E-commerce to the fore as Freemans Grattan looks ahead

It was launched by John Enrico Fattorini, the grandson of an Italian immigrant jeweller living in Bradford, who gave up a career in the family firm to set up the venture.

A hundred years on and the Bradford-headquartered business employs 600 people, turns over £150m and is focusing on profitable growth through an online-focused strategy. The company already conducts more than half of its business online.

Koert Tulleners, chief executive, told the Yorkshire Post: “There are not many retail companies in the world that celebrate 100 years, let alone mail order companies in the world so I think it is a fairly significant milestone.”

The National Media Museum in Bradford played host to Freemans Grattan Holdings’ centenary celebrations last night.

Mr Tulleners added: “We are now focusing on proftable growth. That’s very important.”

For growth to be sustainable it has to be profitable, he added. The firm is in the black following a period of heavy losses.

The key has been focusing on online, making the proposition more customer-friendly and making the organisation more cost-efficient, said Mr Tulleners. “Our organisation was incredibly bureaucratic and slow moving, and when things become bureaucratic the decision-making process comes to a standstill.”

“We certainly look forward to growing in the next few years, rather than shrinking as we have done in the last few years.”

In 2009, the firm axed more than 1,000 jobs, and earlier this year, it signed a deal which saw 400 staff at its contact centre in Sheffield transferred to customer international services firm Serco. Mr Tulleners said: “We are still reorganising certain areas of our business but on the whole we are recruiting more than people are leaving.

“In e-commerce we are expanding.

“We are introducing new propositions, we have introduced over the last two years a number of new brands, Swimwear365, which specialises in swimwear, we have produced a website called Curvissa, which focuses on the larger sizes, we’ve introduced a website called Bon Prix, we have taken over a website which was previously run separately, Witt International, which is for the older person.”

When Mr Tulleners joined the firm four years ago, he said he found “a very old-fashioned, mail order company which was really trading in a very old-fashioned way. And that was largely because people did not want to recognise how the business was changing to an online business.

“And when you change from an old mail order to an online, everything else in your business has to change with it.

“You have different types of customers. The old mail order customer was a very credit-needy customer and while credit is always a very important in the Anglo-Saxon business model, it is a different type of credit, because it attracts different customers, customers who want credit because it’s convenient, not because they need to have the credit in order to buy something.”

He said the business is “in a different place now”, adding: “We are a big online player, most of our business is now online, we are on mobile websites, you can look us up on the smartphone... so we are a much more modern organisation.”

The business has been owned by mail order giant and online seller, the Otto Group, since the early 1990s.