Mike: Hello, happy new year, I’m Mike Bracken and I want to wish every member of the Co-op, particularly the digital team, happy new year. Hope you had a restful holiday and for those of you who have worked through, unlike myself, visited store and lent a hand, thank you for doing that, and have had a great Christmas.
It’s a brief update this week. But I want to just mention a couple of really important things.
Firstly, we moved into The Federation, a building where we’re building out our digital centre working with partners, SMEs and other organisations in the digital economy and already this year we’ve increased our footprint.
We received new leases for the other 4 floors of that building yesterday and I’m glad to say that that means we’ll be expanding our footprint right through the building and into the centre of Manchester further in 2017.
We also had a great opportunity to show our executive around, and show them all the products and services that we’ve been working on for the last year, and they were thrilled with that, and I can already say that we’re gonna have a lot more demand coming our way. So already a great start to the year.
Probably the biggest thing that happened last week as we moved into the new year, was that we passed the 4 million membership mark. Now, membership is central to everything that we’re about, and it was only on September 21st last year, that we reissued our membership scheme. We’ve added just under 400,000 new members since then and as I say, we now got over 4 million active members of the Co-op. So it shows that people are coming back to the Co-op and joining in substantial numbers.
So that’s great news, and do keep your eyes on those numbers which are published live and they’re updated at the end of every week.
This week ahead, well, we’ll welcome Richard, our CEO, to our all digital meeting on Wednesday afternoon in 1 Angel Square and then we’ll spend more time with our businesses through the end of the week.
I’ll give you an update on that next week, but again, just to say happy new year.
Mike Bracken
Chief Digital Officer
Co-op Digital has emerged as probably the most desirable organisation to work for in the North West. Everyone should be congratulated on the remarkable transformations, both to the brand and its products. (I admit to checking the vacancy lists every day in the hope of spotting an opening.) Congratulations to everyone involved.
Mike I hear that things are going good in Coop digital, and I am very pleased…. can you please explain the reasoning behind the move to Federation house? In my mind, the redeeming feature of Angel square was everyone Coop being under one roof and being able to communicate and feel ‘the same’.
Why do digital need to be on their own?