Magento news – Kennards Hire Customer Story

Kennards Hire needed to bring its 70-year-old business into
the
future.

Over 68 years ago, long before the Internet even existed,
Walter Kennard was the proud owner of a small Australian
machinery business, W. Kennard & Company. Kennard
sold
machinery to customers from his shop in the small town of
Bathurst, 124 miles west of Sydney. That was until one
customer
asked a question that would change Kennard’s business
forever.
He asked if he could borrow a concrete mixer, instead of
buying
one.

“I won’t lend it to you,” Kennard said, “but I’ll hire it
to
you.”

Fast forward to 2016, and Kennards Hire is one of the
biggest
players in the equipment hire market in Australia and New
Zealand, with 162 branches and 1,100 employees. But the
company
knew it needed to transform the business away from the
slow,
old-fashioned process of equipment rental. Because in the
Internet age, who wants to fill out a paper form?

Kennards searched the global equipment hire market to see
who
was leading the way in eCommerce. But they quickly
realized
they’d have to invent what they needed—become a
trailblazer.
They needed a platform that was flexible enough to
integrate
hundreds of physical stores, yet robust enough to support
a
bold new digital vision. Kennards’ dream was a ‘click and
collect’ online tool hire site that would unite a customer
with
a concrete mixer at the press of a button. For the second
time
in its history, Kennards revolutionized the way they did
business.