We believe faster fulfilment is a key competitive
advantage for our banners, in particular over online
‘pure-play’ peers, so we have increased our focus on
next-day and same-day home delivery. In August 2021,
Screwfix launched Screwfix ‘Sprint’, offering delivery
direct to home or site within one hour. ‘Sprint’ currently
covers over one third of UK postcodes, with further
rollout planned in FY 22/23. So far, the average delivery
time is around 45 minutes, and our quickest delivery is
just eight minutes. Feedback from customers, especially
our most loyal trade customers, has been very positive,
and we believe this will help us to continue growing our
market share. ‘Sprint’ reinforces Screwfix’s focus on
speed and convenience for customers, alongside its
industry-leading one-minute C&C proposition. We are
sharing lessons from the roll-out with other retail banners
that are testing same-day delivery, including B&Q.
We have added significant talent in 2021 in the key areas
of digital, technology and data, further reinforcing our
e-commerce capability and development plans. This is
allowing us to better understand our customers and help
them all the way through their home improvement
journeys, from research and inspiration to installation and
after-care. We are accelerating investment in customer
data, as an integral part of our plan to identify and retain
our most loyal customers and sell more to them. Data
science and analytics also present many new
opportunities to maximise customer retention and spend,
including improving inventory availability and
personalisation. Over the last two years, we have seen a
significant increase in new and identifiable customers
across our banners. In addition, these new customers
continue to shop with us, with strong retention rates.
Finally, we believe we can add significant value for
customers by offering them more product choice. Using
scalable technology built by Kingfisher alongside Mirakl,
the leading marketplace platform provider, we launched
our first e-commerce marketplace on B&Q’s
www.diy.com on 10 March 2022. Initially, selected
third-party sellers are offering new products in four
home improvement categories – wallpaper, lighting,
power tools and small domestic appliances, the latter
being a new category for B&Q. For this first stage, an
additional 100,000 home improvement SKUs will be
available within the next six months on the marketplace,
expanding B&Q’s current offer of c.40,000 products.
Further rapid expansion of the number of SKUs is
anticipated after that.
Kingfisher is very well placed to benefit from the growing
trend of shopping on e-commerce marketplaces. Our
retail banners have top one or two market positions; they
already have significant online traffic; they are trusted by
millions of customers and have strong brands; they are
able to leverage their store assets to offer more delivery,
pick-up and return options for customers; and they have
long-standing and trusted relationships with a growing
global supplier base. For example, according to
Similarweb data, in 2021 B&Q saw over 300m visits to its
website, ranking it 13th out of all UK retail websites
including ‘pure-plays’ such as Amazon and eBay. The
strong positions of our banners will result in a relatively
low customer acquisition cost, which will help to make the
platform highly profitable over time. We will also benefit
from the platform’s scalable technology, allowing us to
deploy it into our other markets relatively quickly and at a
lower cost. We look forward to providing further detail on
our e-commerce marketplace progress and ambitions at
our ‘teach-in’ for analysts and investors on 5 July 2022.
b. Differentiate and grow through own exclusive
brands(OEB)
We believe that our OEB product development is a
significant source of value for our retail banners and their
customers. OEB provides a strong point of differentiation
for our retail banners in terms of design, functionality,
sustainability and value for money, as well as carrying a
higher gross margin (on average) than branded products.
We aim to grow our OEB sales further, as we bring even
more innovation to our ranges and differentiation to
ourbanners.
The performance of our OEB ranges in FY 21/22 was
strong, with LFL sales up 10.0%, and up 19.0% on a 2-year
basis, slightly outperforming non-OEB ranges. Total OEB
sales were £5.9bn, representing 45% of Group sales
(FY20/21: 45%). This is particularly impressive when
considering our retail banners’ renewed focus on offering
more choice to customers, including through a wider
range of local and international branded products.
Kingfisher’s top five OEB brands, based on their breadth
of differentiated ranges, innovation, and growth potential,
are
GoodHome, Verve, Erbauer, Magnusson
and
LAP
.
These five OEB brands contribute 18% of total Group
sales (FY 20/21: 16%; FY 19/20: 12%).
During the year we introduced several new OEB ranges
across our markets. We have a strong pipeline of
innovative products to launch over the next two years,
with a portfolio of 32 new and redeveloped OEB brands.
This new portfolio reflects our focus on leveraging our
OEB capabilities to provide differentiated and specialised
products for our general home improvement, trade and
discounter banners. During the year we launched 16 of
these new and redeveloped OEB brands, including Evalux,
a specialist paint range at discount prices sold only at
Brico Dépôt France. Some of our OEB ranges, such as
Magnusson and Titan, are significantly outperforming
sales volumes of major branded competitors, which is a
testament to the quality of the Group’s in-house product
design and engineering.
In H1 21/22, we completed the final roll-out of our new
OEB kitchen range, which is now available in all key
markets and is our largest Group-wide range launch to
date. The new kitchen range has received exceptionally
strong customer feedback on design, innovation and
value for money. In a short space of time, kitchens has
become one of our top-performing categories for the
Group and a large contributor to our banners’ growing
market share. The kitchens category achieved double-
digit LFL growth for the Group in FY 21/22, despite some
periods of Covid-related restrictions in-store. We expect
current strong demand to support H1 22/23 LFL sales,
with the current showroom order book for B&Q and
Castorama France 72% higher versus the same point last
year (up 79% on a 2-year basis).
We continue to simplify how we develop OEB, including
improved engineering and prioritising reviews of our
key ranges, which will enable us to bring new products
to market more quickly. In addition, we are exploring
ways to increase efficiencies and lower the cost of
product development even further. As our franchising
partnerships expand, we can generate further synergies
by supplying franchise stores with our OEB products
(see
‘Test compact store concepts and adapt our store
footprint’
on page 11).
9Kingfisher 2021/22 Annual Report and Accounts