Meriel Neighbour

To kick off our new series, The Transformation Tapes, we sat down with a friend of Heur who knows exactly how to navigate those shifts: Meriel Neighbour, former Global Transformation Director at River Island.

Catching up with Meriel on a sunny afternoon, complete with a mid-interview cameo from her dog returning from a walk, we dug straight into the realities of ripping out old tech and steering a massive retail ship. Meriel is no stranger to managing operational complexity. She has led digital overhauls for iconic British brands like Clarks, Selfridges, and Ted Baker.

Here is our conversation on scaling, surviving the friction of change, and where the smart money is moving next.

The true commercial cost of legacy systems

When you are protecting a bottom line, legacy systems often feel like a safe harbour. They are fully depreciated, so the business is only paying support costs. I asked Meriel how she builds the commercial case to unplug them and disrupt a global brand.

Her answer went straight to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and platform dependency.

"Legacy is often viewed as low cost because of that depreciation," Meriel explained. "When you introduce new technology, your initial TCO looks high because you have to fully depreciate the new products to compare them apples-to-apples. But once you get past that, modern technology has full elasticity. It flexes with your business demand."

For an operator, that elasticity is cashflow resilience. With legacy tech, you pay a flat rate regardless of consumption or market conditions. Over time, the scalable nature of a composable stack makes your TCO infinitely better.

De-risking a composable architecture

We both agreed that composable commerce is the gold standard for agility, but it introduces its own operational complexity. I asked Meriel for her non-negotiable rules to avoid a replatforming disaster.

"I always sound like a broken record here, but integration, integration, integration," she laughed. "If you don't integrate the new tools effectively, you will never get the right outcome. Second is real-time events. You need real-time inventory and sales data to service customers instantly. Finally, keep it simple. Strip out the complexity of your legacy stack."

Simplification is rarely just a backend win, it is a direct driver of CAC efficiency. Meriel recalled her time at Clarks, where her team reduced a bloated seven-click checkout process down to a single click. From a commercial standpoint, removing those friction points immediately drives conversion, ensuring the money you spent acquiring that traffic actually hits the bottom line.

What actually breaks when mid-market brands scale

When brands try to scale up to the enterprise level, the tech stack is rarely the first thing to snap. I asked Meriel what usually gives way first.

"Integrations and relationships," she noted. "If a product doesn't arrive online, or if real-time inventory fails and a customer buys something out of stock, it’s an integration somewhere that's broken. But the bigger issue is relationships. You have to get rid of the silos."

This brought us to one of the most expensive lessons a leadership team can learn. Meriel recalled an instance where a C-suite executive literally laughed at her request to fund a dedicated 'Business Change' team. They assumed the new tech would simply dictate new processes to the staff.

As operators making hiring and CapEx decisions, this is a massive red flag. If you force tech on people without managing the mindset shift, they will resist. If you skip investing in business change and the humans using the platform, you are essentially throwing your transformation budget in the bin.

Moving beyond vanity metrics

Most e-commerce brands obsess over specific data points - conversion, abandoned baskets, and AOV. But at a true enterprise level, Meriel argues the business needs to obsess over Total Lifetime Value (LTV).

"For the new generation coming forward, that means playing into your business values—your sustainability, your DEI policy," she said. "If you can demonstrate those values seamlessly across every touchpoint, you get a customer for life."

They become an advocate. Commercially, creating a lifelong advocate beats any expensive, margin-eroding loyalty gimmick on the market.

Busting industry myths and mitigating inventory risk

The conference circuit is full of buzzwords, so I asked Meriel what conventional e-commerce wisdom she views as terrible advice right now.

Her first target was the FOMO around AI. The concept that if you don't adopt AI today you'll be left behind is, in her words, rubbish. She advises adopting it where it brings actual operational efficiency, rather than diving in blindly and bloating your tech stack.

Her second target was the 'Unified Customer Journey'. Software vendors love to sell this, but they usually only focus on the narrow path to purchase.

"A true unified journey encompasses the entire post-purchase experience and frictionless returns," Meriel pointed out. Vendors often ignore returns because it is harder to prove immediate ROI. But as anyone managing a P&L knows, returns are a massive source of inventory risk and margin bleed. Fixing that post-purchase flow is critical.

Instead of panicking about AI taking over websites, Meriel predicts voice commerce is the immediate next frontier. Speaking is faster than typing. Whether it's searching for products or dealing with customer service, voice will reduce friction massively. I completely agreed, I recently switched to a nutrition app that allows voice logging, and the lack of friction keeps me heavily engaged in their ecosystem.

"It's coming," Meriel agreed. "It's taken a long time to get here, but it's coming."

Quick-fire operator signals

To wrap up the e-commerce side of things, I threw some rapid-fire commercial scenarios at Meriel.

When asked what two pieces of tech she absolutely could not run day-to-day without, she didn't hesitate: a Product Information Management (PIM) system and real-time inventory software. You never want to disappoint a customer who thinks they've successfully purchased something. She also threw in a bonus: true personalisation that understands a customer's habits, rather than just sending blanket promotional emails.

If she had to start a brand tomorrow with only £10,000, she would allocate the first £5,000 straight to a rock-solid e-commerce platform. You can handle backend financials manually to protect cashflow in the early days, but a central platform connects your entire ecosystem.

Finally, I asked who she looks to for signals in the market. She pointed to David Clark, currently Chief Customer Officer at Frasers and soon to join M&S as Director of Online and Omnichannel.

"The question I would ask him is: When you're competing for every available pound in retail, what sets one customer experience apart from another?" Meriel said, predicting his answer would come right back to deeply knowing your customer personas. (I promised her I'd do my best to get him on the series to ask him just that).

Leading a transformation at a giant like River Island takes serious resilience. Outside of the tech and the data, Meriel's biggest takeaway is that radical collaboration is the only way forward. You have to break down the silos, build transparent relationships, and operate as one team.

If we all take away one thing, in Meriel’s words it’s integration, integration, integration!