Shownotes
In this Omni Talk Retail interview, recorded live from the Global DIY Summit 2026 in Amsterdam, Chris Walton talks with Harri Karumo, Senior Vice President and K-Rauta Chain Director at Kesko, about what makes Nordic home improvement retail unique and how Kesko leverages insights across multiple retail businesses.
Harri shares his journey from finance to retail leadership, explains Kesko's retailer-owned business model, and discusses the opportunities and challenges of serving customers across Finland and the broader Nordic region.
The conversation explores how Kesko combines data from both its grocery and home improvement businesses to better understand customer behavior, improve marketing effectiveness, and identify new opportunities for growth. Harri also shares his perspective on AI adoption, why curiosity is essential for retail leaders, and why the biggest challenge isn't the technology itself but finding the time to learn and experiment with it.
Key Topics Covered:
• Kesko's retailer-owned business model
• What makes Nordic home improvement retail unique
• Differences between Nordic and U.S. DIY markets
• Serving both professional and consumer customers
• How Kesko uses grocery and DIY customer data together
• AI applications in replenishment, marketing, and product data management
• Why customer data creates a competitive advantage
• The role of curiosity in retail leadership
• Customer behavior in Finland and the impact of second-home ownership
• Lessons from the Global DIY Summit 2026
Thank you to Vusion for supporting Omni Talk Retail's live coverage from the Global DIY Summit 2026 in Amsterdam.
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Transcripts
Hello, everyone, and welcome back.
Speaker A:This is omnitalk Retail.
Speaker A:I am Chris Walton, and I am coming to you live from the Vuzion podcast studio at the DIY Summit in Amsterdam.
Speaker A:And joining me now is Harry Karumo, the senior Vice President and Krouda chain director.
Speaker A:Harry, thanks for joining us today.
Speaker B:Thank you for having me over.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:For our audience, I'm curious.
Speaker A:I know very little about Finland.
Speaker A:I know very little about retail over there, so I'm excited to talk to you.
Speaker A:So tell all our audience back home about yourself, about Kesco and your responsibilities there.
Speaker B:Well, first, I have to say I think you should come to visit Finland more.
Speaker A:I would love to, yeah.
Speaker B:It's a great country.
Speaker B:It's one of the happiest countries.
Speaker B:Nine times in a row that we have been chosen as the happiest country.
Speaker B:So we don't look that happy, but we are happy internally.
Speaker B:So let's say the happiness to us is more.
Speaker B:We are content.
Speaker A:I know.
Speaker B:And the happiness often is seen.
Speaker B:As I remember, I spent some time in America.
Speaker B:A lot of my friends over there just put a smile on your face.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:Well, yeah, that's not real happiness.
Speaker B:That's just the surface.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So to us, we have a little bit deeper thoughts and deeper meaning on it as well.
Speaker B:By myself, I'm a business.
Speaker B:I have a finance background from business education, masters from Helsinki Business School.
Speaker B:And then I went into the finance.
Speaker B:And actually, it was kind of by accident, I ran into the guys from 3M, Minnesota Company.
Speaker B:I met them at the student fair and I got into discussion with them.
Speaker B:I had just moved home from London and I met some guys at 3am who had been living in London as well.
Speaker B:And I started discussing with them, somehow became acquainted with them, friends with them, and then they started offering me a trainee position to the position that didn't actually exist, but they created that for me to get me into the finance team over there.
Speaker B:So I ended up to 3m, which I'm very grateful for, because it was a fantastic company for leadership training, training in overall.
Speaker B:At that time, 3M had really strong focus also on retail business, on consumer side, 100%, you know, the Scots and posted and all this.
Speaker B:But also I was.
Speaker B:But anyway, I went there at 3m when I was still studying.
Speaker B:I went to the finance department.
Speaker B:I was a controller or analyst for all the divisions at certain time.
Speaker B:And I got to know the different businesses during that time.
Speaker B:But then, like many of my friends in finance said, hari, you're really good in this job, but you're Too social.
Speaker B:Have you, have you thought about too social.
Speaker B:Too social to be finance guy?
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Wow.
Speaker A:Yeah, right.
Speaker B:And I've been thinking this a few times that did they try to get rid of me or what was the reason for it?
Speaker B:But I think it was a compliment to me.
