What if scaling your eCommerce business isn't about better ads, but about understanding why customers buy from you? Louise Doyle shares how she built Needi from a struggling DTC gifting site into a £2 million corporate gifting business by refusing to treat gifts like commodities.
Louise and her co-founder Steph launched Needi in 2021 with ambitious DTC plans, only to discover the brutal reality of customer acquisition costs and overwhelming competition. Within months, they pivoted to B2B corporate gifting, where they found desperate demand for their psychology-driven approach. By asking why clients want to give gifts rather than just what they need, Needi scaled from £500k to £2 million in revenue whilst supporting local independent businesses. Lou shares the unconventional journey of building a concierge service that's now projecting £5 million revenue, all whilst balancing motherhood and creating a team where over half the employees are mums.
Key Point Timestamps:
05:10 - The DTC Reality: Why Direct-to-Consumer Failed
10:15 - The Pivot: Finding Corporate Clients Who Were Desperate
16:25 - Understanding the Psychology Behind Every Gift
24:30 - Your Client Isn't Actually Your Client
32:05 - The Amazon Problem: Connection Beats Efficiency
37:14 - Scaling from £500k to £5M Projected Revenue
45:07 - The Mum Factor: Building a Family-First Business
Lou and Steph thought they had it figured out. The research was solid: one in five gifts end up in landfill, 80% of people hate finding the right gift, and everyone's received a terrible present. Simple problem, simple solution—build a website, run Facebook ads, watch orders roll in.
"We went into it fairly naively," Lou admits. "We thought everybody is rubbish at gifting and doesn't enjoy it. So we'll set up an e-comm site where we make people really good at gifting. And it was really hard."
The cost of customer acquisition was brutal. But worse, they faced double jeopardy: they needed to attract customers whilst simultaneously onboarding local independent businesses to supply the gifts. Chicken and egg doesn't begin to describe the challenge.
Rather than flogging a dead horse, Lou and Steph started LinkedIn outreach to corporate clients. They walked into head offices with suitcases filled with gifts. The response was immediate and overwhelming.
"These people were literally saying, my gosh, where have you been? We need what you're doing," Lou explains. Executive assistants and marketing managers were being dumped with last-minute orders for thousands of gifts with tight budgets and no time to find quality suppliers.
The word "concierge" isn't accidental in Needi's description. It represents doing absolutely everything for clients whilst they figured out how to scale the service.
Lou and Steph didn't just pivot to B2B—they transformed how they approached gifting entirely. They spent hundreds of hours studying the psychology of gifting, working with a professor of altruism, researching relationship dynamics.
"A gift is cementing what your relationship means to that person," Lou says. "You would not buy somebody a gift if you weren't looking for a particular connection."
This insight changed everything. Instead of asking what gift clients wanted or how many they needed, Needi asks why. Why are you buying this gift? What relationship are you trying to cement? What message are you trying to send?
When a company orders 10,000 gifts for employees, the purchaser is the corporate decision-maker. But the person who determines whether that company orders again next year? That's the employee who receives the
