DIY pure and simple

Since this year the Netherlands Maxeda group has been a dedicated DIY retailer. It parted from M&S Mode, its last remaining fashion banner, at the beginning of the year, having gone ahead with the decision made in February 2010 to sell its entire fashion division. This included the Bijenkorf department stores and the Hunkemöller lingerie chain. The aim of the action: to become the DIY market leader in the Benelux region. Now Maxeda can concentrate on its four DIY brands: Brico, Brico Plan-It, Formido and Praxis. Currently there are 364 stores belonging to the group, which functions as a DIY store operator and franchisor in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, and employs a workforce of some 5 000. Each week an average of 500 000 customers visit the group’s DIY stores. Its annual DIY sales amounted to € 1.367 bn in the 2010/2011 financial year (to 31 January). This was 1.2 per cent down on the previous year, and 3.1 per cent down like-for-like. The network of stores was expanded by seven outlets (to 362 on the cut-off date). Since May 2011 George Adams, a British businessman, has headed the Netherlands DIY retail group. He is an established DIY expert, having been a member of the Kingfisher board and, incidentally, president of the European DIY Retail Association (EDRA) as well. Having recently branched out into another sector, he was CEO of Spicers, an office products wholesaler, from 2009. Adams made use of the 1st Global DIY Summit in Brussels to appear in front of the delegates and sketch out his company’s strategy. In the process he even struck a self-critical note when he spoke on “Global sourcing – new challenges for the home improvement industry”. “We haven’t done a good job in the last years,” he said, not necessarily referring to his company but to the industry as a whole. His starting point is that there is still a lot of potential for optimisation within the supply chain. For instance, he sees potential in a massive reduction of the current number of 846 Maxeda suppliers and the 119 000 SKUs stocked. By comparison he quoted B&Q figures from 2002, when the Kingfisher banner had fewer than 300 suppliers and just on 30 000 SKUs. Adams named three basic blocks upon which the Maxeda strategy now rests. First it is vital that retailer and manufacturer should know as much as possible about each other and that both sides should stick to what they have agreed. The second point concerns the continuing development of the brands on offer, that…