Our colleague and friend Thierry Coeman visited the recent DIY Summit in Berlin on behalf of The Hardware Journal and has provided some interesting insights and lessons to be learned from the most innovative speakers.
The 9th Global DIY-Summit’s theme of ‘Visions of DIY in the age of uncertainty’ greeted the 1,000-plus conference attendees that had travelled to Berlin with the hope of hearing encouraging messages in an era where the DIY consumer appears to be keeping a tight rein on the purse strings. Of course, there are no more certainties in a world that is constantly turned upside down because of social, economic, political and climatic turbulence.
Nevertheless, decision-makers are only too happy to invest some time and energy to gain insights into the ins and outs of the profession, in addition to relevant networking opportunities. It is always a matter of choosing and sharing when you are presented with a programme with a variety of speakers and topics.
For the organisers in charge of compiling the programme, they resisted the temptation to capitalise on past successes and fill the poster with the same names over and over again. They understand that audiences are looking for in-depth reflections and practical cases that allow them to question themselves
fundamentally, and above all to reinvent themselves with refreshing inspiration. Three speakers at the event this year met this assignment with flying colours by focusing on two challenges in the near future: on the one hand, thoroughly scrutinising the classic and historic DIY business model and, on the other,
embracing tomorrow’s technology from now on, in order to seamlessly adapt customer and store processes to the acceleration of change.
When the growing gets tough
It was not Billy Ocean who suddenly entered the main stage of the Estrel conference room, but the energetic Belgian, Erwin Van Osta, CEO Hubo Group, chairman of Bricoalliance and President of Comeos, the Belgian Retail Association.

He initially impressed with a smashing projection that took up the entire width of the 32-metre screen. The approach was a deliberate choice because of the core of his speech, which he kept extremely excitingly contained until the third part of his presentation.
Erwin Van Osta earned his spurs during the past thirty years as top manager of Hubo Belgium, a retail chain that grew practically from nothing to a top position in the Belgian DIY landscape with 160 stores. He also exudes this dynamism internationally as chairman of Bricoalliance, the European buying grouping,
www.bricoalliance.eu. Bricoalliance has nine active international partners operating in 12 different countries. Their total turnover is over €2.0 billion with more than 1,000 stores.
The keynote was presented as a Netflix screening in four episodes with two guiding principles:
- How do you steamroll an organisation from a challenger position into market leadership?
- How do you underpin that organisation to weather all storms and still remain profitable when margins are eroded?
The first episode explained how Hubo made the transition from the pandemic period over to the current crisis by repeatedly drawing lessons from success stories and setbacks.
The H-A-A-S Model
Episode Two explained in great detail how the Belgian retailer is gradually evolving from a product-centric organisation to a service model.
Erwin dissected the concept of ‘Service’ as a three-dimensional contribution to customer focus: availability of assortments, availability of qualified staff and anticipation of expectations (predictive service) by, among other things, expanding the concept of ‘do-it-together’.
To this end, Hubo made the acquisition of service online platform Solyd www.solyd.io earlier this year and works closely with the Benelux service company All Fields to implement that service model (Do-It-Together Home Installations).
Erwin calls this triple service demonstration, the H-A-A-S model: Hubo as a Service. Episode Three was the highlight of the presentation where the audience immediately understood why the Netflix metaphor was used: Hubo a Subscription. Erwin’s train of thought was simultaneously extremely surprising and also contagious: once a retailer has fully mastered the three-dimensional service offering, it shifts from a customer-centric organisation to a customer-binding organisation where customers express a form of preference, likeability so to speak. Hubo aims for an even higher level where customers will be willing to subscribe to a subscription model on an annual basis at a fixed fee for that blind trust.
With this formula, the DIY customer becomes part of the Hubo community, with the convincing guarantee that they will always get the best price for the most extensive service. Erwin Van Osta prefers the term ‘implicity’ here, an unconditional form of trust.
This service level is groundbreaking because it frees the retail-customer relationship from the negative price spiral and the weekly promotion wrangles. Episode Four anchors the previous three in a people-orientated organisation where team building, team spirit and team work are part of the Hubo DNA. For this, the Hubo top executive uses the slogan ‘Hubo as a squad’. It goes without saying that Erwin Van Osta received a sky-high score at the Berlin Global DIY Summit. Thus once again it demonstrates the need for vision rather than entertainment on such stages.
Embrace Technology in DIY
Erik Cuypers, Group CIO/CDO Maxeda DIY with headquarters in Amsterdam, is one of a select group of top experts who, from a retail DIY perspective, wants to accelerate the need to embrace the available high tech that can facilitate quite a few activities on the DIY store floor. Erik has been working on the digital transformation process of Brico (Belgium) and Praxis (the Netherlands) for several years. Among other things, he makes a point of banishing the term “omnichannel” once and for all and replacing it with the term “omni-consumer”.The high tech expert rightly proclaims that there is no separation between online and offline, which requires a ‘Single View’ (a holistic approach to retailing) across all processes (single view on SKUs, single view on the store shelf, stock management, ordering process and service delivery).
Digital Transformation needs to be driven by the corporate culture because technology simultaneously drives retail processes (data analytics and CRM), facilitates the customer experience (configurators for customised ordering) and finally changes the entire business model (from a purely transactional model to a service model).
Maxeda appears to be pioneering in high tech today with several experiments running at Praxis (close to 200 stores in the Netherlands) in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are concretely applied. Heatmaps are a good example of navigation systems driven by AI. This technological
application enables retailers to monitor customer flows in store aisles thanks to data analysis for both geographical localisation and user behaviour. Heatmaps are also useful to make accurate decisions for the optimal placement of Sku’s, gondola arrangements and displays in general and by extension to determine the impact of promotions. Finally, heatmap technology is also applied at the checkout to reduce waiting times, among other things.
For many, AI and ML still seem like ‘far-off’ ideals, while Erik says that this technology will drive our retail processes very soon and at an astronomical speed. Therefore, we should embrace AI and ML as soon as possible.

Data Decoded
The American Professor, Dr Christina Stathopoulos is an international data specialist and gave a brilliant presentation on this subject in Berlin, entitled ‘Data Decoded, the lifeblood of your business’. Brilliant because for over a thousand listeners, the academic made that rather complex subject matter about AI and ML accessible in a crystal-clear way in just thirty minutes. Among other things, she explained that AI provides three types of intelligence using data management:
- descriptive (understanding patterns from the past to distill correlations from them)
- predictive (identifying patterns from the past to determine the predictability of purchases, maximising chances of success)
- prescriptive (formulating advice towards the next concrete steps the customer will take).
During the subsequent networking events it became abundantly clear to most attendees what constitutes the cocktail of ingredients to weather the current crisis:
- political responsibility to rebalance the economy (the eternal dilemma of inflation versus deflation)
- a communication policy that, once again, boosts consumer confidence
- an innovative business model from the industry (from products to services)
- a new profile of leadership in which purchasing processes are not driven solely by the price factor
‘Visions for DIY in the age of certainty’
Using the above subtitle and based on the essence of the message from the DIY Summit review, we can adopt the conference theme with the knowledge that fundamental and positive change processes always have a catalysing effect on all stakeholders in the Home Improvement industry. And as always, only the tough exit each crisis as winners thanks to the positive energy they transmit, the insights and the foresights.
Images supplied with the kind permission of Karina Kulichenko, DIY Summit