300 million euro online turnover by 2017
The chains Blokker, Leen Bakker, Bart Smit and Xenos will continue to have their separate webshops, but their development and all of the online marketing and sales activities will be gathered in Nextail. Online formula managers will watch over the online positioning of the their store formulas, the online product range and the connection with the physical store network.
Blokker wants to speed up the omnichannel activities of all of its store chains and it aims to get more than 300 million euro in online turnover by 2017. Last year, Blokker Holding managed a 79 million euro online turnover, 19 % more than 2012.
Combination of all online knowledge
Current omnichannel manager Antoine Brouwer, who joined Blokker Holding in May 2014 after periods at Media Markt/Saturn, T-Mobile and UPC, will lead Nextail.
Nextail will employ 70 people, 50 % online and eCommerce specialists employed by the store chains that will now be merged at Nextail. The other half of the employees were contracted from elsewhere. “Combining the online knowledge within one organization and with the benefit of our scale, the group expects to get more return out of its eCommerce investments and the perfect merger of online and offline retail”, the Blokker Holding press release said.
Nextail will be located in a building in Amsterdam and will open on 20 October 2014. The name comes from the combination of “next step” and retail/”longtail” and means “innovation and the thought that niche products can still reach a very broad audience through the internet”.
