From zero to £80 million: how doing the ordinary exceptionally well built an unstoppable business

Seven years ago Must Have Ideas consisted of just three people, all packing orders around a dining table. We’d just quit our jobs and put our homes on the line while the spare bedrooms were filled with stock and cardboard boxes. Fast forward to today, and Must Have Ideas has now turned over £80 million, employs a team of more than 200 people and is in the final stages of moving into a new 250,000 square foot HQ in Kent.

It’s the kind of growth that often prompts the question: what’s your secret?

The honest answer is underwhelming. There isn’t one.

Our business model is purposely straightforward – we mostly sell products that already exist, we use the same marketing channels everyone else uses, there’s no hidden supply chain, no special AI tools and no secret platform.

The reason isn’t innovation in the traditional sense. It isn’t copying trends or mimicking what others were doing. Our growth comes from doing ordinary things extraordinarily well, consistently and thoroughly over time.

When I spoke about this recently at Elite Business Live, I was keen to stress that our growth didn’t come from one big idea or breakthrough moment. It came from a relentless focus on the fundamentals – and the discipline to keep doing them well long after it stopped feeling exciting.

At Must Have Ideas, there are four areas where we have focused on getting the basics right.

Data over opinion

We test and measure everything: marketing, content, landing pages, pricing, checkout flows, customer service responses and offers. We change nothing without evidence or testing.

One of our core values is data over opinion, and we live by it – even when the data contradicts instinct. I check live sales data first thing in the morning and last thing at night. We track contribution by product daily, review acquisition performance constantly, and look for marginal gains that turn into big wins over time.

This isn’t revolutionary. Managing data is ordinary – but acting on it consistently, quickly and without ego is what counts.

Our website “shouldn’t work”

Conventional e-commerce wisdom says customers have short attention spans – keep copy light, keep pages short and let images do the heavy lifting.

Our data told us the opposite.

It turns out our customers want to be educated. They want to understand the problem and see the solution clearly before they buy. That means long-form content, detailed explanations and products in action.

We’ve been told countless times by experts that our pages are too long. We’ve tested shorter versions repeatedly. They lose – every time. Of course, what works for us may not work for someone else, but when the data speaks, we listen. If these tests yielded different results, we’d make changes accordingly. But until the data tells us otherwise, we trust it unconditionally.

Customer obsession, not customer focus

We don’t describe ourselves as customer-focused or even customer-driven. We describe ourselves proudly as customer obsessed.

Last month we celebrated serving our ten-millionth customer, Pauline, from East Sussex. To mark the moment, we invited her to our afternoon tea event at The Savoy. Pauline is one of our VIP customers, those who pay an annual fee for free delivery and shop with us on average four times a year. VIP retention is up to seven times higher than non-VIP customers.

We back our promises unequivocally. Orders arrive within two working days or they’re free. Every product comes with a 100-day no-quibble money-back guarantee. If something goes wrong, most of the time, we don’t even ask for the product back.

Our customer service team – now 50 people strong – is based solely at our Kent HQ – absolutely no outsourcing. They’re trained to an exceptional standard and empowered to make independent decisions to do whatever is right for the customer.

Our very first customer, Antoinette, placed order number one in August 2018. Since then, she’s placed 77 more. She’s never returned a product, never complained and never contacted customer services. She trusts us – and that trust compounds.

Customer service is ordinary. Doing it exceptionally is not.

Doubling down on what works

We have 17 in-house content creators producing hundreds of pieces of content every week, supported by our own on-site studio. We test polished content against authentic, human videos – and time and again, authenticity wins.

People trust real people in real homes more than flawless studios. That’s why I often appear in content myself – not because of ego, but because founder-led ads deliver four to five times the return of regular ads. Why? Because customers are more trusting if they can see who they’re buying from.

We’ve also learned to live with uncomfortable truths. One of our highest-converting product pages is, quite frankly, ugly. I hate it. The team hate it. But it sells. Until we find something that performs better, it stays.

Brand matters – but it should support performance, not prevent experimentation.

But none of this works in isolation. Content educates, and education builds trust, which in turn increases conversion. Exceptional service reinforces loyalty, and loyalty drives retention.

Our growth didn’t come from one big idea. It came from the whole process working together, day after day.

Today, we’re expanding into new categories like beauty and DIY, entering new territories and working towards a goal of having a Must Have Ideas product in every home in the UK.

And even though we’ve grown in ways we could never have imagined, the basics haven’t changed since those early days around the dining table.

Back then, we weren’t theorising strategy – we were packing orders, watching ads perform and looking for evidence of what worked and what didn’t.

So, if there’s one takeaway from our journey, it’s this: don’t chase trends, and don’t look for a quick-fix solution – because there probably isn’t one. Go back to your data and let it decide your next move. Then do the ordinary things – exceptionally well.

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