Bath-based media group Future has further developed its e-commerce team with the appointment of Jason Kemp to its executive leadership team as e-commerce & trading director.
Jason, pictured, will focus on Future’s merchandising strategy, improving the way it converts potential customers into paying customers and developing retail best practice. He will also work on promotions and deals and support product development.
Future, whose key titles include Total Film, Edge, MacFormat and Xbox: The Official Magazine, has undergone a massive 
restructuring and refocusing over recent years, transforming itself into a leading global specialist media platform but also shedding jobs and sold titles.
Among a string of acquisitions over the past 12 months it snapped up Next Commerce, a digital shopping comparison business with operations in Australia and across South East Asia which operates Getprice.com.au and Pricepanda.com.
A career retailer, Jason started as a graduate trainee for Marks & Spencer. After moving to a successful international retail consultancy, he has spent the past 13 years running his own consulting business working across both bricks and mortar and e-commerce with some of the world’s largest brands and biggest retailers, including Zara, Nike, IKEA and Walmart.
Over the past five years Jason has combined his consulting activities with conceiving and creating e-commerce technology start-ups.
He said: “Future has been very successful in building an eCommerce proposition that generates £90m in retail sales.
“I’m delighted to help capitalise on the trading opportunities in e-commerce by bringing a retail mindset and a data-driven customer centric approach, as well as working closely with the editorial teams to produce engaging and commercially valuable content.
In our mission to optimise e-commerce across the business, we want to think like a publisher but behave like a retailer.”
Future chief executive Zillah Byng-Thorne added: “This is a great step in our move to approach our strategy with an e-commerce mindset. We have some fantastic opportunities to extend trading relationships and increase product matching and Jason will help to coach and develop our teams across the business.
“Jason will also support our media services value proposition alongside new brands and channels.”
