An unlikely starting point for a career in customer loyalty. Louisa already had a PhD in biophysics from Imperial College London. Her career had moved through government, research, the Navy, qualitative insight, brand consultancy — disciplines that looked, on the surface, like they had nothing in common.
By 2012, she was in branding, developing premium concepts, and thinking about how companies expressed themselves. Then she discovered CRM.
“Marketing plus math,” she recalls. “I thought: I can do that.”
For the first time, marketing felt specific. Not a vague brief to make something feel more aspirational — it started with observable behavior.
The challenge of connecting
“I know something about this person,” Louisa says. “I know what they bought. I know what they have done recently. I know what they might be interested in next. I can create from that.”
She was hooked. Not only on the mathematician, but on the relationship between data and human behavior. “The endpoint is not just a billboard that looks beautiful,” she says. “The endpoint is a person saying: ‘Yes, that is relevant to me. I agree with you. I want this.’”
Over 14 years LATER, that fascination hasn't worn off.
Today, Louisa is Head of Customer Loyalty and Retention at Hornby Hobbies, working with Hornby, Airfix, Scalextric, and Corgi, iconic British heritage brands with deep customer relationships across generations.
People don’t just buy the products. They build them, race them, paint them, modify them, research them, and argue about them. They introduce children and grandchildren to hobbies they discovered decades earlier.
“Our customers experience these brands in the real world,” Louisa says. “At their garage workbench, around their loft-space layout, on a track in their living rooms, through the family and friends they share the hobby with.”
That sets a brutal bar for marketing.
It can’t just sound polished — it has to feel credible to people who’ve spent a lifetime building and collecting.
“They have their own language, their own expertise, and their own ways of understanding the brands,” Louisa says. “We may work here, now, but we are merely custodians for cherished memories that our models commemorate.”
For Louisa, customer data isn’t there to replace that lived experience with a marketing construct. It’s there to help the organization listen to it more carefully. Her job, then, is to recognize where loyalty already exists and help it grow.
When Louisa joined Hornby Hobbies, lifecycle automation and CRM infrastructure was yet to be built. Working with Loomi, the business has since built a loyalty program, customer journeys, segmentation, and real lifecycle marketing.
How well does your marketing speak the specific language your most passionate customers use?
“Loomi gives us an environment in which insight can become action,” she says. “The data, the audience, the journey and the result don't have to be separate pieces of work.”
How separate are your data, audience, and journey work, really?
That environment is getting more powerful through AI, especially with judgment: Which opportunity deserves priority? Who genuinely needs this message, and who should be excluded? Would this purchase have happened anyway? Has this customer had enough marketing already?
So at Hornby Hobbies, the team uses AI for things like analysis, prioritization, audience refinement, journey diagnostics, contact-pressure management, and quality assurance. One of its most useful jobs may be telling the business when not to send. “The most relevant communication may sometimes be no communication,” Louisa adds.
How often does your team send a message just because it was scheduled, not because it was needed?
She's especially drawn to the language hobbyists use in forums — years of specialist terminology and shared knowledge that a standard product catalog never captures.
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“The ambition is not to make AI sound like an enthusiast,” she states. “It’s to use AI to help us hear enthusiasts more clearly. After all, the best CRM sits between mathematics and empathy.”
It’s a fitting line from a career that began with both. The mathematician was impressed, and they have two children now. But it also became a profession spanning science, creativity, technology, and customer behavior — with AI now expanding the territory once again.
“The best use of AI is not to make marketing look more intelligent,” Louisa says. “It’s to help marketers make more intelligent decisions.”
Louisa Evans
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Digital and Advocacy Director, iiaa
