Castorama, a French home-improvement chain owned by Kingfisher, has devised an innovative way of allowing its customers to benefit from each other’s expertise. Les Trocs'heures is a free website that allows customers to swap their DIY expertise (troc is French for barter or swap).
“Say you’re a gardener but you don’t have a clue how to lay a floor. You can swap with somebody who’s good at flooring but not much cop in the garden,” explains Ian Cheshire, group chief executive of Kingfisher. “It’s doing surprisingly well on a slow burn.”
Users upload a profile including their location, availability and areas of competence. The website already has 3,500 members and has facilitated more than 1,000 swaps.
It is one of a series of peer-to-peer schemes that Kingfisher has set up. In the UK, it has launched a pilot scheme called Street Club, which aims to introduce group-buying for tools. “Think of it as a local social network with elements of Groupon and collective buying.”
“We bought a web platform which we have adapted to help streets to get together to share, borrow from each other or buy equipment as a street,” he explains. “That’s been on trial this year and we’re hoping to scale up to a national roll-out.”
Thus, instead of paying £50 for a powertool that will be used once and stowed away in the shed, members will be able to pay a fraction to borrow one from an assigned neighbour whose contact details would be available on the website.
“We’re trying to think differently about the retail relationship with our customers.”
He adds: “All of this relies on technology that just wouldn’t have been possible ten years ago.”
Screwfix, Kingfisher's trade business, hosts online forums where tradesmen share tips and upload home-made instruction videos of projects they have worked on. The electricians’ area of the site alone has nearly 40,000 discussions.
This case study appears in The i Factor, a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). In June and July 2012 the EIU, on behalf of MasterCard, surveyed 306 European retailers to investigate their views on the challenges facing the retail industry in the years to 2020—what are the opportunities and growth areas, how they are adapting to sector changes and how are they using new technologies to deliver an improved customer experience. To read the full report, click here
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited (EIU) or any other member of The Economist Group. The Economist Group (including the EIU) cannot accept any responsibility or liability for reliance by any person on this article or any of the information, opinions or conclusions set out in the article.
