Commercial Strategy, Customer Experience & Concept Development
Hervé Laengel.
Thirty-one years of retail operations, from the sales floor of a French store to global concept work, across Europe, Asia and North America. A builder who arrives with a fresh perspective and stays until the impact is measurable.
The numbers behind the record.
Hervé spent thirty-one years at IKEA. At his peak store posting he ran three departments carrying roughly €90M of a €300M flagship, about a third of the store, and drove consumer-credit selling from around one contract per co-worker per week to as many as ten, taking the store to number one in the country on that line. He was also part of the team that opened IKEA's first store in India, in Hyderabad.
His signature rollout sits on our proof wall: the national switch from one kitchen range to its successor, 29 stores moved on a single date with zero lost revenue, in a category worth a quarter of the company's French turnover. Eight domain leaders, around 145 store-side people, one date, and a ten-year after-sales guarantee to honour behind it.
From stores to meeting places.
At Ingka Centres he built the integration framework used across some thirty meeting places, with governance live in ten locations, and ran workshops with 200+ people across the China, Europe and Nordic clusters. One uncomfortable number drove the work: 60% of centre visitors never enter the anchor store. Turning that into concept and partnership decisions lifted cross-visitation measurably, one centre at a time.
He brings deep expertise in customer-centric design, commercial strategy and digital interaction, and a habit of building with cities, organisations and local teams rather than around them. As an operator he identifies what matters, builds the solution, and stays until it delivers on the floor.
What he signs.
Hervé signs Adoption, not launch, the piece on why a rollout only counts once the organisation has made it its own, under Thinking.
Work with an operator who builds.
A 30-minute diagnostic: we pressure-test your carve-out, AI rollout or transformation, and give you the first three things we would do. No pitch.