Kebbeh previously worked as marketing manager at HMV (where she was profiled by In-Store under her former surname, Kane, in 2002) alongside then operations director Simon Douglas. Soon after, Kebbeh went travelling for five years. On her return to the UK, Douglas recruited her into the newly created role of head of display and design at Virgin where he was chief executive officer.

"The Virgin brand had gone out of the stores, you wouldn't know you were in a Virgin Megastore. The identity had fallen by the wayside," says Kebbeh. "If you don't do something about your estate profile you're in trouble. We could have carried on trading the way Virgin Megastores had been doing, in a struggling market and not moving with the times or listening to customer research. But if we had done, we would have been in danger of not surviving."

With other music retailers such as Tower Records and Fopp falling from the high street, Virgin needed a shake up to get back on track and avoid the same fate. The company had carried out research that showed customers were feeling bombarded with a plethora of colours and messages and inconsistent information in stores, that stores were difficult to navigate, and too dark and alienating to female customers, says Kebbeh.

Kebbeh's first task was to build a team that could rein in all these elements. "The look and feel of the stores was all over the place," she says. "The ultimate challenge was to bring all the stores up to scratch. What we had to do was embrace the future and the digital age."

"Our stores are very much like a library - categorised in A-Z format and with racking that can create barriers with streams and streams of gondola racks. What we didn't do before was let people interact with our products. And everything we sell is interactive, you watch it, play it, listen to it; it was something we did really badly."

Opening its Store of the Future, in Manchester, was a landmark for Virgin says Kebbeh. "It broke the mould of A-Z barriers and introduced interactive areas of interest. You could listen, play or watch, and that was the intention."

It was at this point that Kebbeh's role developed into something much bigger. "Design and display didn't really make sense anymore. Head of brand and advertising encompassed everything creative that was customer facing, from price stickers, store fascias to six-sheet adverts you see on the underground, I was the brand guardian."

Under a strict confidentiality agreement Kebbeh was one of a select few to know of the MBO that would spark the name change from Virgin to Zavvi, before it was officially announced within the wider business and to the City.

Part of the deal was that a new name would be announced on the same day, which left just six weeks to come up with a new name, brand colours and a mission statement of what the new brand was going to look like. "The only people that knew were the big cheeses at Virgin, the board of directors and myself. It was really the most ridiculous timeframe ever, I don't think I slept for those six weeks with names going through my head."

The brief was to come up with a name that was memorable, used the minimum letters and preferably meant something about entertainment, says Kebbeh. Something that turned out to be impossible because with restraints over existing trademarks and domain name availability, the search was considerably narrowed. "We got to the point where we had to have a made up word. It wasn't an issue because we were thinking 'what did Google mean to people years ago?'"

The team drew up a list of words that summed up what the brand was about and what an independent retailer was about, one of the words that cropped up was "savvy". "It means clued up and you know what you're talking about and you're passionate about what you talk about - that word wasn't liked, but a play on it became 'Zavvi', and we liked the word straight away," says Kebbeh. She adds that Zavvi would also create stand-out on the high street because Z isn't a popular letter. "The only other one is Zara and we quite like that it was just very different."

By looking at the high street and seeing which retailers were using which colours Kebbeh had already narrowed down that the Zavvi brand colour would be green. "It was an interesting analysis that I'd never carried out before and we found that we really wanted to be in the green camp, as that's where we wanted to position ourselves, with other retailers using green," she explains.

Then came the hard part; physically rebranding 125 Virgin branches into Zavvi stores in six weeks. "Everything from shop fascias down to corporate stationery needed to be 'Zavvied'," says Kebbeh.

Every piece of P-O-P was replaced and the strategy was to clean up the in-store environment. "We feel navigation in stores has improved so much, and is simpler. Where we want to highlight primary campaigns they have stand out now because they're not fighting against each other."

However, there is still a way to go as around 50 per cent of the estate still has some element of Virgin branding. Kebbeh is currently working on Project De-Virginise to exile all remaining traces from stores in the next three months.

While Zavvi is working hard to remove all visible signs of Virgin from its property, Kebbeh stresses that the company isn't trying to erase the history of Virgin. "There's nothing about Virgin Megastores that we want to disassociate ourselves from, that's our heritage," she asserts. "We still sell the same products, we still have the same passionate staff, and the only thing that's changed is that we're now independent."

Being independent means that Zavvi has the freedom to expand into other areas and progress without the risk of conflict of interest with the rest of the Virgin Group. "We were governed so much by the Virgin Group in terms of what we could do, now we're an independent company we can take risks," says Kebbeh.

So far, the business is performing well with healthy sales figures since the rebrand, according to Kebbeh. "We're in a really good place for the first quarter of this year, we're certainly not suffering in terms of finance," she says.

Kebbeh is under no illusions about the decline of the music retail market, but says Zavvi is moving with the times and focussing on the fast-growing gaming sector. "It's a challenge, when you've gone to the digital world, you're not going to come back, but for those who do want to buy music, there's nowhere else for them to get it. Our strategy is that we focus on depth of catalogue and specialist label campaigns that people just can't get anywhere else. Yes, music is shrinking, but we're realigning our in-store space to allow for shrinkage in music and allow for growth in gaming."