Inside QVC’s battle to keep us shopping

It began with a yellow Volkswagen Beetle-shaped alarm clock. Yours, for £16.50 – postage and packing included – delivered within seven to 10 working days. QVC’s first broadcast of its UK TV shopping channel, at 2pm on October 1, 1993, reached 2.7 million homes. It was so novel that it made the 10 o’clock news.

In the 40 years since QVC has been on the air, Dolly Parton, John Legend, Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart, David Attenborough, Ivana Trump and Joan Rivers have all been guests (the latter two both had fashion and jewellery lines with the channel). Coldplay even made an appearance to sell copies of their latest album as recently as 2024.

In 2024, UK revenue was £493.4m (with a profit of £33.1m), up from 2023’s £477.6m. The company doesn’t release viewing figures, but in 2026, QVC UK is available in 28 million homes, broadcasting for 19 hours a day on TV, online via its website and app, as well as live shows on YouTube (41,000 subscribers) and TikTok (87,000 followers and growing).

Yet, earlier this year, the QVC Group, QVC UK’s US parent company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and faces a brutal restructure to drop $5bn (£2.8bn) worth of debt by a deadline of July 15. Even as its chief executive, David Rawlinson II, reportedly collected a pay cheque of almost $11m last year – a pay rise of 70 per cent on 2024 – 900 employees (5 per cent of its workforce in the US) were made redundant.

At the height of QVC’s pandemic powers in the 2020 pandemic, the global group reached a revenue of $14.18bn. But in recent years, it has been viewed as slow to adapt to the volatile retail landscape and unable to claw back revenue to service its growing debts from an ageing customer base. The business has been hit with supply chain issues from the impact of Donald Trump’s vacillating import tariffs, especially with regard to China. In 2021, a warehouse fire in North Carolina killed one worker and wiped out an estimated $134m worth of inventory.

The reality is that the company that once pioneered live shopping is being undercut by a democratised internet bursting with next-day delivery titans and social-media snake-oil charmers. In the face of endless influencers raking in affiliate deals and hawking their wares, QVC (Quality, Value, Convenience) feels like a quaint relic from a different age. In 2026, it’s a company in both dire straits and desperately trying to reinvent itself for what is now referred to as “shoppertainment”. Can it reclaim the formula it invented from its upstart online challengers?

At its headquarters in a business park in Chiswick, west London, the mood is buoyant.

When I visit in early June, everyone who works there bounces around, sunny and smiling, as if they’re about to elucidate the charms of an egg boiler (one of them does, actually). It’s akin to stepping into The Truman Show. The purpose-built glass-fronted building sits in a corporate idyll of sorts around a central lake. A duck and three ducklings swim past to thrilled gasps. “There were four,” I’m told quietly.

Screens in reception show its global outposts. The US has a denim segment on; Germany, a 9ct white-gold Diamonique heart-shaped necklace, Italy, protein snacks and slimming shakes; Japan, raw sashimi. The official line is that the QVC Group’s international entities are not included in the US court-supervised restructuring and that business is running as usual.

Upstairs on the production floor, there are beaming pictures of each team as well as a compliments board full of Post-it notes bearing gushing messages staff-to-staff. Past piles of inventory – hanging baskets, garden sofas, clothes and racks of shoes – the two beige and gilt-edged studio spaces are recording live; the morning fashion show will segue into gardening.

On Style With Katy, presenter Katy Pullinger stands next to a gold rail, running through the merits of a terracotta £75 Monsoon dress with stylist Caroline Macleod-Smith. As they debate its shape (“Would we call this A-line? It’s trapeze isn’t it…”), a model walks on to set to turn, smiling, fanning out the material. Pullinger warns that the piece is selling out and the model is off.

The presenters are impressive: they don’t stop talking or, indeed, smiling. Every other sentence, Pullinger reminds viewers of the item number, and that “you’ve got your three easy pays” (all items are available to pay in interest-free instalments), as well as the deal-maker: its 60-day returns policy, money back, no quibbles. You could wear this dress, wash it, decide you didn’t want it after all and still return it. There are screens around the studio showing how much time is left on the show as well as ticking seconds down from the five minutes that each item gets. The only other person in the studio is the floor manager, queuing up the next piece or model. The cameras are robotic, controlled by the producers hidden away in the galley. Samantha Rowe, the ex-John Lewis fashion buyer, tells me that today was a good show with lots of sell-outs.

