When Giny Boer joined C&A Europe two years ago, after 23 years selling furniture and homewares with Ikea, she found a retailer in urgent need of the sort of refresh that her Swedish former employer promises its home-making customers.
C&A, founded in 1841 by young Dutch brothers Clemens and August Brenninkmeijer, was operating 1,400 shops in 18 European countries — but they were wildly different sizes and layouts, including some four-storey stores that had long outlived consumer taste. Boer found 12 different versions of the company’s famous oval logo strewn across the group.
She arrived at the group’s Düsseldorf headquarters as European retailers were moving through their most disruptive period since the second world war, shifting in and out of Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. At first only the management team were in the office — and most of them were only there to meet their new boss. She was able to visit some of the group’s shops in Germany, but for weeks she was mainly a virtual presence to her new colleagues.