This year NN4M turned 10! We have grown so much in the past ten years. We’ve worked from three different offices, substantially grown our team, changed product offering and won more than 20 awards while doing it. This year is looking to be our busiest year yet and we couldn’t be more excited about it.

Before we talk about this year, let’s step into our time machine and go back 10 years to 2005 to see how far we’ve come.

In 2005, our three founders, Carolyn Burnett, Jonathan Heap and Lorraine Howard, decided to work together to provide outfit building technology to retailers, based out of their home offices. Our first customer was Oasis, a British fashion retailer. We built a tool for their website that allowed users to create an outfit and see how different products looked when put together. This technology became highly desirable at the time, and we were one of the only companies able to provide it. We soon started working with numerous other retailers including Karen Millen, Coast, Matalan and AWear.

By 2009, after being asked by retailers, we made the decision to move into the transactional app business. Mobile apps were just starting to become big after the Apple App Store went live in 2008. We were first to market with the first fully transactional retail app for Oasis that year. By 2012 we had built the first iPhone apps for Warehouse, Coast, Karen Millen, Laura Ashley, River Island, House of Fraser, Ernest Jones, H Samuel and Debenhams. In the next few years we released Android and iPad apps for many of those retailers. In 2011 we started working with our first American client, Saks Fifth Avenue, and we’re excited to continue to work globally.

Now three months into 2015 things are really starting to kick off. We’re looking forward to working with new customers and to releasing two new mobile commerce products to market (watch this space!). We now have fully fledged customer service, design, Android, iOS and backend teams. Two of our apps were recently recognised by MasterCard as the best shopping apps in Europe (read the full story here) and Mothercare’s app has won numerous awards, including two PayPal Etail awards, two Effective Mobile Marketing Awards, two Retail Systems Awards and several others.

To celebrate our 10th birthday, we’ll be dedicating some time this year to participate in events to raise money for charity. These include:

  • A team abseil off the Forth Rail Bridge for Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland
  • A colour run for charity
  • A gameathon for the Sick Kids Friends Foundation (donate here!)

Here are some comments from the team:

“Our design team is the best around. Seriously awesome.” – Jo Wigginton

“I am employee number 1. One of the things I love about working for NN4M are the development challenges. From day one I was tasked with converting an application written in .net (which I didn’t speak) to Flex (which I didn’t speak). Today the teams work really well together and we have yet to meet a challenge we haven’t overcome. Happy birthday NN4M.” – Chris Milne

“Throughout my time at NN4M I have seen the company double in size, along with our product range. We’re continually striving to work faster and more efficiently, to ensure we remain at the top of our field. Our driven, eclectic team are a joy to work with and mean there’s never a dull day in the office!” – Fiona Dempsey

“Working at NN4M over the last three and a half years, I have seen the company triple in size, which has been a great experience to be part of. It takes a lot for a job to keep you interested and challenged but that’s not a problem at NN4M. The ever-growing and diverse team is full of great ideas and plans for the future. Gone are the days that the team could go for a quick drink after work and we could always get a table, there are now so many of us that advanced notice is needed! There are so many new changes and developments happening in the tenth year of the business that makes the thought of where the company will be in another 10 years incredibly exciting.” – Sam Patey