#68 From DIY to Do-It-For-Me: How OBI Is Reinventing Home Renovation, with Felix Weber
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From Selling Products to Solving Projects: Inside OBI's DIY Retail Innovation Strategy
When a brand is recognised by 96 percent of a country's population, the temptation is to defend what works. OBI is doing the opposite. In a recent conversation on The Retail Reality Show, Felix Weber, Head of Innovation at OBI Group Holding and Managing Director of OBI SQUARED Venture Capital, laid out how one of Europe's best known home improvement retailers is rebuilding itself around a single idea: stop selling products, start solving projects.
Why DIY Retail Is Moving From Products to Projects
The traditional “Baumarkt” (DIY store) sells a hammer and a box of nails. The customer figures out the rest. That model still works, but it leaves most of the value on the table. A renovation for example is not a set of products. It is a complex journey that a customer might undertake once or twice in a lifetime, with no reference point and high stakes. That is exactly where a trusted partner becomes valuable.
OBI's stated goal is to become the number one destination for home and garden in Europe, and the path there runs through the entire customer journey rather than a single transaction. Inspiration, planning, materials, and execution all belong inside one relationship. The strategic logic is grounded in customer lifetime value. A single renovation customer can generate up to six different jobs over time, from a bathroom to a heat pump to a wall box. Acquiring that customer once and serving them repeatedly is worth far more than winning an isolated basket.
Do-It-For-Me as a Competitive Firewall
The shift introduces a second category alongside do-it-yourself: do-it-for-me. It spans everything from small assisted tasks to complex installations like photovoltaic systems and heat pumps that no customer completes alone. This do-it-for-me model is more than a service line. It functions as a firewall against pure product sellers. Online platforms and FMCG retailers can match a price on a power tool, but they cannot send a vetted craftsman to install a PV system and stand behind the result. In an age of agentic commerce, the ability to actually execute a project is a defensible advantage.
The hard part of this category is scale. Craftsmanship is traditionally local and difficult to standardise across a country, let alone a continent. Building services that scale across hundreds of stores and multiple markets is the central operational challenge OBI is working to solve.
Build vs Buy: An Innovation Operating Model That Avoids Becoming a Tech Company
Felix Weber comes from investment banking and venture capital, not retail, and that outside perspective shapes a clear build vs buy innovation strategy. His starting question is what a company's real assets are. For OBI he names the customer, customer insights, the stores, the ability to serve, and the brand. Almost everything else is open for discussion, because the market is usually more efficient than a single company.
This is where external innovation comes in. It takes the form of investing in startups, venture clienting, and acquisitions. The advantages are concrete: faster time to market, development risk moved off the balance sheet, and partners who are structurally forced to focus on customer needs rather than internal stakeholders. The counterargument is maintenance. A solution built in house must be supported forever as technologies and requirements change, which quietly turns a retailer into a tech company. For a business whose core is not technology, Weber argues that rarely makes sense.
There is also a cultural truth underneath the framework. As he puts it, “Real innovation is boring.” It is roughly 20 percent inspiration and 80 percent adoption, processes, legal review, IT security, and procurement. To keep innovation tied to actual problems, OBI places it inside the CEO office as part of group strategy rather than in a standalone lab that risks producing clever ideas no one needs.
The 42Watt Acquisition and the Discipline to Say No
The clearest expression of this thinking is 42Watt, a company installing PV systems and heat pumps. OBI started with a minority stake in 2023, then acquired the business as it pivoted to become a general contractor for energetic renovation of private homes. Owning that capability gives OBI end to end control of a high value journey, from acquiring the customer to issuing the final invoice. Notably, Weber measures success not by classic investment return but by customer lifetime value and revenue contribution, because it is no longer an investment, it is part of the group.
Innovation also means deciding what not to do. Weber highlights the idea of a kill team, a group whose job is to kill ideas so the organisation falls in love with the problem rather than the solution or the founder. Every initiative is tested against one question: does it move the needle on strategic goals?
Where Agentic AI Creates Value in Home and Garden
On AI, Weber is specific. The biggest value is an assistant that serves the customer end to end, a kind of 3AM employee and personal project manager. It can drive playful project planning, find and coordinate craftsmen, compare offers, and remember a customer's history to suggest the right next job. The same intelligence helps craftsmen by removing administrative work so they complete more installations, and it powers store shopping agents that make store employees more capable by carrying digital context into the physical store. His advice to any DIY CEO reflects this: innovation lives in processes as much as in the customer experience, which means getting data ready and becoming agentic commerce ready.
The full conversation goes deeper into each of these ideas and the reasoning behind them. Listen to the episode now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts to hear Felix Weber explain how OBI is turning a DIY retailer into an operating system for the home.
