"Diversity is important"

One of the few DIY retail companies worldwide with a woman at the top is now the New Zealand co-operative Mitre 10. Andrea Scown, previously Chief Operating Officer at the Albany headquarters, has been appointed Chief Executive Officer. She succeeded Australian Chris Wilesmith, who announced his retirement in autumn. A press release from the co-operative gave private reasons for this: Wilesmith was unable to commute between his job in New Zealand and his family in Australia due to Corona travel restrictions.
Andrea Scown joined Mitre 10 New Zealand in June 2017 as general manager retail operations. Three years later, she was appointed Chief Operating Officer. Her appointment as CEO is remarkable for the company in two respects, as the Chairman of the Board Martin Dippie explicitly points out: not only is she the first woman in this position at the co-operative, but it is also the first internal appointment made to the CEO role at Mitre 10 New Zealand.

Andrea Scown: In New Zealand, we had our first lockdown on 25 March. We had to completely close our store network, which was a real challenge. One aspect was that as the largest garden centre operator in the country, there were thousands of live plants that needed care. But as you know, we are a co-operative, and that was a real benefit, because we have very capable operators at each of those stores who were able to implement protocols that allowed essential work to be carried out safely.
We had very limited revenues for those next few weeks. We were selling online, and we were able to offer click & collect. But again, being a big box business, you are set up for efficient customer shopping in a normal world; then when you are actually closed and you are using that store almost as a fulfilment centre for customers shopping a few products online - it's a really inefficient model.

Yes, but it was a very small part of our business. We had the infrastructure there, and we worked very, very quickly to add more products on a daily basis to sell more and more online. A good example: Before lockdown we had never sold paint online, but when that became our only sales channel, we had to adapt pretty quickly and came up with a solution to make it possible.

It's still small, but we are aiming to almost double online revenue this financial year, and we are well on the way…