Speaker B:But anyway it was more like.
Speaker B:And I was also.
Speaker B:I have always had a passion about marketing.
Speaker B:I remember looking at the different like super bowl advertisements.
Speaker B:I looked them, watch them every year.
Speaker B:I make my own opinions about them and I love that commercial elements of the retail business.
Speaker B:So I was in finance kind of like in a back office and thinking, well, I have a long career ahead of me, so I wanted to move into the commercial side.
Speaker B:And I was within 3m and became an opportunity after I had been there for seven years to join the team of a retail sales team.
Speaker B:And it was a team that was responsible for hardware stores, home improvement.
Speaker A:Okay, so there you go.
Speaker B:I went from finance into the sales team responsible for that area.
Speaker B:And as I got in there I got to know the Finnish customers, also the other Nordic retailers on home improvements.
Speaker B:And that became like my home base.
Speaker B:It was only after four months that I got the office supplies, the grocery trade and also pharmaceuticals and all this.
Speaker B:But still the home improvement became.
Speaker B:That stayed as my home base.
Speaker B:So ever since that I have felt like home improvement.
Speaker B:The hardware stores, however you want to call it, has been my place to be.
Speaker B:I'm still here, let's say 20, 25 years later.
Speaker B:I'm still in hardware stores.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:At school, when I was at school, I never thought I would be a hardware store.
Speaker A:No, no, no.
Speaker A:You got the bug though, didn't you?
Speaker B:Yeah, but I got the retail bug.
Speaker B:I got that.
Speaker B:Definitely the retail, this brands, this area of business, maybe by accident, but I like it, I like it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Tell us about the brand too.
Speaker A:Tell us about Kesco and Kurada too.
Speaker A:Like in terms of like number of stores, how big are the stores?
Speaker A:Like just general information for the audience back home.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Well, first of all, so coming from the.
Speaker B:From a 3M working in a subsidiary joining Quesko, which is a stock listed company in Finland.
Speaker B:We are by market cap, we are number 12 in the Finnish in Helsinki stock exchange.
Speaker B:So we're quite big.
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker B:Although we are stock listed, we are 80, 85 year old company.
Speaker B:We are maturity of the, of the voting rights are owned by the retailers.
Speaker B:So it's retailers who own it through the stock and then we are the one who is operating in the middle.
Speaker B:So basically our owners and our customers, the retailers are the same people with the different kind of authorities.
Speaker B:So anyway, we are kind of in the middle serving them.
Speaker B:And what Kesco is, Kesco is about in dollars.
Speaker B:It's about $16 million.
Speaker B:The revenue, half of that is coming from the grocery trade.
Speaker B:Grocery trade is the biggest.
Speaker B:That's a traditional.
Speaker B:If you ask many Finnish person, who is Quesco, what is quesco?
Speaker B:They say grocery.
Speaker A:Grocery store.
Speaker B:It's the place where they go every day, every other day.
Speaker B:We are number two in the market.
Speaker B:We are working on grocery trade.
Speaker B:We are only in Finland, so it's a domestic business.
Speaker B:We used to have operations in Baltics and Russia, but now only Finland.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:And that's about the 8 billion euros retailer model Finland, number two in the market with about.
Speaker B:With a little bit less than 40% market share.
Speaker B:That's the biggest spot.
Speaker B:The second part is where I work and that's the building and technical trade.
Speaker B:It used to be hardware division, but hardware, but now we got technical trade as well.
Speaker B:So we have.
Speaker B:That's a little bit complex in a way that we have the hardware stores, the home improvement stores.
Speaker B:So we call it building and home improvement.
Speaker B:I'm responsible for the building and home improvement in Finland.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:Then we have operations also in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Baltics, Norway.
Speaker B:So we have those countries where we have big building a home improvement chains.
Speaker B:It's Krauda in Finland, but it's other names.
Speaker B:Bukmakar, Davidson, K Buk in other places.
Speaker B:And then also we have the technical trade in other countries in Nordic.
Speaker B:So basically we are around the Nordic area and Baltics, Poland in that region.
Speaker B:So that's the 6 billion.
Speaker B:And then we have 1 billion euros domestic.
Speaker B:So we're working with Volkswagen Group on car trade.
