As General manager of customer and online at Officeworks, Jessica Richmond combines marketing instinct with commercial rigour, drawing on data, empathy and experimentation to drive measurable results across channels.

Richmond brings what she calls a “builder’s mindset” to her work – constantly learning, iterating, and taking bold bets when the opportunity arises. “To change the logo. Not as simple as it sounds,” she recalls as one of her most daring moves as CMO.

Richard also champions an agile, insight-led approach, where marketers must “quickly test, learn and evolve based on results.”

Effective marketing strategy

When Richmond took on the challenge of evolving the brand's perception beyond “just stationery,” she knew it would require more than a new campaign, it meant a new customer story.

“Historically seen as an office supplies destination, Officeworks served businesses, parent and student shoppers. With a refocus in strategy, Officeworks outlined a new vision: ‘Inspiring Australians to work, learn, create and connect’. Extending the range beyond office and school stationery to areas such as art and craft supplies, early learning, education and gaming required a more inspirational approach than just catalogues and product and price advertising, and more product integration than the typical ‘big brand ad,’” she explains.

Richmond got to work, launching Noteworthy, an online content hub featuring articles, how-to guides and engaging videos and reviews featuring Officeworks ranges across art, crafts, education, office and study furniture, gaming and technology.

Content was shared not just on the website, but across social channels and integrated within emails. The launch of the first Officeworks magazine quickly followed, delivered quarterly and sharing stories, inspiration and offers across work, learn, create and connect pillars. The magazine now reaches over 4.6 million readers quarterly. Notably, over half of readers went on to purchase a product they discovered in its pages.

“Content aimed to stretch customer perception of what Officeworks provided, showcasing ranges across stationery, art, education, technology and furniture, as well as new services such as Same Day Printing and Geek2U,” explains Richmond. “Beyond just Officeworks branded ranges, these platforms also became a communications channel for suppliers, with supplier funding driving strong advertising revenue to support Officeworks’ retail media income ambitions.”

With growing retail media ambitions, these platforms doubled as revenue channels, delivering measurable impact and reshaping customer perception. Market Mix Modelling (MMM) confirmed the magazine and content ecosystem now significantly contribute to sales – proof that marketing isn’t just storytelling; it’s commercial strategy.

Yet Officeworks’ marketing strategy was still largely anchored in traditional channels such as catalogues and TV. Digital marketing efforts were limited and focused mostly on search and an email program that reached fewer than half a million known and marketable customers. With suppliers and merchandise teams more comfortable investing in familiar formats, there was limited appetite for prioritising digital media or investing in marketing technology.

Notably, Richmond recognised Officeworks faced three core challenges: scale, capability, and belief – so she set out to change the game.

“First, we scaled customer data and marketing consent, optimising for greater marketable customers through online journeys and implementing Flybuys to capture in-store customers. From a base of less than 1 per cent, in FY25 almost half of Officeworks’ sales are from known customers,” she says.

Secondly, it was about capability. “We built the right tech stack, including a scalable data and analytics platform and self-serve audience tool and appointed and upskilled a capable digital marketing team.”

Third came belief. To gain traction internally, Richmond knew she had to speak the language of commercial benefit. Guided by the mantra ‘Show me the money’, the team launched a data-driven growth program, focusing on high-impact use cases across customer groups and product categories. Results were rigorously measured, aggregated, and shared with internal stakeholders to build confidence and momentum.

“The best creative comes from great insight,” Richmond says, highlighting her approach to insight-led innovation.

Her own leadership style – "always learning something" – has permeated the marketing function, helping to shift perceptions of marketing from the colouring-in department to a data-empowered growth engine.

“In 2025, Officeworks has a world-class digital marketing and personalisation program, with over half of marketing spend invested in digital; with both owned and paid channels contributing significantly to media driven sales. Now highly valued by internal finance and merchandise teams, suppliers are also seeking Officeworks’ rich data asset and personalisation capabilities as part of retail media to grow their own brands and businesses,” says Richmond. 

