Our Strategy

1

Inspire our customers with a differentiated and super-specialist offer.

Objectives

Specialism

We will become a super-specialist by:

  • Increasing our online ranges of motoring and cycling products.
  • Investing in training with even greater focus on specialism.
  • Reducing our non-core products.

Innovation

We will lead and differentiate our markets with customer-led innovation by:

  • Utilising customer insight to develop products we know they want and need.
  • Working with suppliers to jointly create, and bring to market, innovative products which are exclusive to Halfords.

Customer Experience

We will improve our customer shopping journey online and instore by:

  • Continuing to optimise the Group’s web platform and the full omnichannel journey.
  • Focusing on personalisation by leveraging our Group-wide Single Customer View.
  • Improving the in-store experience by providing a more experiential, inspirational and service-led environment.

Progress Made

  • Launched over 160 new customer enhancements to our group website, including ‘email me when in stock’, guided selling, local store stock availability, and personalisation.
  • Expanded our E-scooter range; introducing our first own-brand E-scooter and a greater number of products at a broader range of price points.
  • Transferred inbound phone and digital customer-contact from all 404 retail stores to a centralised, specialist team.

Priorities for the Year

  • Project ‘Fusion’ remains an exciting opportunity and we will trial 2-3 towns in FY22. Fusion is ‘a customer experience seamlessly, consistently, and conveniently executed across all of our assets in a town’.
  • We will continue to invest heavily in our digital proposition, whether online through the Group web platform, or enabling the wider transformation agenda.
  • Through Project ‘Peloton 2’, we will significantly improve our PACs (“parts, accessories and clothing”) offering in Cycling, through better ranging, improved merchandising, and most importantly enabling our colleagues to provide customers with complete solutions to their needs.

This year, we launched our own-brand E-scooter – the Carrera impel is-1 – bringing together the strength and reputation of the Carrera brand and the exciting growth in the E-scooter market. The impel offers customers the same high-quality performance technology commonly found on performance E-scooters but at a much lower price point.

Developing our own product has meant we have been able to talk to our customers, understand the pain points with branded E-scooters, and design a product which our customers love and that our electric service technicians know inside and out.

The impel has received great reviews from customers and critics, and has been in high demand with consumers as pressure mounts for the legalisation of E-scooters as we transition out of COVID-19 lockdowns and prepare for an exciting future of electric mobility within the UK.