The Very Group

Digital retail company behind Very and Littlewoods, serving 4.4m UK and Ireland customers across fashion, homeware and technology, with a flexible payments platform and in-house AI work.

The Very Group is a digital retail company serving 4.4 million customers in the UK and Ireland through its flagship brands Very and Littlewoods. Products are offered across fashion, homeware, toys, beauty and technology, supported by Very Pay, a flexible payments platform. The company employs over 1,000 people and is headquartered in Liverpool, with further sites in the East Midlands, London, Dublin, Wrexham and Bolton.

The business traces its roots to catalogue origins in the 1860s and completed its transition to a pureplay digital retailer in 2015. Littlewoods dates from the launch of Littlewoods Home Shopping in Liverpool in the 1930s. More recently, the group has embarked on its largest digital transformation to date, re-platforming its technology systems and applying AI capabilities across the business.

Technical work spans e-commerce platform engineering, payments technology, AI and machine learning, consumer data analytics and personalisation, and generative AI. In 2024 the company launched VeryGPT, an internal generative AI tool, as part of this programme. The team draws on one of the richest consumer data sets in the UK to build personalised shopping experiences. The company states its purpose as helping families get more out of life.