LeShop

The highlight of today was the visit of Christian Wanner, co-founder and CEO of LeShop.ch.
Christian visited our Operations class where we had been preparing and discussing a case on Ocado and Tesco, the two largest online food retailers in UK market. As the UK market by far is the most developed market for online food retailers, this also make the two competitors the largest in the world. It is the classic fight between the new entrant, Ocado, and the big established player. Tesco leverages it large existing network of stores to enter the online market while Ocado goes for delivery-only. Both models has its operational advantages and drawbacks. LeShop is the Swiss equivalent of Ocado, but in the absence of a Swiss equivalent of Tesco LeShop has taken the lead in Switzerland. LeShop was started in 1999, but as Christian said 'he had to walk five years in the desert' before it took off, but then it also took off big time.

As we started pushing Christian for more 'juice details' he told a fascinating story about how LeShop back in 2002 literally had been hours away from closing down. It was saved by the bell because of the commitment of its management and employees. As Christian pointed out: 'Sometimes the gap between failure and success is extremely narrow.' It felt more like we were in an Entrepreneurship class than in Operations, but who cares, this was real life and there it all comes together anyway!