Retail field marketing group doubles profits
Retail field marketing specialist Dee Set Group doubled its profits in 2021.
Having made a profit of £1.8m in the first year of the pandemic in 2020, the group doubled profits to £3.6m in 2021, with a profit of £4.5m forecast for this year.
Originally a logistics firm that began operations in 2001, the company evolved from 2015, becoming a field marketing specialist for the retail sector.
The business now focuses on helping brands to improve retail performance both in-store and online, while also working with big retailers to improve the performance of non-core categories.
Based in Stoke-on-Trent, the company uses software that turns rich data into simple, actionable insights at speed.
Dee Set’s dedicated data science team has now collected over three billion units of data, which artificial intelligence uses to deliver predictive insights to some of the UK’s best-known retailers and FMCG brands, including Asda, Tesco, Morrisons, John Lewis, Kellogg’s and Arla Foods. This supports over £4bn in retail sales every year for the group’s clients.
Dee Set complements this tech offer with the largest field sales team in the UK, employing over 4,000 people across the entire business.
Greg Phillips, CEO of Dee Set Group, said: “We take pride in being entirely self-funded – Dee Set has never taken on any debt or gone through any funding rounds. Being privately-owned and self-funded is beneficial, as we are not beholden to shareholders or investors. In turn, this means we are a more agile organisation, and much quicker to make decisions that meet the needs of our customers.
“Our approach has always been to aggressively invest profits back into the business, so that our customers are always basing their decisions on the best, most informative data. To-date, we have reinvested £10m of profits into data and technology, with a further £7m-worth of investment planned by 2025.
“We are looking to drive digital transformation in retail field marketing, and so, our ambitions going forward are to commercialise the data stack we have collected and offer these marketing-leading insights globally. We also want to continue to grow our physical footprint in the UK organically through customer acquisitions – principally targeting major brands – and through the strategic acquisition of competitors that have failed to invest in the same market-leading technology that Dee Set Group has.”
The company’s growth has resulted in the creation of 350 job vacancies UK wide, across a variety of field sales roles including supervisors, merchandisers and warehouse fulfilment.
