The Warehouse Group

Yeah, yeah.

All right, coming up after 2 o'clock, the Warehouse Group is planning a major overhaul of its stores and operations to try and turn around years of underperformance.

Question we've got for you.

Have you fallen out of love with the warehouse? If yes, why? And what would it take to get your love back? Tell us.

0800 80 1080 is that number to call.

9292 is the text.

Starting now.

We certainly do.

I went and hung out with the cool people at the warehouse.

Shout out to the White House.

Yeah, they had this Christmas event on today at the headquarters.

And it was an invitation to head along and check out the new stuff that they got coming out for Christmas.

Let's hope so.

Anyway, I mean, certainly the warehouse group as well, we're out there in markets saying, hey, we've got this ambitious new strategy that what doesn't seem to, it seems to defy gravity when it wants to sort of forex its operating market.

Yeah, that's right.

So here's another company that's lost around about 90% of value since those peak levels, you know, when everyone's spending sort of coming out of COVID.

Yeah, so it's no secret it's been a tough environment for retailers for the last, well, probably at least five years now.

Two of our biggest, the Warehouse Group and KMD Brands, have both announced pretty significant changes in the last few days.

So starting off with KMD Brands, which owns Katmandu, Rip Curl and Oboz, it disclosed on Monday that it's in talks to sell to a big US consumer group called Blue Star Alliance.

That firm...

Is that a lot, especially in the tough, tight retail market there is and has been? Is that a lot to be aiming to open?

I think so, and people, if anything, have been turning away from bricks and mortar stores as well, right? So it's an interesting strategy to be opening more stores.

It also comes just last week, just at the end of Friday, a shareholder in the warehouse group, this guy called Tommy Scrivener, who's a university student and has been quite an active shareholder for a couple of NZX-listed companies over the last year or so.

He's basically written to the board and asked why they own Three particular properties, which they've said are worth about $140 million.

They release all their announcements at 8.30 in the morning.

From the Warehouse Group, they've released a new strategy and they're now aiming to make $100 million in profits within three to five years.

That will be quite an impressive effort because last year they made just under $23 million, so they want to grow it.

by nearly four times.

We, you know, we, um, we've started with large businesses.

The Warehouse Group was our first customer.

We, we took two solar farms and sold it to 200 of their stores.

And, and the techniques to sell to 200 locations are not a whole lot different than selling to 2,000 locations.

It wasn't super popular, it wasn't super exciting, but we could do really cool things with it.

And so we had some great customers like Helen Stynes and Glassons, and we had various parts of the Warehouse Group, ACC, Vector, KPMG, Vodafone, many places.

And if it works, it worked really well.

But that was not the AI that we're talking about today.