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then as now
Metcash’s home improvement pillar, along with Mitre 10, while Bunnings benefited from Masters’ demise by occupying some of the Masters sites, in WA particularly.
IS BIGGER ALWAYS BETTER?
Back in October 2011 we told another story that’s closely related to the benefits of scale.
Vinod Kumar and brother Dee Lal, were back then MD and GM respectively of the Henderson and Botany Mitre 10 MEGAs and the Westgate Home & Trade store, and had made their mark on DIY retailing over the previous two and a half decades.
Having found the finance in the difficult late 1980s to
buy McCorkindale’s three West Auckland hardware stores, McCorkindale’s managers joked the pair would turn the store into a dairy – and indeed they were among the first retailers to open on Sundays – but sales rose quickly.
“We didn’t know what recession was, because our sales just kept going up,” said Vinod in 2011.
And bigger was going to be better, he reckoned, so by 1993 a new 2,000m2 Henderson store opened for business, the first Mitre 10 Home & Trade branded store in Australasia, not to mention the first purpose-built Mitre 10 store in the country.
Early on, visits during a Mitre 10 conference in Seattle had opened Vinod Kumar’s eyes to the opportunities offered by scale: “I looked at all the big stores over there and said ‘Gee this is worth having...”
Bigger would become a watchword for Vinod Kumar – and for Mitre 10 in general.
“It’s like having rifles when the opposition has tanks,” he quipped in 2011. “If you want to go to war, go fully prepared or don’t go at all!”
To state the obvious, back in the late 1990s, the “opposition” was the promise of Bunnings, which would buy HardwareHouse and rebrand the stores as Bunnings in 2002.
To forestall this move, around 1999-2000 Mitre 10 NZ set to
Vinod Kumar chased scale throughout his career, from Mitre 10 Westgate circa 1995 to Nido (below) in 2020.
tooling up and Vinod Kumar was part of the co-op’s advisory team tasked with developing the new MEGA format which would debut in in 2004.
Having opened the second ever MEGA in Henderson that year, fast forward now to 2018 when Vinod surprises us by selling the store to Dave and Elaine Hargreaves of Mitre 10 MEGA Westgate.
Unimaginable that he wouldn’t pop up somewhere interesting, shaking the tree as has been his wont, by early 2019 we were hearing about Vinod Kumar and his ambitious new upscale venture called Nido.
One of if not the largest single retail store in New Zealand, the 27,000m2 furniture & furnishings store aimed to carry 10,000+ product lines and house 80 exclusive brands (Vinod being renowned for his buying nouse), with 100+ display rooms.
Originally scheduled to open in spring 2019, having been delayed and hampered in construction by lockdowns, and with less than the promised offering, Nido eventually opened in mid-2020.
Just a few months later, sadly we find Nido in liquidation, with the receivers saying the failure was all about timing, launching as it did during Covid-19.
Decide for yourselves whether the sheer ambitious scale of Masters and Nido were the root causes of their failures...
48 NZHJ | OCTOBER 2021
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