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The company will consolidate its entire online offer at falabella.com, which will now include current sites such as Linio.
The third floor of the Falabella corporate building, on Rosas Street, in the center of Santiago, entered a new normal. After months unemployed by the pandemic, the president of the firm, Carlo Solari, and the general manager, Gaston Bottazzini, returned to their offices. It is a way of giving a signal to all the workers who have returned to the sales rooms, says an insider. “In the corridors many problems have been solved; It is not the same as being in teleworking mode ”, says a senior manager of the company.
In the midst of this new reality, the company announced yesterday what it defined as “an important step to consolidate its leadership” in electronic commerce in the region: it will transform falabella.com into its only technological platform for electronic commerce (e-commerce) , converging in it all its retail and marketplace offerings.
Benoit de Grave will lead the new platform.
In this way, the new corporate platform will incorporate the current sites such as Falabella Retail, Sodimac, Tottus and Linio.
Falabella also reported that it will establish a new logistics area dedicated to dispatching purchases made on this unique platform. To that end, he said that the last-mile logistics of all the company’s business units and that of external companies will be combined. “In order to streamline shipping costs, shorten delivery times and improve customer service,” the company said in a statement.
The new platform – which has not yet been implemented – will be led by Benoit de Grave, current general manager of Linio.
In this scheme, the CEO of falabella.com, Ricardo Alonso, becomes the manager of the corporate site’s Marketplace.
This reorganization follows the delays in the company’s dispatches for online purchases, which the firm attributed to the explosive demand for the pandemic.
Misstep?
When Falabella acquired the Linio platform for US $ 138 million in 2018, Bottazzini said: “Linio is going to boost the sales of Falabella Retail, Sodimac and Tottus, becoming a common showcase for the products of the group’s companies, which will continue to strengthen their own sites ”.
Today, the vision is different: “Consolidating our e-commerce at falabella.com will give us great synergies in our IT developments. It will give us greater speed and simplicity, because we will unite the resources in a single technological platform ”, said the CEO yesterday.
According to industry executives, this move may be a response to the latest move made by Cencosud, which reached an agreement with Cornershop today controlled by Uber.
Another former McKinsey takes on a key company position
French nationalized Chilean, Benoit de Grave was chosen by Falabella’s management to lead the company’s new internet platform. The executive will leave the general management of Linio, the marketplace that the group acquired and that it originally intended to turn into its workhorse to compete with giants such as Amazon and Aliexpress.
He studied at the University of Girona (Spain), a master’s degree at the ICN Business School in Nancy (France) and an MBA at the Kellogg school of Northwestern University in Chicago. Later, he was recruited as an associate at McKinsey, a firm that became a hotbed for Falabella managers. Its CEO, Gaston Botazzini, and the general manager of Falabella Financiero, Juan Manuel Matheu, also passed by.
De Grave coincided with both of them during his period at the consulting firm (2008-2010) and they were the ones who promoted his arrival in Falabella from BBVA. He arrived at the bank, where he took over marketing. Then he led the group’s travel agency at the regional level, went on to the insurance business and then to the general management of Banco Falabella in Chile. In January 2019, after the creation of Falabella Financiero, he assumed commercial management. It was half a year when Linio came to lead. Now he will be in charge of the entire digital transformation of the group.
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