Global Digital Team Update

As Dennis discussed in his recent town hall, we face difficult choices that have become necessary to deliver essential cost savings during this period of reduced revenues. These are driven by high inflation, the war in Ukraine, supply chain shortages and the knock-on effect on consumer confidence.

These problems are not unique to Colart, and many businesses are having to make similar decisions. Colart remains a solid and resilient business, built around market-leading brands backed by strong manufacturing, sales, distribution, and support teams. Challenging though they are, the changes we are making today helps to ensure we can adapt and flourish in challenging times.

It is with sadness I must announce that due to the prevailing financial conditions, we have had to make Louise Booth redundant and restructure the global digital team. In addition to Louise's role, we will not replace the four additional roles that are currently or soon to be vacant. Louise will leave Colart on Friday 15th July. For a transitionary period running until the end of August, the team will report directly to me as we embed the digital team into their new homes with the suitable structures and cross-functional ways of working to continue the success of consumer digital within Colart. After that, Gail and I will support the new reporting lines to ensure digital strategy, governance, and specialism continuity.

Louise joined Colart in 2016, growing what at the time was a fledgeling capability into a highly professionalised team that has massively driven forward digital marketing capabilities providing Colart with a strong competitive advantage in how we reach and engage our consumers. Built on these strong foundations, we have grown from a basic multi-channel capability to a fully integrated communications approach based on data-driven decisions. The different digital channels work together to deliver best-in-class, personalised consumer brand experiences.

Over the last five years, this journey has seen our brand's social media channels and content strategies maturing. Our fan base has grown by over 50%, and we introduced an advanced and comprehensive consumer lifecycle marketing approach which now comprises over 540k consumers in our database, built up digital analytics and insights, and developed our consumer care experience.

When Louise started, we had multiple website technologies, run at high cost by third parties, with little commonality in approach. Over recent years, Louise and her team have successfully relaunched all our websites together with the B2B Portal, all based around a common platform, ensuring greater efficiency in building and growing our websites whilst also delivering significant cost savings.

A key focus for her has been to ensure successful digital campaigns, marketing activations and communications to our brand's consumers across the entire digital ecosystem in a connected way. To achieve this, she has grown new areas of expertise, launched innovative new digital marketing strategies and supported our brand's growth in the digital world.

Throughout, Louise and her team have closely integrated with brands and local markets working cross-functionally with all parts of the business to consistently deliver on our aims and objectives. Her professionalism, passion, unwavering commitment to the business and driving our digital agenda forward will be hugely missed.
With this decision, we will be reorganising the digital team to ensure it is optimised to continue to drive our digital strategy and platforms and deliver the specialist skills to engage with our consumers.

I want to end with a few words from Louise.

"It's been an enormous privilege to spend the last 5+ years with so many talented and passionate colleagues at Colart. I feel very fortunate to have worked with the amazing digital team and together develop our wonderful brands' global digital presence. I truly hope Colart continues its digital journey and I look forward to seeing what the future brings. A warm thank you to everyone around the business who has supported me and the team over the years - it's been a wonderful experience and I will miss you all. Please stay in touch, all the best Louise"

Please join us in thanking Louise for her hard work and wishing her every success in the future.

Toby Russell,
Chief Digital, Development and Disruption Officer