Archimedes’ lever

Bernhard Reiter has been at the helm of 3e AG as CEO since September 2024. He knows the Austrian retail group very well, from the other side, so to speak: the Lower Austrian previously served as managing director of the 3e member company Zadruga in Carinthia from 2017 onwards and was a member of the 3e supervisory board. He has also worked as a management consultant.

3e AG is best known in the DIY sector for its ‘Lets doit’ retail chain, which made headlines in 2018 following a comprehensive overhaul. In an interview with the diy trade magazine, Reiter discusses how this concept is being modified.

Mr Reiter, where does 3e AG currently stand with its retail operations?

Bernhard Reiter: As for everyone in the DIY sector, 2025 was not an easy year, and we too have seen slight declines in turnover. Fortunately, we have continued to grow internationally – that is our growth market. We currently have 346 members, and internationally alone we gained ten new members last year. This shows that we can offer real added value that goes beyond mere purchasing benefits.

What does this added value consist of?

We strive every day to generate benefits for our members. We are a purchasing group and a public limited company, but organised on a co-operative basis. This means that our members are also our owners. We must constantly re-sell ourselves to our members. Over the past few months, we have received feedback from members that they need support to become more profitable. Drawing on the expertise we have in-house, we have developed a service – a product – which we have named Archimedes. Through Archimedes, we advise our members on how to structure their product range and their ‘per linear metre’ concepts in such a way that they can increase their gross profit. This means we incorporate the experience we have gained with our members as best practice into a calculation model, which also takes competitor analyses into account. We look specifically at competitors within a 10-kilometre radius to see what their per-metre concepts are, feed this into our calculation model, and then receive a per-metre recommendation for that market. In our experience, this can lead to an increase in gross profit of around 10 per cent.

Are there significant regional differences when it comes to these shelf-metre recommendations?

It is a local issue, and so we want to focus more on the individual needs of…