Hello, everyone. This is OmniTalk Retail. I'm Chris Walton, and I am coming to you live from the World Retail Congress in Berlin from the Vision Podcast Studio. Now, joining me is a man that I interviewed earlier on stage today, and that is Roman Rolu. Hopefully I said that closely. Closely. Close enough, right? And he is the Group Digital and E-Commerce Director at Kingfisher. Roman, welcome to OmniTalk. It's great to have you. Great to be there. Thank you very much. Yeah, man. Tell us about yourself, your background, and also about Kingfisher for those in the U.S. that might not be as familiar with them. Yeah, so I have 25 years experience in digital. Started in my career in the B2B business, mail order business, and then moved to the travel business, which I spent half of my career, and moved to retail only 10 years ago. Only 10 years ago. All right, let's age ourselves. Which is pretty funny because I have half of my career in the travel business and half of my career in the retail business, which is pretty unusual. Yeah, right. That's funny. That reminds me of something that was said on stage, but that's two inside baseball. We'll talk about that afterwards. You can talk about baseball if you want. I'm a big baseball fan. Are you? Red Sox Nation. Red Sox. All right. You got a good team, too. I like the Red Sox. Good stuff. Not this year, though, right? Yeah, they just fired their manager. Yeah, no, no, but now they're three in a row. Oh, right. That's so funny. Funny how that works. All right. Well, what brings you to WRC? What brings you to the World Retail Congress? That's my first time to be honest. Very impressed by the level of seniority, the level of quality of content, the quality of networking, discussions. We had a great session on Agentic earlier. And I think I'm going to come back next year. Yeah, awesome. It was a really good session. What did you like about it particularly? What were you happy that we brought away for the audience? No, I think it was good because we had a different point of view between a software partner, a tech view and a U.S. environment. And obviously my view, which is more, like you said, an operational one and basically leaving it as we speak. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny. You said on stage, too, that, you know, Kingfisher's e-commerce now represents roughly one-fifth of your business. Yeah, 21%. 21%, right? And the ambition is to actually grow that to 30%. Yes, that's our target. What's the single biggest unlock you think you need to make to get to that number? So the single unlock is not really an unlock. At least it's an acceleration. It's putting stores at the center of our digital strategy. So we have clearly defined that the fact that if we want to go against pure players and play with the same skills and the same rules that they do, we're going to lose. So we're going to use and maximize our assets, our stores. We already discussed about it, but DIY is a complex project and a complex industry where you have a lot of interaction before you transact. And we want to make sure that we maximize our stores which means maximizing in terms of customer relationship but also maximizing in terms of e fulfillment 90 of our e business is being fulfilled by stores today in all of our banners So we have B&Q, who is a leading DIY retail brand in the UK. Screwfix is a leading B2B retail brand in the UK. Castorama and Brico are number two and number three in France. Castorama, Poland, who is number one in Poland. Brico Depot, which is a challenger in Spain and Portugal. Yeah. I'm always amazed at how you all, particularly on the digital side, manage all of that complexity and all the different things that have to go into it. It's unreal to me that you can, as one human being, process that much that you have to have under your purpose. So first of all, let's make sure I'm not alone. I have a team. Right, right, you got a team. First of all, we have great digital banners teams for all of our banners, B&Q, Castorama, Scrufix, Brico Depot, massive, massive skills. We have developed our internal skills for the past 10 years massively because we do believe that obviously we rely on vendors, but we need to make sure that we have the right level of expertise because it is a strategic pillar on the overall Kingfisher strategy. Right, so the key point, going back to the question, though, which is really great to hear, that you think the stores are actually the center to unlocking the growth in digital, taking it from 20% to 30%, which is your goal. And you think of that really in two ways that I took from you. So one, fulfillment side, the true Omnichannel nature. Yes. If you take the marketplace, we were the first one in the UK to launch click and collect and return available on a marketplace business. A marketplace, okay. If you take continental Europe, which is more advanced than the UK in terms of marketplace business, Roughly none of the large omni-channel marketplace operators do provide a service where you can click and collect in the store. It's pretty new. So some of them have a marketplace for 10 years, and they have not launched the click and collect service. We launched it six months ago at B&Q, and in return, we launched it 18 months ago. So basically, we allow our consumers to return in a store a product that they have bought online through a third-party vendor. Right. Wow. Okay. And then the other piece of it, too, was around, you know, it sounds like deepening the relationship with the customer because you understand the customer in the story of that much more data around them and you can enrich their experience, too, in the store day to day. How are you thinking about that? So what we what we start to do is to make sure that, first of all, for the store associate, the marketplace is not like an alternate channel. It's part of its strategy, which means that, for example, you go in a B&Q store or a Castorama store and you want to do a kitchen project. and basically you're going to select all the components of your kitchen project. Sometimes within the project, there is an element where basically our 1P offer