It has been 30 years since Woolworths became the first supermarket in New Zealand to deliver online grocery shopping.
Des Flynn was there at the start and shared how hard they fought to get it off the ground, and the pride he feels now seeing it run as an important convenience offering for customers.
When Flynn looks at a Woolworths supermarket team member loading online grocery orders into a customer’s boot, he isn’t just looking at modern retail convenience. He is looking at a revolution he personally championed.
Back in 1996, long before smartphones or high-speed broadband, Flynn helped pioneer New Zealand’s first online supermarket service for Woolworths. But he said the story behind its inception was one of sheer grit, defiance, and a refusal to pass up a good idea.
Around 1994, as the early internet began to emerge, Flynn connected with Andrew Faris from Ad Pacifica to discuss building a great New Zealand shopping mall online.
Realising the concept was too ambitious for the time, he narrowed the focus and decided to establish an online supermarket as the anchor first. Soon after, a shift in corporate leadership brought structural changes, and his role was no longer required.
Before leaving, Flynn asked about the intellectual property. The new leadership chose not to pursue it at the time, but agreed to let him take the concept with him and formally transfer the rights.
Shortly after, Flynn was rehired by Woolworths into his former role overseeing group marketing and business development. When he presented his personal online retail concept, it was agreed with the Managing Director at the time that Flynn could see where he could take it.
Operating on a shoestring budget, Flynn and a small, young, talented team worked tirelessly on user experience, focusing on reducing clicks and speeding up the site for customers. The missing piece of the puzzle, how to handle fulfilment without burning through millions, came during a trip to London.
While visiting Tesco to learn about their newly launched Clubcard system, Flynn met a fellow Kiwi working on online retail. The contact revealed a game-changing secret: instead of building expensive "dark stores" or fulfilment centres, supermarkets could pick online orders directly from the shelves and utilise oversized backrooms created by moving to daily delivery models.
In 1996, Woolworths launched a closed-loop trial with 100 shoppers. At first, Flynn and his team lead, Richard Harrison, didn't sit in boardroom meetings; they went into the old Manurewa store and picked orders themselves.
Online shopping began as a trial with 100 customers in 1996. Today, Woolworths processes more than 160,000 online orders every week, or around eight million orders per year.
Hands-on picking revealed unexpected hurdles. Pickers struggled to select fresh produce like lettuce that met online buyers' expectations. This forced Woolworths to raise product quality standards across all its stores.
Another breakthrough came when the Manurewa store manager complained that 80 percent of orders were missing items, notably 750g boxes of Weet-Bix.
Data analysis revealed that 20 percent of product lines drove 80 percent of sales. By guaranteeing that the top 200 grocery lines were never out of stock, Woolworths boosted its overall store sales by 4 percent overnight.
By late 1997, the trial expanded from Auckland to a nationwide network. By the year 2000, the online operation turned a profit.
When Progressive later acquired Woolworths and conversations began about shutting the service down, Flynn fiercely defended its profitability to corporate auditors, saving the service a second time.
He went on to build an extraordinary career, later serving as COO and CEO within Life Pharmacy Group (helping engineer Green Cross Health) and spending 14 years at The Warehouse Group. Now retired at 76, he looks back on his role in New Zealand's retail history with quiet pride.
