From a Frome garden shed to Strictly!

THEIR work led to Strictly Come Dancing and TV presenter Brian Cox, and are doing ground-breaking work for some of the country’s leading companies – all from a company launched nine years ago in a Frome garden shed!

Kaiasm, based in Whatley near Frome, are world experts in using human-guided artificial intelligence to help their clients understand how to align what they sell to what people want. And their clients include the NHS, and household names like Homebase, Clarks, Vision Direct, L’Oreal, River Island, Castrol and Screwfix – as well as the BBC (did we mention Strictly?)

Starting from a garden shed in Frome nine years ago by founders Liam McGee and Steve Johnston, their team help their clients understand what their customers need, and how their customers think about those needs. The company now works from The Grange in Whatley, near Frome, and employ around 25 members of staff. And if you’re looking for an exciting new job, they are recruiting! 

Liam said, “We describe ourselves as a ‘strategic data-science and technology company’, but what we really do is help our clients, mainly retailers but also organisations like the NHS and the BBC, to understand all the different things people want and need. We do that by collecting lots of information that people type into search engines, and where they end up as a result. 

“We don’t look at the people, we look at the needs. We explore the different ways that people describe the same thing. For example, there are about 259 ways that people can describe a ‘wedding guest dress’ and that’s because it is a slightly complicated thing to describe. It’s not a wedding dress, it’s a dress appropriate for a wedding guest.

“There are lots of ways people search for it; for example ‘dress to go to a wedding’. Our job is to tell our clients what to call it so people can find them easily, how to organise things to make them easy to find, as well as what society in general needs from their market that they aren’t providing. It allows a business to grow their revenues, not by getting into price wars or spending ever more on advertising, but by offering the things people are asking for, in the way they are asking for it. We get our clients to stop focusing on making people want things, and instead to start making things people want.

“Retail is changing fast, and those retailers who change with it, embracing the complexity of what people need from them, are reaping enormous competitive advantage.

“We’ve never done any marketing, it’s all been word of mouth. Our big success in the early years was Screwfix. We were very lucky that they took a chance on us back then, but we helped them to transform their business. We are now working with lots of national retailers as well as projects for the NHS and the BBC; yes our work led to both Strictly Come Dancing and Brian Cox!

“We have grown around 80% in the last year but we are looking to continue to grow at a sustainable pace. We have a few new positions to recruit for at the moment, both technical and non-technical, to allow us to accept more work in the spring.

“We are world experts in this type of technology and you don’t expect us to be based in the wilds of Somerset. But actually Frome has this emerging technology sector; we are one of quite a few interesting technology firms based here, even if it’s a bit under the radar because most of our clients are elsewhere.

“We pride ourselves on our beautiful working environment, and family-friendly flexible working patterns, we take a lot of care making sure we are a green company and wanting to play our part in the community. We have an office dog, we make sure we buy local, our office setting has river walks, walled gardens, orchards and a lily-pond, it’s a beautiful place to work.”

For more details, see Kaiasm’s recruitment advert on page 28 or visit www.kaiasm.com/jobs