The Very Group

The Very Group generates £2.13 billion in annual sales as one of the UK’s largest multi-brand digital retailers. Their ambition is simple and audacious: become a world-class leader in online retail. As a digital department store spanning fashion to electronics across multiple brands, they know that extraordinary customer experiences drive everything.

But customer touchpoints were multiplying rapidly, from desktops and tablets to smart TVs and voice assistants. Their existing content systems created barriers to their vision. The Very Group knew that shaping the future of retail demanded a new foundation for content, built for unlimited scale.

The Very Group partnered with Amplience and achieved:

• Over one million digital assets managed through Amplience DAM and Dynamic Media

• Full creative control of content through a composable CMS

• Agentic orchestration of commerce content with Amplience Workforce: full Fashion catalogue covered with quality, GEO-optimized AI-generated copy within 36 hours of launching Workforce, up from around six months with their previous AI vendor

The challenge: scaling content for a world-class experience

The Very Group faced the complexity that comes with extraordinary ambition. They launch around 150,000 products a year across 900 suppliers, with over 200 people involved in collecting the data behind each one. Their assortment had grown far faster than their copy team, so the time available per product line kept shrinking, and copy quality was only ever as good as the raw data collected upstream. The result was gaps in coverage, patchy data quality, and a frequent fallback to supplier-provided copy, which filled the page but didn’t give search engines, or increasingly, LLMs, the unique content they reward.

The real challenge wasn’t just storing assets; it was delivering the right content to the right customer at precisely the right moment. With new devices and channels emerging constantly, they needed to manage content centrally while deploying it intelligently across every touchpoint where their customers engage.

The solution: a unified content foundation

The Very Group transformed their content foundation with Amplience, moving beyond their legacy Scene 7 solution. The partnership began with a focus on asset management at scale, using Amplience DAM, our powerful digital asset management platform, to manage their library of over one million assets. This was complemented by Dynamic Media, a capability within Amplience DAM, which optimized that rich content for high-performance delivery on any device.

This partnership quickly evolved into something more ambitious. Driven by a shared vision for innovation, the solution grew to include the full content operations platform, with Amplience CMS, our enterprise headless content management system, giving them the unique capability to tag each piece of content with specific information, like audience or campaign, and deliver truly personalized experiences at scale.

The Very Group had already experimented with AI-generated copy two years earlier, with a different vendor, and it had done its job on coverage, taking them from around 40% of live lines with copy to close to 100%. But three things pushed them to look again: that solution could only ever reach Fashion, and took six months to get there; the quality bar had risen sharply as customers started using LLMs to find products and Google rewarded richer content; and it was a black box, with no room to keep pace with newer models or iterate the output.

Amplience Workforce, the agentic orchestration layer for commerce content, was brought in to close that gap. Rather than treat it as a point solution, The Very Group worked with Amplience to document every consideration their human copywriters apply, SEO rules, brand guidelines, legal requirements, tone of voice, all of it, across a 50-page rules document that became the foundation for the AI prompt. The result is a Workforce flow with over 80 steps, linked to nine tables within Amplience CMS, so the rules can evolve without ever rebuilding the flow itself. Before launch, the team built and tested an objective quality-scoring model of their own, scored out of 50, so they could prove genuine improvement with explainability, not just a subjective “this looks better,“ and give stakeholders something concrete to hold onto while traffic and conversion data caught up.

Now they can create, optimize, and deliver sophisticated content that resonates with each customer, transforming how people discover and engage with their brands across every channel.

The results: a future-ready platform and a strategic partnership

The Very Group now has a future-proof, agile content operation that accelerates their ambitions: the architecture to deliver personalized, contextual content across any existing or future channel, the delivery mechanism to do that at scale, and the orchestration layer to automate everything boring and accelerate everything important in commerce content.

The Workforce results speak for themselves. Within 36 hours of launch, every product in Fashion had complete, on-brand, GEO-optimized product copy, compared with six months to reach the same coverage with their previous AI vendor, and the scale-up wasn’t even Amplience pushing it: it was The Very Group’s own copywriters asking for more lines once they saw the output. Copy quality, scored against The Very Group’s own model, rose from an average of 14–18 out of 50 to 38–41, straight out of the box before a human editor even touches it. Review time per line is now down to around two minutes, a target the team hit even in week one, and the platform runs at a scale of up to 2,600 products an hour.

The Very Group is now rolling Workforce out division by division on a six-week sprint model. Beyond product copy, they’re already exploring new use cases for the same engine, including automating image creation and using AI to catch errors or outdated claims in content that’s already live.

Beyond the powerful technical capabilities, the most profound outcome was the evolution of the partnership itself. We evolved from technology provider to strategic collaborator, united by shared values and an uncompromising focus on excellence.