Name: Lawrence Hene
Retailer: Ocado

What do you think contributed to your win this time round? It’s great to win again and I think it reflects how we continue to focus on what the customer wants. We’re up to 30,000 SKUs now from the low 20,000s last year, we’re offering increasingly good value and we’ve been making the site smarter and easier to use.

The shopper found the site easy to navigate. What is the key to a good layout? Good layout is all about reducing complexity. The shopper is trying to find 50 items in a shop of 30,000 products and they haven’t got time to search for the same item five times. We’re incredibly focused on making it as easy as possible to find products whether that be through search, recommendations or category browsing.

How have customers reacted to the launch of the Smart Pass loyalty scheme? The reaction has been fantastic. We’re seeing the number of people moving on to the Smart Pass increase every week. More and more people are taking advantage of the savings on brands. Also, more brands have joined in and there are more to come.

The new distribution centre in Dordon opened in February. Is everything running smoothly? It’s worked fantastically well from day one. We’re increasing volume all the time and we’re running ahead of plan. Today was the first day vans have gone out from the site - previously we were sending lorries to Manchester. We sent flowers and Champagne to the first customer!

How was trading over Easter? Easter was strong and in line with expectations. We had good sales of Easter eggs, running ahead of expectations. We sold much more than in previous years.

Is the growth of non-food going to plan? We are up to 7,000 SKUs and we’re selling more each week. We told customers about our gardening range a couple of weeks ago and that is starting to sell well. It is clear to us that customers want to buy non-food with their grocery order.

Lawrence Hene, director of retail and marketing at Ocado, was talking to Guy Montague-Jones