Facebook, YouTube, email, and how do you design creative for each?

Janis Thomas: Yes. So all of those things, particularly YouTube is really interesting. YouTube is incredibly powerful for us. What is interesting about YouTube is when I’ve spoken to our really high value customers, so customers who have bought from us 50, 100 times, they all consistently say YouTube was part of their journey to discovering us as a brand and that it’s a really big reason why they continue to buy from us. So in terms of direct conversion, we see very little direct revenue from YouTube, but in terms of building a loyal customer who returns and advocates for us, it’s incredibly powerful. Facebook is a really great full funnel for us. It’s great at educating customers about our brand and why we exist, why our products are different, and converting them.

So throughout the journey, email is absolutely massive for us, that we really focus from an email perspective on being useful and helpful to our customer, being of service. And as a result, we typically see 50% plus open rates. And my favorite stat is that over 85% of our customers want to receive an email from us every single day. And how many brands can you say that you would like to have an email from them every single day? So from our point of view, we are very content focused. We know that customers’ journeys typically start with a specific way that one of their makeup products is not serving them in the way that they would like. So a typical query might be something like, my lipstick is bleeding into the fine lines around my mouth and it’s not very flattering, how do I stop that? So something like that, we will create a landing page for that. We will create a YouTube video, like a full length really detailed one, because a lot of our customers really want the specifics. Particularly in makeup tutorials you see these women who look amazing and they’re just like, look I’m amazing, whereas our customers are like, no, I want to be really specific about exactly how you do that.

So, YouTube tells us that on average our customers watch five times longer than is typical on their platform because they want a lot of detail, but we’ll also do YouTube shorts and we’ll do Instagram reels and we’ll do some imagery and all of those things. So we’re very much, instead of it being like this is a channel, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, email, that we’re producing content for, we think of it much more like, how do we create something that solves this problem and then format that for all of the different channels in the best possible way.

Danish: Awesome. Let’s move to the next question and this question is from Sajjad. He is asking, what unique behaviors have you observed in older consumers while shopping online? For example, do they tend to spend more time researching a product before purchasing?

Janis Thomas: I think for us specifically, we have a very specific strategy, which is that we want to invest in the relationship before you purchase. For example, the way that you apply eyeliner in a flattering way when you’re 75 is completely different to the technique you would use at 25. So actually to start off with, I don’t care if you’re not buying your eyeliner from me, you’re buying it from someone else. If I’ve helped you, then that has a value and it means that we’re much more likely not just to win that customer, but to win them and have them come back and make a second and subsequent purchase and advocate for us. So that’s not specific to older customers per se. That’s much more our strategy.

In terms of their behavior. I think the biggest difference is because they don’t feel included by so many mainstream brands. When they find a brand that makes them feel like they belong, they are more loyal. So they are not more loyal by default, but when they feel welcome, they are a lot more loyal.

Danish: Awesome. Let’s check the chat options as well. So there is a, not actually a question but an appreciation for you, by Ivana. She is saying that the data-driven decision making is still being taboo in 2025 and I love your breakdown of it.

Janis Thomas: I think it is just the most, it’s really easy for us to say, oh we think that we should be doing XYZ, particularly from a strategic point of view, and actually just taking a moment to ask your customers could save a huge amount of money.

Danish: Perfect. Thank you so much Janis for your valuable time. It means a lot and I think there are key takeaways for our viewers as well. So this is Janis. For our viewers, don’t go anywhere. We have another exciting activity lineup that is tagline in 30 seconds. So you have a chance to participate and win big prizes. So it is your chance to participate in the activities and win big. And there is another update that we recently announced our awards. So you have a chance to showcase your product and get valued by Cloudways. The link is in the comment section. It’s a pinned comment. So you have a chance to submit your queries. And you can check out the page from the comment section. So stay tuned for the next activity.