What was once met with scepticism is now embraced: internal teams see the commercial value, and suppliers are increasingly looking to Officeworks’ data and personalisation tools to grow their own brands through retail media partnerships.

Business influence

One of Richmond's most transformative achievements has been leading the development and enterprise-wide adoption of the Officeworks Data and Analytics Platform (ODAP).

“Customer was a named priority for Officeworks, but customer data was lacking, as was the ability to confidently and securely store, manage, analyse this data, and to use it at scale. So we embarked on the build of Officeworks’ Data and Analytics Platform, aiming to provide a secure and scalable repository to support customer insights and personalisation use cases,” she continues.

While ODAP began as a customer data platform, Richmond expanded its remit significantly under her stewardship. It’s now evolved into an enterprise-wide asset, ingesting and integrating data across key domains including product, finance, people, B2B, inventory and store operations.

“While we had built a team of skilled engineers and scientists and new systems capability to support data across the organisation, we lacked those able to connect business challenges to analytics products and solutions. We still needed data specialists to maintain and develop what we’d built; but also needed to invest in additional resources to develop and deliver the value cases required,” Richmond says.

The operating model of the team then transitioned to a hub-and-spoke model, with Officeworks building a dedicated offshore ‘hub’ team of data engineers and developers, and an onshore team of analytics ‘spokes,’ each reporting into different functions.

“The introduction of a new hub-and-spoke operating model for the insights team has helped to unlock the benefits of these insights across the enterprise. With analytics leads hired to support merchandise, B2B, inventory, finance and customer teams, we have a team dedicated to ensuring each can leverage the rich data across each domain; as well as collaborate across the enterprise,” she says.

Examples of impact include the automation of hundreds of previously manual reports – covering areas like loss prevention, supplier income and store earnings – now made available through self-serve dashboards.

Audience profiling has become a powerful tool for suppliers, helping to inform strategic decisions and improve the effectiveness of personalised marketing campaigns. Insights from ODAP also support smarter merchandising and ranging decisions by identifying products that drive customer loyalty and lifetime value. In store operations, data-led workforce planning models have improved team availability by ensuring the right staff are on the floor at the right time.

Thanks to Richmond’s leadership, ODAP has shifted from being a siloed initiative to a foundational capability, driving measurable commercial impact and embedding a culture of insight-led decision-making across the organisation.

Data-driven decision making

Richmond acknowledges the best creative starts with great insight – because data doesn't kill creativity, it fuels it. In this world of data, a key achievement of Richmond’s leadership has been transforming how the organisation measures and acts on customer experience. While customer experience had long been a named business priority, Officeworks lacked a robust, actionable metric.

“An Officeworks-created metric ‘Great Service Score’ [GSS], captured limited feedback, didn’t represent current channel mix and couldn’t be benchmarked against market. Manually classified GSS feedback was collated monthly, did not provide actionable insights, and internal engagement with the program was limited,” she says.

Under Richmond’s guidance, the business made a foundational shift. First, she led the adoption of Net Promoter Score (NPS), championing education efforts across the business to ensure teams understood the value of NPS and building familiarity by reporting both new and existing measures in parallel. She also focused on improving feedback volume across underrepresented channels.

Richmond then implemented the Medallia platform to scale this vision, enabling real-time collection, classification and analysis of customer feedback through machine learning and AI. This provided tailored, actionable insights for each business unit and dramatically enhanced the speed and specificity of CX decision-making.

“Thirdly, we needed the organisation to value customer experience as highly as they did their sales performance. A cross-functional forum commenced, with owners designated for each customer channel: Stores [by state], online, delivery, and click & collect; sharing actionable insights, and performing collective customer problem-solving to achieve targets,” she explains.

“Each channel target was built into individual and team scorecards, with the every-channel target forming an incentive KPI for the leadership team. With Stores the biggest source of feedback, every store, region and state created a unique NPS improvement plan based on their individual performance; with frequent reports and even customer video messages shared to engage and drive action.”

