Claire Harper

Why organisations work with Claire Harper

• She has run senior marketing inside three of the UK’s most scrutinised retail brands, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, and Argos, during periods of leadership change and digital pivot.
• She has also done the founder’s job: built IndiaCoco from a dining-table operation to an award-winning multi-channel children’s brand, with the cash-flow scars to prove it.
• She translates board-level brand strategy into the operating decisions marketing teams actually face the next morning, on pricing, range, channel mix, and acquisition.
• Her current commercial leadership at London Pulse Netball gives her live material on building a consumer brand in women’s sport, a sector under significant commercial expansion.
• One credential that travels: first female board director at Mamas & Papas, brought in to scale the brand domestically and internationally.

Biography highlights

• First Head of Customer Acquisition and PR at Ocado, later Head of Marketing during the company’s grocery delivery breakthrough.
• Head of Online Marketing at Sainsbury’s during Justin King’s turnaround programme.
• First female board director at Mamas & Papas, with international brand remit.
• Founder of IndiaCoco childrenswear; winner of Theo Paphitis Small Business Sunday and Jacqueline Gold WOW awards.
• Non-Executive Director at Blue Diamond Garden Centres; former Marketing Director at Frosts Garden Centres.
• Currently leading commercial and marketing for London Pulse Netball in the Netball Super League.

Biography

Ocado was a niche online grocer when Claire Harper joined at 26 as its first Head of Customer Acquisition and PR. By the time she had been promoted to Head of Marketing, the company was redrawing what UK households expected from a weekly shop. That early bet on customer behaviour, before the category had a name, set the pattern for the rest of her career.

She moved into Sainsbury’s as Head of Online Marketing during Justin King’s “Make Sainsbury’s Great Again” turnaround, and into Argos during a hostile-takeover period that forced the brand to confront multi-channel reality. Both roles asked the same question: how do you keep a customer proposition coherent while the leadership and operating model are being rebuilt around it.

At Mamas & Papas she became the first female board director, charged with scaling the brand internationally. She then founded IndiaCoco, a British childrenswear brand that grew from her dining room into a multi-channel business and picked up backing from Theo Paphitis and Jacqueline Gold. The founder years gave her the commercial discipline that corporate marketing budgets rarely teach.

She now sits on the board at Blue Diamond Garden Centres and leads commercial and marketing for London Pulse Netball, one of the fastest-growing franchises in the Netball Super League. Audiences get a speaker who has run the brand from inside the boardroom and from inside a single-founder profit and loss, in retail categories where the customer is the only honest scoreboard.

Key speaking topics

• Customer-led brand strategy in multi-channel retail
• Marketing leadership through restructure and ownership change
• Building consumer brands from founder stage to scale
• Commercial growth in women’s sport
• Non-executive contribution to consumer businesses
• Women’s leadership in retail and consumer industries

Ideal for

• CMOs, brand directors, and customer experience leaders in consumer retail
• Boards and NEDs at consumer-facing businesses navigating ownership or strategic change
• Founders and scale-up leadership teams in DTC and consumer categories
• Sponsors, commercial partners, and leadership in women’s sport

Audience outcomes

• A working view of how customer insight should sit at the centre of commercial decisions, not at the end of them
• Practical reference points from inside Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Argos, and Mamas & Papas during periods of strategic change
• A clearer sense of where founder discipline and corporate scale-marketing diverge, and what each can borrow from the other
• A current read on the commercial mechanics of women’s sport as a consumer category