In case you haven’t heard us mention it (!), Laybuy recently launched officially in the UK, partnering with iconic British footwear and apparel retailer, Footasylum. This is, of course, a great achievement and an exciting time for Laybuy, but the journey to getting here has also been super valuable in terms of the opportunity to learn. From my perspective, the really key lesson, from launching Laybuy in New Zealand, to more recently moving to the UK to expand the business, has been that building relationships that are based on trust is absolutely critical to success.
Trust, it turns out, could not be more important in the retail landscape. It is fundamental to partnerships with other businesses that your company’s representatives build a human and honest connection with each other. You can wow prospective partners with stats and facts all you want, but when it comes down to it, decision-makers are reliant upon whether they feel they can trust you when you say that your business can benefit theirs. Success works best when everyone is winning.
Trust is also key when it comes to any business’s relationship with its end user, in Laybuy’s case, consumer shoppers. Although positive interactions and good representatives are important to this group, the proof is really in the pudding when it comes to impressing them enough to encourage them to trust you as a brand. Are your brand values transparent? Are your terms and conditions enforced fairly? Are you offering a genuinely helpful service rather than merely a profit-making machine?
It’s all about integrity. If your stated brand values don’t match up to your company’s behaviours, sooner or later you’ll be found out.
This is why we are proud to partner with Experian, which performs a credit check before a consumer is verified to use Laybuy. This ensures that any decision to lend is based on a robust analysis of the affordability of the loan to the shopper in question – offering them a manageable level of flexibility to empower better purchasing decisions.
Responsible lending is in our DNA, as our Experian check will assign a spending ‘limit’ to each of our users based on their personal affordability. In cases where payments are not made as agreed, Laybuy user accounts are swiftly frozen to ensure that our customers aren’t racking up ever increasing debts. No debt spiral here. In fact, our partnership with Experian means that Laybuy users can build a credit score through Laybuy, as an alternative to riskier ways of doing so, such as credit cards.
In other words: Laybuy helps to augment and improve the shopping experience for retailers and consumers, that’s our business model. Laybuy isn’t structured to profit from our users, our profit comes from a small commission we charge to our retail partners. This was and still is extremely important to us as a business.
These are just a couple of examples, but the point is that only by having strong values and integrity is it possible to become a brand that people rely on and trust. This is our aim for Laybuy, in our relationships with retail partners, shoppers and our stakeholders.
Whether or not you embrace our business, one thing you can be sure of is that we will always endeavour to be transparent about what it entails and how it works. Because it turns out that, when it comes to the retail business, trust has everything to do with it. Find out more about us, here.