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.
