This episode of Functional & Fabulous welcomes Lauren Nicole Muir, the ecommerce leader who was instrumental in scaling Oh Polly from an eBay startup to a £150 million global powerhouse. Lauren shares the agile strategies, technical transformations, and mindset shifts that fuelled the brand’s explosive growth.
Oh Polly's Unexpected Rise - Once upon a time in Lockdown...
From the beginning, this episode is jam-packed with pivotal moments demonstrating extraordinary brand growth. Lauren Nicole Muir explains that she had just started at Oh Polly at the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the brand was suddenly faced with a profoundly abnormal trading environment: their core product—glamour and going-out dresses—was the last thing on anyone's mind. (Let's face it, we all spent most of our lockdown in leggings and hoodies!)
Faced with an overnight shift in demand away from their core party wear, Lauren and a small team immediately got creative. They began meeting daily to figure out "crazy, innovative ideas" that would help shift their products. By leveraging pop culture and social media engagement, the team was able to achieve an unexpected 100% year-over-year growth during a period when demand for their core product should have been non-existent—a true testament to the strength and agility of their internal culture.
From Live Tweets to Viral PLP Videos
The brand’s early agile muscle memory persists today, evidenced by their pioneering use of video on Product Listing Pages (PLPs). LNM fostered a culture where "no idea is too crazy," leading to the successful integration of high-engagement videos which are timed to almost see the models on individual listings to interact (you can check it out here) directly into the website's merchandising.
Lauren speaks to how she enjoyed rallying the technical and creative teams to ensure the video was super fast, optimised for mobile (which accounts for 92% of their traffic). Ultimately, it demonstrates the brand’s willingness to try new and innovative methods to stand out in a saturated industry.
Technology Must Work Harder for You
Lauren stresses that "technology must work harder for you," insisting that brands should stop investing in tools that still require manual workload at the forefront. She states that there lies a danger of delaying to automated processes as competitors are automating with AI, leaving manual-focused brands behind.
She explains that the tools are only half the battle and for Oh Polly, scaling required a massive, foundational effort. Before they could launch a PIM project was launched, the needed to ensure they were not just using it to put a plaster on poor data. Ultimately, they decided to look internally first and over a 12-month period they were able to execute a wholesale data cleanse and launch a PIM system.
She states that the true value of having tools work harder lies in empowering the team by removing “boring” admin (like manual pricing and HS code checks), freeing them for strategic work and enhancing the customer experience.
The Trader's Mindset: Combining Customer Love with Technical Reality
Lauren views her background of marketing as the "best way to come at trading," uniting a marketer’s tendency to think customer first with a technologist's understanding of "hard reality" (like stock control). After realising her work on the website was essentially just "onsite marketing," she learned to leverage tools like Nosto to "manipulate the algorithms" using clean product data. This allowed her to automate crucial trading decisions: boosting products based on commercial performance and defining "good availability" (e.g., ensuring all core sizes are in stock), rather than relying on time-consuming manual pinning. This fusion of creative ideas with technical, automated execution is a key factor in scaling the business.
Want to Find Out More?
You can listen to the full episode of Functional and Fabulous on all your favourite podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify or catch the visual version on YouTube. You can also check out our podcast page here on the StudioForty9 website or the Functional and Fabulous website.
