Featured Work

cardfactory: How we plugged the talent drain

You’re a big organisation, your attrition rates are high, you’re losing talent and knowledge faster than you can fill it. Recruitment becomes expensive, and the lack of available talent means lowering standards, which leads to increased salaries, training costs and inevitable churn. With career paths often blurred or colleagues unable to see a future, they disengage and look for pastures green elsewhere.

It’s a familiar story. These are challenges faced by all businesses. So how do you successfully engage colleagues with career progression, in an inclusive and accessible way, at all levels across the business?

At cardfactory, they do things differently and are leading the way in colleague growth and engagement.

We were delighted when cardfactory chose DTNX to bring their vision of career pathways to life in the most compelling and visually engaging way possible.

As a company that enables almost half of UK households to create celebrations for all life moments, cardfactory brings happiness to the nation on a daily basis. They are also one of the country’s leading retailers, with over 1,000 stores and 9,000 colleagues working across all areas of the business, from design to manufacturing, retail to marketing. They recognise that, as the business continues to grow, it’s essential they provide colleagues with career development and personal growth opportunities if they are to retain valuable knowledge and talent.

Our strategic insights team worked closely with cardfactory’s Careers Team to map out every role across every department within the business. This resulted in a comprehensive database of interconnecting roles. Much like the London Underground map, but switching roles for stations, and zones for departments, we were able to design some visual logic that would form the basis of a Career Pathways tool.

We then set about developing a user-friendly interface that enabled colleagues to click on their role, and the role they aspired to, and the tool would provide them with a detailed career path, along with necessary skills and qualifications they’d need to acquire along the way.

Working with this talented bunch was an absolute blast. They brought energy, talent and collaboration to each step.

Patricia Burnett — Senior People Development Practitioner

Now cardfactory colleagues can see what the future holds for their career and start to define their own career path, working towards personal success and fulfilling their ambitions. The tool has been widely adopted by the team, attrition rates and engagement continue to improve. Not only that, cardfactory is delivering great commercial results too, with Group revenue growth of 10.3% across the 2024 financial year.