With its Culinarion and Ambiance & Styles brands, EK France had an exceptional 2015 in a market that remains challenging. Eric Holzinger looks back at the major projects underway for the cooperative's partners.
// Pouvez-vous revenir sur l’évolution d’EK France depuis votre arrivée en 2014 ?
When I took over the management of EK France in 2014, I discovered a European cooperative based in Germany, EK ServiceGroup (of which EK France is a subsidiary), which now has more than 4,000 points of sale in various sectors and numerous countries. After a rapid analysis of the French market and the group's situation, we initiated several projects, particularly on communication, point of sale animation and product strategy.
On the communications side, we worked on the national awareness of the Ambiance & Styles brand by launching a television advertising campaign for the first time a few months ago. This was a real first for us, with a presence on screens between mid-November 2015 and mid-January 2016. We also developed our communication strategies and distributed 1,700,000 copies of our latest Christmas catalog. We are in a highly seasonal sector, with December representing approximately 25% of annual turnover. The like-for-like growth of 7.5% for Ambiance & Styles and 11% for Culinarion in December allowed us to return to very good results in 2015. This momentum continued in the first quarter of 2016 with double-digit growth for both brands.
// Vous êtes sur un objectif de notoriété pour vos enseignes. Quelles sont les autres actions que vous mettez en place ?
Our group is evolving its product strategy with the creation of our own brand, Chefs & Co, which was launched a few weeks ago. We're starting with a range of knives, then our customers will be able to discover other products in their stores in May-June, and we will gradually expand this offering. These are exclusive collections that aim to differentiate and drive margins for our members, while positioning ourselves to offer the best value for money for our customers.
We are developing our digital strategy with social media communication led by a community manager and combined with a more aggressive sales promotion plan. Still on the digital front, we have just launched mobile applications that will be enriched with features over the months for our two brands. The idea is to offer an increasingly personalized service to our customers. Finally, by September, we will completely redesign our websites with the aim of enriching the product offering for the "Click and Collect" activity. To date, we have between 600 and 700 references on our sites and we will increase this number to more than 3,000 references by the summer in order to have a representative offer of our stores in a web-to-store strategy. Mechanically, this work will contribute to the improvement of the natural referencing of our websites.
This global strategy to develop the reputation of our brands will also lead us to renew the Ambiance & Styles communication campaign on television at the end of 2016. All these projects have short deadlines in order to continue to stay ahead of the market.
// Parlez-nous du développement du réseau.
EK France is keen to relaunch the development of its network for its two brands, which explains our presence at the franchise trade show after a five-year absence. These initial efforts have enabled us to develop around sixty contacts that could lead to openings in the short term.
We have the potential to double the size of EK France with 70 Culinarion points of sale and 200 Ambiances & Styles stores. To facilitate this ambition, we seek to simplify the lives of our entrepreneurs so that they consider opening a second or even a third point of sale . It is by supporting them ever better in their daily management that they will be able to plan for a multi-store strategy. Some of our partners have understood this well, but it is still too marginal in the network. For our members, value creation will come from the development of their business beyond the growth of each store. Furthermore, as in all networks, we will be faced with transfers in the coming years due to retirements. It is clear that takeovers will involve not only the recruitment of new partners but also players already present within EK France who will want to grow. We have a duty to give them the means to do so.
// Comment pensez-vous améliorer la vie de vos adhérents ?
We're starting to simplify our merchant management by partnering with our 100 suppliers. We're creating a single product database that will be dynamically populated to speed up updates, whether for product descriptions or price adjustments. It's precisely these types of time-consuming tasks that we're trying to reduce as much as possible.
But our challenge remains commerce with the ability to duplicate winning recipes:
So, I can already reveal to you that 2016 will be the year of the launch of a new store concept for Culinarion. A new initiative that will allow us to satisfy our customers and our associates!