Structure and Brands
As well as its core home shopping business, Shop Direct Group owns and operates a financial services business, formerly known as Everyday Financial Solutions, and now known as Shop Direct Financial Services, which is the consolidated brand under which Littlewoods and Shop Direct's finance arms were merged.
The Group's contact centre company, formerly known as Optimum Contact Solutions, is now known as Shop Direct Contact Solutions.
Home Delivery Network Limited (HDNL) is the Group's logistics arm, the result of the merger between Business Express and Reality, the former Littlewoods and Shop Direct delivery companies respectively. As well as delivering home shopping for the Group's brands, also delivers for Tesco Direct, Amazon.co.uk, dabs.com, The Book People, Virgin Wines and other third parties.
Following a takeover of DHL's UK domestic B2B and B2C arm, HDNL rebranded itself as Yodel. Yodel received much negative publicity in December 2011 for alleged instances of poor performance. Yodel ascribed the failures to unexpectedly high demand. However, the Daily Mail later printed a clarification after exaggerating the amount of backlogged and undelivered packages by Yodel. In March 2012, the BBC's Watchdog consumer programme broadcast a segment highly critical of Yodel.
Transactis is the Group's printing, direct marketing and publishing company.
Shop Direct Group operates a variety of home shopping brands, consisting of the former Littlewoods brands and the former Shop Direct brands (Additions Direct, Abound, Great Universal, Marshall Ward, Choice, and Kays). A sports website, called sport-e.com was also opened by the group in 2003. The 'Littlewoods Direct' brand was formerly known as 'LX Direct' and 'Littlewoods Xtra'. The shop provides a range of items ranging from clothing and jewellery to electrical goods and appliances. Fashion advisors Trinny and Susannah are currently the faces of Littlewoods. They fronted Littlewoods when orders rose thirty per cent during its sponsorship of their ITV1 programme Trinny & Susannah Undress in 2006. As of January 2007, they have also provided twelve pages of fashion advice within the Littlewoods catalogue and also produced a booklet called The Golden Rules, which was distributed to all Littlewoods customers with fashion advice aimed to suit all body shapes. They have also compiled guidelines aimed at customers searching online, who are then able to type-in their body measurements and get instant advice on which Littlewoods clothing is suitable with accordance to their figure. The duo have also launched their own clothing range with Littlewoods. Littlewoods also own Littlewoods Direct, Marshall Ward, Additions Direct, Choice and Kays.
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