Speaker A:On car trade too.
Speaker B:That's a domestic.
Speaker B:So three different divisions.
Speaker B:And we are now talking about the middle one, the most international out of those three got.
Speaker A:This is why I love doing this job.
Speaker A:I come to these conferences, I meet fascinating people, learn about fascinating aspects of the business that I didn't even know necessarily existed before doing the research for this interview.
Speaker A:And so getting to share that with my audience back home is just so valuable to me and so fun for me to do on a given daily basis.
Speaker A:So thank you for that.
Speaker B:Oh, you're welcome.
Speaker A:I'm curious too.
Speaker A:Like my next question is naturally Nordic home improvement.
Speaker A:What are the dynamics of the Nordic market, particularly as it pertains to home improvement?
Speaker A:And how is it different?
Speaker A:How is it similar to say mainland Europe or even the US from your experience?
Speaker B:I Admire the US based home improvement chains over there.
Speaker B:Lowe's, Home Depots, even the smaller ones like we had True Value, Ace and that kind of medicine over here at the fair.
Speaker B:But those big ones that, you know, the volumes they have are massive and the operations they have gives you so many opportunities to do things.
Speaker B:One of the downsides in Nordics is that our markets are small and every country is a little bit different.
Speaker B:Not just by language and by behavior of purchases, but also the regulations are a little bit different.
Speaker B:Although we are within eu, so the market is very fragmented.
Speaker B:I enjoy visiting, like yesterday we were in Amsterdam.
Speaker B:We are here in Amsterdam visiting different stores.
Speaker B:I enjoy seeing them.
Speaker B:But at the same time, of course, we are all proud what we do for our professional life and other things in life.
Speaker B:But still, I have to say the stores in Finland and also another place in Nordica are in a good shape.
Speaker B:We have really good stores, really good consumer friendly stores.
Speaker B:But you were asking about what's the specific thing I would say in overall, the quality of the stores, the things, how they've been maintained is high.
Speaker B:So it's also the expenses of maintaining the stores.
Speaker B:We have a lot of heating expenses.
Speaker B:If we have what we call mild winter, we save a lot of money.
Speaker B:So it shows immediately on P and L. And I don't think there's that many other countries that can say that they will immediately make a P L profit impact depending on the weather.
Speaker B:Because for us the temperature is.
Speaker B:It can vary quite a lot.
Speaker A:It shows you how cold it can get there.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker B:But it also says that the stuff that we sell, the items that we sell insulates and that kind of items, they need to be high in quality.
Speaker B:So you need to really, you cannot sell something that is roughly there.
Speaker B:You need to have them precisely matching the needs of insulation, humidity and all those so the buildings will stay healthy.
Speaker B:And I think it's a quality of building and building materials that is very common and needed in our markets.
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker A:Okay, got it.
Speaker A:So, yeah, so kind of cool.
Speaker A:So taking the Pepsi Challenge with the quality of the stores here against Amsterdam too.
Speaker A:I like that you got a little cross national rivalry going on here in home improvement, which is not surprising given this audience.
Speaker A:I'm curious, is the customer different in any way?
Speaker A:Like is he or she in Finland looking for things that are different?
Speaker A:Is the housing structure, Are the housing structures different in any way?
Speaker B:Well, I think we.
Speaker B:There's not that big of a difference.
Speaker B:But when we look at the.
Speaker B:We were just hearing about the density in Holland for Instance, it's so different to ours.
Speaker B:We are so dispersed.
Speaker B:Of course, we have a lot of people living in cities like Helsinkian and so on.
Speaker B:And people are getting more urban all the time.
Speaker B:But still we have a lot of people, especially those who are customers that are living a little bit out of the cities.
Speaker B:They own the properties they need to maintain, they need to do the yard and all that.
Speaker B:So those are good customers to us.
Speaker B:So a lot of our business is within those areas over there, Helsinki as well.
Speaker B:But if you are living in a rental place, you don't need to spend that much time.
Speaker B:It's someone else who's taking care of the maintenance of the building.
Speaker B:So in overall, I would say we have a lot bigger yards, we have more.
Speaker B:And also what is common to us, we have a lot of summer cottages.
Speaker B:Okay, so we have 5.5 million people in Finland.
Speaker B:We have 2.3 million households.
