Remarkable Commerce Turns 25 Years Old
We are excited to announce that 2024 marks our 25th birthday! Read about our history and what our future looks like as we continue our mission of supporting high-growth retailers.
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We are excited to announce that 2024 marks our 25th birthday! It's been quite a journey from a single web designer working from his kitchen with a handful of small clients, to becoming the UK’s leading bespoke eCommerce platform and agency, with over 60 brands and more than 80 employees.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our wonderful staff (past and present), our fantastic network of partners (without whom we would not be able to offer all the services that we do) and lastly our clients who form part of a tight-knit family that we love.
It's fair to say that over the years we have had our ups and downs, like any business and it has taken time to evolve into the success that we see today. We are proud to be one of the only independently-owned companies in our industry that still offer our own proprietary software driven by supporting agency services. This unique offering has helped us to establish ourselves as one of the leading bespoke eCommerce platform providers, relied on by many well known brands.
The story of where we came from:
In 1999, our founder and CEO, Mark West, made the decision to leave his role as Head of IT at a US mining machinery firm to establish his own web design business. Shortly after its inception, he brought onboard a .NET developer, and the company began crafting internet-focused software solutions to tackle intricate business challenges.
In the early 2000’s, there were very few web technology businesses in the UK and many traditional businesses still relied on offline software and technology that was quickly outdating itself. This inspired Mark to begin designing and developing software solutions that were able to scale and grow with a business, instead of restrict them.
Originally, the business was known as ‘Eventure’ and developed software for a variety of enterprises, including an e-learning platform for the NHS and bespoke systems for complex manufacturers. This was before the rise of eCommerce as a significant industry.
Back in 2002, when the company secured its first eCommerce project, online shopping was a new concept - Amazon.com had only launched a few years previously. Many eCommerce solutions, such as the popular Actinic Catalog of the time, utilised web forms to create a basic basket and checkout process on-the-fly. Eventure was among the first UK companies to develop a database-driven eCommerce platform, leveraging a new technology from Microsoft called .NET, along with Microsoft SQL database technology.
Fast forward to today, 25 years later and now called Remarkable Commerce, we still have the same highly successful methodology behind our technologies, although our software has evolved considerably.
Key milestones over the last 25 years:
1999 - Established by Mark West (Founder & CEO) as Eventure Internet Limited, originally based from Mark’s home.
2001 - Move into our first offices in Pleasley Vale Mills, Mansfield and Steve Cart (Operations Director) joins.
2002 - Developed our first web eCommerce site for a golf retailer called The Fairway and we start to realise the potential of offering advanced eCommerce capabilities to retailers. Andrew Beresford (Systems Director) joins and helps to develop our first e-learning platform for the NHS.
2003 - Ben Brown (Technical Director) joins and we begin to grow the development team, we also start to offer our clients digital marketing services along with design services.
2006 - Win Absolute Snow (Formerly known as Bargain Boards) as a client who we still work with today, one of our most long-standing success stories.
2007 - As the team grows to 12 we move to larger offices into the centre of Nottingham’s Lace Market district.
2008 - Yours Clothing joins us as a client, then a successful bricks-and-mortar retailer with 38 stores across Anglia, but only taking £300,000 via eCommerce. Today Yours Clothing Group are Remarkable’s largest client with a turnover that will exceed £300m online in 2024.
2009 - Successfully launched our first International website based in the U.S.A for designer Leon Max - Max Studio.
2010 - We create our first stand-alone Warehouse Management System (WMS) for Yours Clothing. Today our WMS platforms process over 10 million orders per year, over 20 million individual items for our clients.
2012 - We are on the march again due to growth, this time to a brand new office at H2O on Sherwood Park in Annesley.
2013 - Rebrand to Remarkable and secure Moss Bros PLC as a client - cementing us as a top choice for many leading high street fashion brands.
2015 - We become the first company to integrate Amazon Pay for Moss, and we migrate renowned menswear brand Ben Sherman to Remarkable, too.
2016 - Roman Originals comes onboard and Remarkable helps to propel them from £6 million to over £60m within just 4 years. We also this year become an official Google Premier Partner.
2019 - We purchase our own building as a permanent home for the business - Newstead House at Sherwood Park, just round the corner from our old office at H2O. We now have a cafeteria, gym, tons of parking and also lots of space to grow including several meeting rooms (which are still always booked up!).
2020 - We win retail/eCommerce development team of the year at the Northern development Awards and Covid hits, all staff begin working from home. A challenging time for all businesses and Remarkable was no exception. Each of our clients immediately found that their trading was heavily impacted by the pandemic, so we introduced support packages to help them until trade returned to normal levels.
2022 - We achieve the prestigious Cyber Essentials accreditation as part of our ongoing commitment to cyber security.
2023 - Integrate OpenAI into our platform, as we begin to evolve into an AI world.
2024 - Win SGS Engineering, a well-established and renowned power tools retailer - which a smooth migration from Magento to our eCommerce platform and WMS, has enabled immediate revenue growth.
Our core values remain true through the 25 years:
Community – Remarkable is a vibrant community inside the workplace and out. Many staff are friends outside of the business and our informal, friendly culture means that we have a great internal community.
Leadership – Strong and friendly leaders with a clear and shared vision to evolve the business, maintaining the culture and values that have got us here.
Support – We are proud to have a friendly team who will help and support each other, in work and their personal lives. Staff are actively supported in their day-to-day roles by the management team.
Diversity – We are committed to ensuring that diversity, equality, and inclusion are deeply embedded in all we do - from hiring and career development, to our culture.
Health & well-being – We significantly invest in supporting staff health and well-being, including access to an on-site gym, private medical insurance, mental health support service and more.
Innovation – Our industry is constantly innovating and a key focus across the business has always been to keep an eye on the future and look for ways to adapt and evolve our technologies.
Flexibility – Our staff have flexibility around their work methodologies and their ways of working, enabling them to write amazing code, design incredible customer experiences, craft brilliant marketing strategies and build awesome client relationships.
Looking ahead:
Our continued success is a true reflection of the hard work of our employees and partners, working tirelessly to improve our software and to help our clients grow and succeed. Our business has always had an independent spirit that has community at its heart, which we will always protect.
In the coming years, our eCommerce platform and service offering will continue to evolve, as we begin our next phase of growth. There are three main focuses we have for the coming years:
Becoming more agnostic to the wider eCommerce landscape. This involves our platform being used in new and alternative ways, such as: solely using single modules from our platform, or integrating headlessly with different frontend technologies.
Deepening our expertise with API-based architecture. With the recent explosion of PaaS software and no/low-code solutions, our software integrations will become more reliant and expandable.
Expanding our agency service offering. We will look to further differentiate our agency services, by creating new service types, fairer commercial models and promoting our employees from within.
Here’s to the next 25 years of Remarkable!