QVC was originally founded in 1987 by the American entrepreneur Joseph Segel, who had previously found success with The Franklin Mint, a mail-order collectables company selling commemorative coins, figurines and the like. Segel’s idea for QVC was to take on the brash telesales channels with a softer, more magazine-like format that would bring catalogue mail order to life, to woo the viewer into buying rather than demand it of them.

In 1993, the UK businessman Peter Ridsdale – later best known as the chairman who steered Leeds United from the premiership to League One, leaving the club £103m in debt – brokered a partnership between the US headquarters and BSkyB to bring QVC to Britain.

Now, there are now 25 full-time presenters at QVC UK, six men to 19 women, which perhaps reflects its particularly roaring trade across fashion, beauty and jewellery. Beauty has long been a sweet spot for the channel: in 1997, it made its first £1m hour, hosted by Julia Roberts (not that one), who attributed it to the success of beauty brand Molton Brown. In 1996, Liz Earle launched her skincare brand (sold for millions in 2010 to Avon) on QVC; last year 312,375 products from an exclusive collection sold in one week.

Roberts was one of the seven original launch presenters, along with Jon Briggs. Famously, the original audition for potential hosts was to sell the producers a pencil. Briggs had previously worked in radio – he later became the original British voice of Siri, Apple’s brand of virtual assistant. When I speak to him over the phone, his voice is richly mellifluous and unnervingly familiar.

“None of us really knew quite what it was going to be, because there was no ‘selly telly’ outside of the US,” he recalls, now aged 61. The live shows were (and remain) entirely unscripted. “It was one of the hardest broadcast jobs I’ve ever done.”

He oversaw the first £100,000 hour thanks to “the big green clean machine, a vacuum cleaner that did everything. The hour before, [we thought] what can we squeeze on the carpet tile? We’ll mop it up live. It worked, the tile was fresh as a daisy. The skill was knowing what to give the audience to make them feel like this was something they really needed.”

Presenters worked eight-hour shifts, an hour on air and an hour off to run through everything in the prep room before going back on to sell it. Briggs was paid £65,000, with a wardrobe allowance and regular manicures on top.

Katy Johns was a jobbing actress and singer before becoming part of the launch team in the UK, staying for eight years until she was cast as the lead in the BBC children’s show The Song Catcher. Viewers “invited us into their homes, they almost became friends, they’d come on and chat to us. When I had my daughter, somebody knitted me a Tellytubby,” says Johns. “We did worry that they were buying stuff because they were lonely and wanted to talk to us.”

She’d sometimes be spotted and teased in the supermarket: “People would come up saying, ‘oh, are you going to measure it?’” But on air, the selling spell can’t be broken. “When Princess Diana died, we still had to be on that day. You have to be perky, keep going.”

Johns has since retrained as a Pilates instructor but for some, the lure of sales remains. Rob Locke became a presenter aged 22 in 1995 and stayed for seven years. The sweet-spot selling hour was often at midnight when the “Today’s Special Value” went live on air. He recalls selling 1,000 £600 desktop computers in that first hour. “By the time I left, they were regularly doing £60,000-£100,000 an hour,” he says.

Locke is now head of television at Shop On TV (a joint venture with ITV), which runs every night on ITV platforms from midnight to 3am. He is frank about the industry: “Eyeballs are so diluted. The days of people sitting down in front of the television and watching the show at a given time of day, that doesn’t really exist anymore. For the full-time channels like QVC, Ideal World and the Jewellery Channel I would say it’s a dead man walking.”

The paradox facing QVC is that while the TV format feels dated, the concept of live shopping has never been hotter. While many of us may rely on the ruthless efficiency of retailers such as Amazon, the market for more entertainment-driven shopping is huge. According to a 2024 report from Retail Economics and TikTok, the social commerce market – that is, people buying through social media channels – is projected to reach £16bn by 2028.

The same report states that four in five users now say they engage in shopping via social media – from browsing products to following favourite brands and watching live shopping events. While TikTok has 30 million users a month, Whatnot, a dedicated live shopping app, is the number one downloaded shopping app in the UK. In 2025, it reportedly generated more than $8bn in raw sales and is valued at $11.5bn following a $225m investment raise in October 2025.