As of FY25, Officeworks’ every-channel NPS is nearing the ‘World-Class’ benchmark. Strong year-on-year improvements have been seen across all touchpoints – Stores, Click & Collect, Delivery, and the website – with every channel on track to exceed their NPS goals.

Thanks to Richmond’s strategic leadership, customer experience measurement has moved from an afterthought to a business-wide imperative, deeply integrated into Officeworks’ operational and performance culture.

Commercial delivery

With a firm eye on commercial leadership, Officeworks through Richmond has significantly elevated the scale and sophistication of its supplier marketing and retail media program, unlocking new revenue streams and delivering tangible business outcomes.

“Officeworks has historically had a strong supplier marketing program, heavily focused on catalogues and television. This year saw increased ambition,” she says. “The exponential growth of Officeworks’ customer data and known customer base provided opportunity. While Officeworks had established its own digital, email and lifecycle programs, there was further upside in suppliers leveraging this capability.”

In addition, Officeworks’ store traffic has grown, providing opportunities for suppliers to reach customers on their path to purchase.

Historically anchored in catalogues and television, Officeworks' supplier marketing program had a strong foundation, but Richmond saw untapped potential in growing digital capabilities and the rapidly expanding known customer base. So she spearheaded a more ambitious commercial strategy. With over half of Officeworks' sales now coming from known customers, the business was uniquely positioned to offer suppliers targeted, insight-rich marketing opportunities. This kickstarted a raft of initiatives to change how suppliers engage with Officeworks’ customers, both digitally and in-store.

“A number of major initiatives aimed to capitalise on this opportunity: Providing digital circulars, improving reach and reducing cost. Secondly, ensuring email and digital programs were appropriately valued based on their reach and strength of targeting; with additional insights and audiences offered such as customer profiling, buying behaviours, marketing effectiveness and brand performance,” Richmond says. “And thirdly, implementing digital screens in all stores to start to capitalise on the increasing traffic and reach provided in the physical retail environment.”

The impact of these commercial enhancements has been substantial. Officeworks has already seen significant year-on-year growth in both retail media revenue and margin. While Richmond notes the business is still in the early stages of its retail media journey, the momentum is undeniable.

“FY26 will be another strong year with even bigger things in the works to drive growth for supplier brands and Officeworks.”

People leadership

Richmond’s people leadership has been central to Officeworks’ transformation, as she guided the marketing team through a significant evolution, expanding its scope to include ecommerce, customer experience, data, analytics, and insights.

Richmond’s leadership journey has been defined by her ability to bring people together around a unifying idea: The customer comes first.

“A common denominator galvanised the team: Customer was king. A centralised Insights Hub was established for research, analytics, insights and actions, replacing the previous fragmented systems of record, sharing regular updates, lunch and learns and insightful showcases and reports. Customer Personas were created based on analytics, representing a common language across the business. A regular ‘Customer Night In’ brought customers to support offices, sharing new products, offers or reviewing marketing options with real customer feedback,” she says. “These ensured everyone was pulling in the same direction and to create common language across teams.”

Accountability and focus were another must. Richmond introduced a shared team scorecard aligned to three core strategic pillars: Delivering easy and engaging experiences, modernising the business, and driving profitable growth. These goals became embedded in annual planning and were regularly revisited in monthly team town halls, where performance updates were shared, and team members were encouraged to showcase their work and its impact.

“Recognition also plays a significant role. Regular acknowledgement of team contributions of initiatives that link back to the scorecard, through monthly awards, or a regular cadence of all-team emails that celebrate successes both big and small,” she says. “Importantly, encouraging teams to try roles outside their remit, with a substantial proportion of the team being promoted, seconded or transferred within the team over the last 12 months.”

What was once a marketing team has become a connected, insights-led, customer-obsessed function that helps drive decision-making and strategy across the business.

“The team has shown strong performance and progress during this time. From a typically product and finance focused business, the team has helped ensure that the customer has become a crucial focus and theme across Officeworks, contributing to future success,” says Richmond.