Q&A: Kingfisher’s Dorothee D’Herde on meeting cost and sustainability needs

How have consumers’ attitudes to sustainability changed through the cost-of-living crisis?

I would probably say it’s caused an acceleration of a trend that had already started. There’s an awareness about sustainability, but people are also cash-strapped. It’s a win-win if you save energy or water, and also save on your costs. 

If you define sustainable as ’enough for all, forever’, there is an environmental element and a community element in it, and some of those trends have accelerated and people care more about getting products that are sustainable, that help them save energy and water, but that are not also harmful.

We’ve made a huge effort, for example, around peat-free compost in the UK, and that is very much in conversation with customers and shaped by their views. So I think the sustainability conversation will become ever more important as long as it’s not more costly, which is very much something we’re very mindful of.

Kingfisher has made lots of progress on sustainability commitments this year – which achievement are you most proud of?

For me, it’s where we’re getting with the customer side of things. Homes in the UK lose heat three times faster than our European neighbours, and combine that with the fact that housing is responsible for 20% of UK emissions. 

There’s such a huge opportunity here and people are actually interested and want to make their homes more energy-efficient. People over 65 are being particularly affected, typically are living in less efficient houses and spending more money on energy than those under 30. They want to do it, but they feel either the investment upfront is not affordable, or they don’t really know what the options are, or they’re a bit puzzled as to where to start.

So B&Q is partnering with The Energy Trust to help customers get an appointment for a 45-minute conversation covering where they’re at, what would help and what they need, so it kind of becomes a whole offer from beginning to end. I think we’ve had over 1,400 appointments already.

And what could there be more progress on? 

Across the board, there is room for improvement. When you know the extent of the challenges and the extent of the opportunity, there is so much room for growth. Whether it’s continuing on our journey to more gender diversity in our senior leadership team, whether it’s reducing the emissions from our operations and then looking at scope three – which is the absolute lion’s share of our emissions. 

Scope three covers emissions from everything in your value chain. Where scope one is your direct emissions, for example, from your logistics, and scope two is the electricity that you use and the emissions from that, scope three is everything from the materials that you use to the energy you use through manufacturing, plus all of the emissions from the use of your goods. 

All the charging that people do with their power tools, and other customer use, makes up around 75% of that, so we have a huge focus on it. We’ve made a lot of effort around getting the right level of data and making products more energy efficient. 

We saw an emphasis on energy saving earlier in the year, but what types of sustainable products are people investing in now? 

Water saving is definitely a key segment, with products like water butts for the garden, tap aerators and dual-flush toilets. 

With all the droughts and hosepipe bans, we looked at water stress for a thought leadership campaign. It’s estimated that seven out of the 17 regions will be water-stressed by 2030, and 12 out of the 17 by 2040. People usually underestimate how much water they use in a day – they think it’s under 60 litres, but it’s actually 141 litres per day, per person, and 70% of that is in the bathroom.