Speaker B:But we have about 1 million summer cottages, which means that almost every family or every other family has a summer cottage.
Speaker B:We don't.
Speaker B:It's about everyone else.
Speaker B:And now we are in mid summer.
Speaker B:So most of those people will be enjoying the summer at the cottage this weekend.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:We were joking before we started that it sounds like Minnesota, where I'm from, is.
Speaker A:Is basically the Scandinavia of America.
Speaker A:And we have the same thing with the summer cottages.
Speaker A:I'm curious too, like you.
Speaker A:The.
Speaker A:The CEO of Intergama was on earlier with me today and he made the point that no one here will drive over 20 minutes to go to a store.
Speaker A:Is that true in Finland or would you say it's different?
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker B:I would say it's not true.
Speaker A:I didn't think so.
Speaker B:People say.
Speaker B:Most likely they will say, but if you start looking and observing there, they're quite happy to drive.
Speaker B:But you were asking about in the first question in the beginning about Cairo chain.
Speaker B:I didn't say that much about it.
Speaker B:We have 125 stores, so 125 stores that are operated by retailers.
Speaker B:So if we think about the next widest coverage of any other chain, it's thinking about Home Improvement.
Speaker B:They have about 30 stores, so we have by far the widest network.
Speaker B:So we are close to those customers in any case.
Speaker B:And I think we have some studies about how long it takes for customers to get to our closest store and maturity of the customers we can reach within 20, 30 minutes.
Speaker B:So we don't see that problem and it helps us out and we see that our competition is quite different on it.
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And you don't see the problem because you already have the density too, versus like what you see.
Speaker B:So we don't see.
Speaker B:See that and.
Speaker A:Yeah, right, okay, got it.
Speaker A:So, okay, so one of the key tracks here is of course AI.
Speaker A:And so I'm curious, how are you looking at AI from a digital transformation perspective and are you seeing anywhere currently where AI is having a tangible impact on your business so far?
Speaker B:Do we see the tangible effect?
Speaker B:Yes, I would say how it started and how it's going.
Speaker B:We are focusing a lot on it.
Speaker B:We could do a lot more and it's a learning curve, but definitely we see it now within our internal processes.
Speaker B:So it's about replenishments, it's about maintaining the product data, it's about planning the marketing campaigns, analyzing the success of those hit rates and so on.
Speaker B:And also because of our grocery trade, we have a lot of data.
Speaker B:So we have a loyalty card membership that customers, when they buy groceries and they buy from us, we have the mutual data of that.
Speaker B:So we can see if a customer buys during the week in Helsinki and then during the weekend they buy in another city.
Speaker B:We know that they have a cottage over there or something else.
Speaker B:So we have this data seeing the following up so we can target them on those and use AI to analyze and find some elements over there.
Speaker B:So I would say at the moment it's more about internal, whether it's about replenishment or using it to target customers.
Speaker B:That's what we do it, we hope and we want that to be evident also for customers.
Speaker B:And also it's a cost control, but also managing the cost being effective, but also giving time for our staff to help out the customers more because they don't need to do the same stuff as much as they used to manually.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And that's a similar trend I'm hearing across retail right now in terms of where they're seeing the impact.
Speaker A:Your point about owning grocery and home improvement is really interesting too because in the US we went away for that for years.
Speaker A:But now with the rise of retail media and the profit from that, I wonder if we'll start to see some consolidation towards that here over the next 10 or 15 years.
Speaker A:Which is a point I've never thought about until you just raised it in my head there.
Speaker B:What do you think it is?
Speaker B:Actually, I wouldn't be surprised because there was a time when most retailers, most of the distributors were saying that they focus consumers or professionals?
Speaker B:We do them both.
Speaker B:We have 50, 50.
Speaker B:We have half of our sales is coming from consumers, half is coming from professionals.
Speaker B:And we think that's a benefit to us.
Speaker B:They both have different roles, they support us, help us, but our competition has focused on either one of them.
Speaker B:But now you brought up the grocery and that one.
Speaker B:We see the benefits of that in many ways.
Speaker B:It's also quite inspiring to be in the same headquarters with the grocery trade.
Speaker B:You watch them, you observe what they do on marketing.
Speaker B:And I would say in general, they are more advanced than our trade is.
