Retail Week Live: Argos 'weren’t fully ready' for Fast Track, says Bodson

Bodson said the retailer’s launch of its same-day delivery proposition during the manic Christmas period in 2015 “broke a lot of things.”

“We weren’t fully ready, to be frank, but peak was coming and we didn’t have the luxury of time so we made a tough call to launch in the middle of peak nationwide,” Bodson said.

“We were moving so fast to try and make it happen and clearly we compromised at times, which is a regret to this day.”

However, Bodson said that despite the teething problems when Fast Track first launched, he didn’t know if he would delay the launch if he could do it again.

Bodson stressed that launching during a key trading period meant Argos behaved like an entrepreneur and learnt a lot of valuable lessons about its delivery proposition in a short period of time.

He added that if they had waited until the following year to launch they would effectively have lost “half a year of trading” with the new proposition because it would not have been rolled out until the following March at the earliest.

“One of the things I am most proud of about the Argos business in particular is that it really feels like a start-up inside – an entrepreneurship of 30,000 people,” said Bodson.

He said that the retailer had brought this agile way of working to its partnership with Sainsbury’s, and had rolled out “250 [Argos] store-in-stores and collection points” since it had been acquired by the grocery giant last September.