The balancing act behind Kingfisher’s turnaround

There is a tendency in large organisations to believe that scale solves everything. More centralisation. More alignment. More consistency. Thierry Garnier has spent much of his tenure at Kingfisher undoing that assumption.

“One of the usual mistakes is to try to do too much together as a group,” he says.

When he arrived in 2019, Kingfisher was a business with strong brands but uneven performance. The instinct had been to drive efficiency through standardisation across markets. In practice, it had the opposite effect.

“Trying to do too much together [meant] losing the customer and then losing sales,” he says.

The shift since has been less about strategy and more about balance. What should be centralised, and what should not. At Kingfisher, that balance is now explicit. Customer decisions, pricing, ranging and loyalty sit with individual brands. Technology and private label sit with the group.

“It’s stupid to have 10 teams in charge of AI,” Garnier says. It is a simple principle, but one that requires discipline. Scale where it matters. Stay close to the customer where it counts.

The impact has been cultural as much as operational. When Garnier joined, morale was low. Decisions had slowed. Ownership had diluted. Reintroducing autonomy, to brands, stores and individuals, changed that dynamic quickly.

“If you want to grow fast, you need to empower your team,” he says. That empowerment is not theoretical. Store managers are given the ability to respond to local conditions, adjusting ranges or reacting to competitors, within a broader framework. It is a deliberate move away from control.

But empowerment comes with a trade-off. Speed increases, but so does the likelihood of mistakes. Garnier’s response has been to reframe how mistakes are treated.

“You need to celebrate the mistakes so that people understand that it’s okay,” he says. This is not about lowering standards. It is about accelerating learning. Projects are tested quickly, assessed honestly and, when necessary, stopped without hesitation.

“We tried eight and after 12 months, we closed all eight stores because it was not successful,” he says of one initiative. The discipline lies not in avoiding failure, but in recognising it early.

Underlying this approach is a broader shift in leadership style. Garnier describes his earlier career as defined by perfectionism, a tendency to control, refine and optimise before acting.

“Perfection is a disease,” he says. Experience, particularly in China, forced a different perspective. Speed, pragmatism and iteration became more valuable than precision.

That thinking now shapes how Kingfisher approaches its future. Retail, in Garnier’s view, is moving towards a hybrid model where physical and digital converge. Stores are no longer just places to transact, but assets that enable speed.

“We are delivering home in around 20 minutes,” he says. This shift reflects a broader change in customer expectations. Faster fulfilment, more flexibility, and clearer value in the in-store experience.

It also reinforces the importance of proximity. Rather than consolidating into fewer, larger sites, Garnier sees a network of smaller, more responsive locations.

“You need to be close to people,” he says. Across all of this, a consistent theme emerges. Growth is not driven by a single lever. It is the result of multiple trade-offs, managed well.

Centralisation versus autonomy. Speed versus control. Scale versus relevance. The role of leadership, in this context, is not to resolve those tensions completely, but to hold them in balance.

And to keep moving forward.