Whatnot is like watching QVC on speed: its sellers range from slick presentations of collectables to people in their living rooms holding up old clothes and auctioning them off. Vinted has recently invested in Tilt, a UK-based live auction app, presumably with a view to turn its static function into something more titillating. Now, you too can brush up on your sales patter to get rid of that pile of old tat in the loft.

Retail analyst Natalie Berg says: “The competition looks very different. It’s much more fragmented. QVC were unknowingly ahead of their time. No one could have predicted we’d all be shopping on TikTok in the way that we do. E-commerce is going to look wildly different over the next few years. It’s transitioning from a fairly joyless and transactional experience to something that’s much more dynamic, immersive [and] personalised.”

In 2010, Carol Woolton, then British Vogue’s jewellery editor, was invited on to QVC to sell copies of her first book. At first, she baulked at the offer. Then she thought it would make a good story. “It was an amusing idea,” she says. Her editor, Alexandra Shulman, agreed. Her appearance was fleeting.

“I really didn’t have to say anything then they cut me off.” Off-air, she asked why. She’d sold out. Woolton went on to collaborate on a jewellery collection for the channel. “It was mesmerising, all the presenters had been actresses. They knew how to perform. People got attached, they followed them, bought what they sold them, trusted them and were entertained by them, too. Anyone with good business sense goes on, frankly.”

QVC is aware of its need to lean into the new era of live shopping, although arguably it’s been slow to act. Having launched on TikTok last year, in June it opened a new dedicated TikTok studio with a week-long “Super Brand Day” event featuring daily discounts and flash sales.

The new studio is on the ground floor, opposite the ducks. It’s similar in feel to the beige-toned studios upstairs, but smaller. There are two desk set-ups as well as a sofa area and beauty stations with light-bulb mirrors. The idea is to invite in influencers and content creators as well as QVC’s own hosts.

On TikTok, presenters are on their own for up to three hours, responding in real time to comments, calling them out by name as they pop up on screen. There are seven presenters rotating, with some crossing over from the TV studios. They speak more quickly here, with a dose of chaos, in line with the general tone of TikTok.

Robyn Cooke, director of social commerce, helms the new operation. It’s not necessarily a paean to find a younger customer. “Our target customer is the Gen X woman: [she] has disposable income, [she] makes a lot of purchase decisions in the world.”

And she is now on TikTok. “We need to be where she is. The fastest-growing audience on TikTok is Gen X women,” says Cooke. “Since we’ve been live, every month the audience has been 80 per cent women over 35; it’s exactly the same audience [as the TV channel].”

The evening is a sweet spot for sales. “We get them on the commute. We see a dip at 7 o’clock when people are eating their dinner, then we pick up again,” she says.

There are endless Facebook groups and Reddit threads of shoppers swapping tips and stories, but outside its regulars, does anyone still think about QVC? “Everybody knows QVC,” says Cooke. “They may not have thought about [it] recently but they know who we are.” (There is a knowing bit the presenters do on TikTok: “We’re QVC, yes the real QVC.”)

“We get a lot of “‘My nan used to shop QVC’,” says Cooke, who sees that recognition as an advantage.

“We’re a trusted brand coming into [a] space that a target customer might be sceptical about. We’re reassuring them [that] it’s us, we check everything, we will make sure you get what you order. We’ve reactivated customers, too. They’re no longer watching telly and they’ve come across us on TikTok Shop.”

The difference they are counting on is the mark of their presenters. “They are warm, honest,” says Cooke. “They’re not trying to sell you something you don’t need. They have to be joyful, upbeat, positive and welcoming. They cannot shout at you,” she adds.

The small social space may well eclipse the “proper” studios upstairs. With an ageing customer base, QVC does need to reel younger fans in, and consider what other platforms to join in a retail landscape constantly disrupted and diversified. We are bombarded from all angles – from films to TV, social media, Amazon, Vinted, eBay and on and on – to purchase something, anything. We all now live in The Truman Show.

“It’s really important to acknowledge that everyone can do it,” offers Cooke. “This is a democratised environment. Anyone is welcome into that world, and that’s good. It’s lovely. Is everyone going to have the same level of success? No.”