Baumarkt Direkt

» see baumarktdirekt.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

OBI@OTTO was set up in 2000 as an even split between a German hardware-store chain and a mail-order house, and it went nationwide in March 2001 after a test phase. The idea was to put OBI's shelves and Otto's catalog logistics behind one order. Around 8,000 DIY articles were available through the website or a printed catalog, and the same order could be placed over the counter in an OBI or an Otto branch. Whichever parent held the stock did the picking, and Hermes handled delivery to the door.

It worked well enough to win an award. The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institut gave the company its E-Shop prize in 2003, specifically for the multichannel arrangement. A manager said in 2005 that most of the revenue was still coming from catalog orders, with the website promoted through direct marketing and search engine optimization.

The partners then changed. On 1 October 2006 Otto bought out OBI's half, and OBI left. The company renamed itself Baumarkt Direkt in early 2007, and on 1 March 2007 Hagebau came in as the new joint-venture partner, with Baumarkt Direkt becoming a limited partner in Hagebau as part of the swap. From then on the public-facing brand was Hagebau Direkt, and the operation ran the Hagebau group's shops.

In October 2018 the company announced that the cooperation would end in the summer of 2019. The joint venture was dissolved as of July 2019 and roughly 200 staff were absorbed by the two parent groups. The Hagebau group carried on running its own shops at hagebau.de and werkerswelt.de alone.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the catalog that outsold the website ~

The revenue line is the most interesting thing in the file. 171 million euros in 2006, down to 147 in 2008/09, then up every single year afterwards: 153, then 182.8, then 194.3, 204.4, 221, 225, 239, 245, and 260 million in 2017/18. The business was still growing at the end. Very few entries on this site can say that.

In 2010/11 the company reported that online had overtaken the catalog for the first time. The internet's own mythology puts that crossover a good decade earlier. By 2012 the range had grown to 20,000 articles and barely overlapped with what the physical stores carried, because the whole point was things too bulky to walk out with. A mobile shop went live at m.hagebau.de in August 2011 and an iPad app followed in May 2012. The second-largest channel was still a customer standing in a Hagebau branch placing an online or catalog order, for which Baumarkt Direkt paid the store a commission.

This is a German arrangement end to end, and the part I cannot reconstruct from the outside is how ordinary it felt. Buying a shower tray out of a paper catalog from a chain in Hamburg and having a courier bring it to a flat is a German retail habit that predates the web by decades. Turkey had no equivalent I ever ordered from, so the habit Baumarkt Direkt spent nineteen years modernizing is a step I never saw in its original form.

~ two business models ~

The stated reason for the split was strategy. Otto was building a platform, meaning a marketplace that carries other sellers' goods, and Hagebau wanted cross-channel retail, meaning its own goods moving between its own stores and its own site. A shared back office can serve one of those or the other. The Otto Group announcement on 1 October 2018 said both sides would pursue individual business concepts in the do-it-yourself segment, and the German trade press headlined it as the two groups going separate ways.

Otto did not leave the category. It opened a sub-shop at otto-baumarkt.de late in 2019. In September 2021 that shop was folded into otto.de along with several other specialist storefronts. baumarktdirekt.de still resolves and answers nothing, timing out on both schemes. The .com resolves too, to a Nameshield brand-protection page explaining in French that the domain currently does not point at any website. Nineteen years went into teaching two large retailers how to share a single order, and the sharing is the one piece neither of them kept.

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