Speaker B:So we can just watch and learn.
Speaker B:And I can ask, hey, how did you do that?
Speaker B:What did you do here?
Speaker B:So we get this benefit to us.
Speaker B:So it's quite good.
Speaker B:Yeah, I enjoy that.
Speaker A:Yeah, that's a really insight.
Speaker A:God, we're getting some great nuggets at this conference, for sure.
Speaker A:All right, so when it comes to AI, what is still, is there anything that's harder about it than people are probably letting on right now in the industry as you try to get it adopted throughout the organization?
Speaker A:Where are the real difficult pain points?
Speaker B:Finding time to do it?
Speaker B:Yeah, it's definitely.
Speaker B:You can get inspired here listening the talks.
Speaker B:You got professors or experts talking about it.
Speaker B:It all makes sense.
Speaker B:It all looks nice visually when they explain it.
Speaker B:Then you go home and you go to we used copilot but you standard of cloud or chat, GPT or something and you see it doesn't bring you what you wanted and then you get discouraged and all that.
Speaker B:But I would say my point is that try to make it as easy for you as possible.
Speaker B:So try to learn about AI and how it works in areas where you feel comfortable.
Speaker B:If you feel comfortable watching some spot, try to do it over there.
Speaker B:What's the.
Speaker B:What's the most likely winner of the World Cup?
Speaker B:What's the top scorers most likely?
Speaker B:And try to learn over there, Try to challenge the AI over there, where you have your expertise and knowledge and comfortable.
Speaker B:And then little by little, you start taking it more to professional things.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's getting comfortable with it.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:And that's a really honest assessment too.
Speaker A:And I appreciate that because basically you're saying like the biggest.
Speaker A:The biggest difficulty right now is finding the time to teach yourself and to be curious about it in a way.
Speaker A:Do you.
Speaker B:How.
Speaker A:How do you make time for that?
Speaker A:How do you make sure that you're doing that?
Speaker B:Well, that's the tricky part because there's always.
Speaker B:We are battling against the limitation of time.
Speaker B:But I would say, like I said, if you choose a topic that you're really interested, like World cup, you will find time for that you will find time to analyze World cup no matter what.
Speaker B:Now, when the World cup is played in America, we are here in Europe.
Speaker B:Like Sweden played 4, 4 o', clock, 4am we were watching that and that was of course we skipped some sleep just to watch the game because we wanted to see the game.
Speaker B:So you will find time if you have the interest on it.
Speaker B:And I'm not saying you can do that on everything.
Speaker B:But like in AI, try somewhere nice and easy.
Speaker B:Take little steps, getting used to it, and do it in a topics that you really are interested, not just because it's part of your job.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And that's our motto here at Omnitok.
Speaker A:Follow your interests and you'll always be interested.
Speaker A:So that's a good way to think about how you find the time to learn and be curious about AI.
Speaker A:Alright, well, let's get you out of here on this.
Speaker A:You're at the DIY summit.
Speaker A:I'm assuming you've been here before.
Speaker B:I have been here a few times, yeah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Given your long career, what's the one thing, is there one thing you hope to take away from this conference?
Speaker B:I don't know if it's specific to this one, but at least the previous ones.
Speaker B:When I go home, I like the fact that I had a little bit of chance to get rid of routines, to think differently, give some room for thought on different topics.
Speaker B:And one thing that rings a bell to me every time is that why and how are we relevant to our customers?
Speaker B:What's the customer experience that we are offering?
Speaker B:What we hear here, what we see here, that's like a buffet.
Speaker B:And you have to choose few of those items that you really want to take and then try to mix a difference on those.
Speaker B:Otherwise it's overwhelming.
Speaker B:So you have to see what's relevant to you and how you success on that.
Speaker A:Yeah, well.
Speaker A:And one of those new experiences is sitting down with an American podcaster.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, imagine.
Speaker B:All new to me.
Speaker B:I'm happy to be here.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Awesome.
Speaker A:Well, thank you so much Harry for your time today.
Speaker A:I really appreciate it.
Speaker A:Thank you to Vuzion and to the DIY Summit for providing us this opportunity to bring you these amazing interviews with all these amazing executives in the home improvement industry.
Speaker A:And as always, of course, be careful out there.