Interview: EasyHire exec talks about bringing tool hire to more people

Under the new agreement with Wilko, easyToolhire fulfills all tool and equipment hire orders from its 25 depots across the UK. The website offers a variety of equipment, including gardening and landscaping, cleaning, painting and decorating, drilling and breaking, and sawing and cutting. Users can select the equipment they require, the dates they need them for and where they wish them to be delivered to, such as a site or home address.

To learn more about how this partnership works, IRN spoke with Dennis Helderman, co-founder and CEO of easyHire. Following is an excerpt from that discussion.

Dennis Helderman, co-founder and CEO of easyHire.

IRN: Tell us a little about the company and your role?

Helderman: We’re an international business, with operations in Spain, Portugal, as well as Italy, but our head office is in London.

Personally, I’m the CEO of Easy Hire Technologies as a group holding, so I oversee what’s happening in Europe as well as in the UK.

We have multiple trademarks. One is easyToolhire, which is the trademark we have for the United Kingdom, and which is in partnership with Wilko. We also have the localization of that in Spain, which is easyOculaire and then in Italy, easyNoleggio.

IRN: How does the partnership with Wilko work?

Helderman: We started talking to Wilko about a year ago and they told us their customer base has an appetite for hire. This follows the trend of retail outlets looking to start offering hire services.

Wilko is dealing with its own transition, but the new owners were keen to tap into the hire opportunity their customer base provided. The deal that we have with them is a joint venture, where we’ve offered our entire technical stack, as well as infrastructure around the supply chain, for them to service customers that are requesting hire items.

It ranges from big to small, with a special focus on gardening and landscaping.

It’s all primarily through the e-commerce website that we’ve launched together called wilkotoolhire,

easyHire hopes that partnering with Wilko will help create a one-stop shop, digital experience for the end user.

which is powered by easyToolhire.

All the underlying technology, as well as the supply chain, was built up from our side. And then from Wilko’s side, they’re doing the marketing to their own customer base, both offline and online.

We’re hoping that by doing a partnership with a very recognizable brand like Wilko, and by placing all this information digitally in one place, we can create a one-stop shop, digital experience for the end user. It should increase the penetration of hire within the UK because there’s an opportunity to get more people to understand the benefits of hiring instead of purchasing.

We would like to make equipment hire more accessible and easy for the end customer. We hope through this partnership with Wilko that we’ll get in front of more people and build something to give customers access to the right information at the right time to be able to place their hire, on a mobile device.

IRN: How does the transaction work for customers?

Helderman: Let’s say a customer looks to hire a skip from us. They scan a QR code and are taken to an account landing page that will tell them everything they need to know about hiring a skip, in terms of picking the right size and the type of material you can put inside of it. It’s basically a product catalog.

They can shift to different products and make a decision there and then. They can check out, pay online and the deal is done. We’ll then deliver it within whatever date and time they’ve set.

If they don’t feel ready enough to make decision online at that very moment, they can also ask for a quotation, or they can get in touch with us over WhatsApp, which is actually one of the primary customer communication platforms we’re betting on. 

But let’s say they get in touch with us. They can also get the exact quotes for that product and can turn it into a hire. In terms of what happens behind the scenes for us, let’s say with this example that we don’t own any skips. We would then broker that transaction out, but we would be the merchants on record. It won’t be Wilko.

The world of skip hire is incredibly fragmented, there are very few national skip hire companies. So we broker it out from our own supply chain, and we work primarily with independent and regional businesses because from our experience, they provide a higher quality of service.

IRN: Who actually owns the equipment?

easyHire’s product offering ranges from big to small, with a special focus on gardening and landscaping.

Helderman: We don’t own any assets and we are actually forbidden from doing so. We will never open our own outlets and own our own assets, which makes it very important for us to partner up with the right sort of businesses. Our mission statement has always been to make equipment hire as accessible and easy as possible.

We felt the best way we can accomplish that is by simplifying the end customer’s journey and then by helping out with the distribution challenge you have with DIY customers. This means partnering up with a retail chain that can get us in front of more customers, which is what we’ve done with Wilko.

Again, we like to work with businesses that really care about their customers, and the way we do that is with independent operators that are generally family run and know how to best service their local area.

IRN: How do you decide which products to supply?

Helderman: The beauty of what we’re doing is the fact that we’re putting all these pieces together under one roof and offering a digital experience to the end customer.

We can immediately tell, based on analytics, whether there’s demand in each outlet for different sorts of products. It’s not easy to do; others have had their challenges going completely digital with the e-commerce route.

Wilko has been heavily focused on e-commerce, and we’re aligned with continuing that approach, which allows us to be fairly data driven around what we offer.

IRN: Is there a possibility that you might acquire the rights to Wilko and roll everything into one business?

Helderman: It’s impossible to predict the future. I do believe Easy holds a lot of strong brand affinity, especially in the UK, so it would be rare for us to acquire another trademark and brand, because there’s just so much that we can do with the Easy brand. It’s a powerhouse brand.

EasyJet has been leading the charge for the last 30 years, creating brand values that apply really well within the tool and plant hire industry. I wouldn’t put a high probability to us acquiring another trademark.

IRN: What is your primary goal?

Helderman: It’s absolutely to increase the penetration of hire industry wide.

It’s necessary to go after distribution partnerships and get the proposition in front of more customers, especially in store, but at the same time, via offering a digital experience. 

We definitely will be doing more distribution partnerships within the industry, both in the UK as well as in internationally.

Internationally speaking, we would focus on Spain and Portugal, which are two markets that we are very optimistic about and we have some great partners and great relationships there.

IRN: Are you looking at any specific partnerships?

Helderman: Yes, but it’s confidential. I can’t mention the names that we’re in discussions with, but the answer to that question is yes, both domestically as well as internationally.