does not suit the customer, color, size, style, whatever, or stock. The reflex of the associate is to provide an access to the hundreds and thousands of opportunities that we have on our marketplace and propose this to the customer in order to complete the project Instead of saying sorry I don have this tab on my portfolio you need to go somewhere else No, we have some third-party vendors. Let's see if it fits. Oh, it fits. Then we integrate it within the same basket. So we are currently seeing how we can integrate 3P within a 1P basket in a store. Right, which is a really important point that I don't think many people in the U.S. understand. I want to make sure that I heighten it up is that you said basically the marketplace allows you to be in stock in a store Potentially or in an online transaction when you're not necessarily in stock as the first party provider of that item Yeah, so when you have it when you have a large 3p opportunity at B&Q We have 3.5 million SKUs castorama in France We have close to 1.5 million if you take our 1p offer which is our own brands plus the national brands, we basically have between 40 and 70 thousand SKUs. Yeah, that's about what I expect. So which means that when you do select a product, sometimes you have some. Obviously, we are very keen on making sure that our stock is very reliable, but sometimes you're out of stock. On the same SKU, or at least on the same service and value, sometimes a vendor does provide the stock and is available in 24 or 48 hours delivery. Let's make sure that we use this in order to maximize and to satisfy the customer. Or pick up in store. Exactly. Right? That's the whole thing here. Yeah. Wow, that's really cool. All right, so you mentioned, let's keep talking about marketplaces because marketplace, the other thing is the retail media side of that. How do you think about the relationship between marketplaces and retail media particularly? So our target is to have 3% of our retail media should represent 3% of our total e-commerce GMV. That's our target, which is pretty significant. If you take the speed between 1P and 3P, 3P vendors are more educated, more advanced than 1P vendors. Why? For one reason, because they are already using Amazon. And when you go on Amazon Ads, they know how the platform is working. They know if they put some marketing budget, what kind of impact is going to be generating in terms of sales, which means that they know that they can calculate and they have full autonomy on their service. differently with large brands that operate and we buy from them. Sometimes they are not fully educated in order to use the platform on their own. So we do need to provide a managed service. Okay. And it takes time. Okay. And obviously there is a learning curve on their side. Wow. All right. All right. So I can't let you go. I mean, we just got off stage talking about it. So I've got to share with the audience back home some of what we talked about. So AI, right? Home improvement, high consideration category, high complexity category. How different is the AI personalization challenge in DIY versus like grocery apparel let say Yes If you take I going to take an example If you take all the examples that went out at the NRF in January basically if you take all the examples of UCP ACP they always give a very simple transaction model. Basically, you ask your agent in order to put one item in the basket and do the checkout for me. That's very good. In DIY, it doesn't work that way. you very rarely go into an home improvement store just for one product. Most of the time you go for a project or a complex combination of products, accessories and stuff. Doing this through agent today doesn't work, which means that the agent that we provide either externally through those platforms or within our own platform with our own agents, we launched Elocasto and EloBNQ providing that and making sure that it does provide a full customer journey service and a support to the consumer, that's extremely critical in DIY, and that's where we're investing our money on. Right, right. Great point. And so to that point, to end on this, I'm curious, and I didn't get to ask you this on stage, where do you think AI is overhyped? Are you deliberately saying, hey, that's cool, but we're going to do that later. We're going to get to that later. We're not going to look at that yet from the chair atop, which you sit? So let's say overhype, not too much. But I would say not what is the priority is a checkout. It's a checkout. Checkout, right. Because we do believe that the level and the volume of consumers in Europe that are ready to fully rely 100% on an agent in order to do everything, including the checkout, I don't think it's for today. It might be for tomorrow. But I think we have some other priorities to tackle with, which is today's priorities and today's focus. Got it. So kind of keeping your eye on it, keeping tabs on it, but not a focus. And so by that, to make sure, so not the truly, the true ability to agentically check out, to integrate checkouts is not something you guys are keenly focused on right now. And it sounds like that's the prevailing sentiment here because somebody else said that to us on stage as well. And it seems like that's what we're seeing in the U.S. too, because there's a lot of things that have to iron out before we can get to that point. So that's good to hear you say that. Man, you are super knowledgeable, dude. I love this conversation. This was great, man. God, I can learn so much from you. I love this dude expression. You know what he reminds me of? What? The Big Lebowski. Right? That's right. Well, you're my Big Lebowski today, my friend. You're my Big Lebowski. All right, man. Well, so thank you so much. Thank you. It's such a great pleasure getting to meet you finally. We've talked about doing this for a while. Yes, definitely. We were able to make it work. Hopefully we can do it again sometime. My pleasure. And on behalf of all of us at OmniTalk, and thanks to Fusion for sponsoring our coverage here at the World Retail Congress, but on behalf of all of us at OmniTalk, be careful out there.
