It is a busy Saturday at one of Office Depot's Boca Raton retail stores. The staff is hustling during the back-to-school season to match middle schoolers with backpacks and college students with graphing calculators. Salesclerk Monica Luechtefeld, crisply professional in a red Office Depot polo shirt and black pants, draws a particularly thorny request from a young customer.

The teenage boy desperately wants to buy a computer and a monitor with the money that he has earned during the summer. Trouble is, he has only about $500 -- not quite enough even for a low-end off-the-rack system. But Luechtefeld, a mother herself, can't bear the thought of sending the kid home empty-handed. So she marches him right over to a computer kiosk near the front of the store, clicks around the Office Depot Web site displayed on the screen, and presto! -- just like that, she manages to find a reconditioned 1.5-GHz Hewlett-Packard computer, complete with warranty, for $499. A few more clicks, and she discovers a refurbished monitor that was originally priced at $179.99 but that now features a $150 mail-in rebate, for a grand total of $29.99.

Even the store manager is astonished. But Luechtefeld, who is working there as part of a companywide executives-in-the-field program, isn't completely satisfied. The search wasn't as seamless as she'd expected. There were a few things that could have tripped up less Web-savvy searchers. Most disturbing, her fellow sales associates seemed only dimly aware of the vast virtual inventory available through the site. She vows to make it right.

By Monday, Luechtefeld, dressed in a stylish black St. John's knit suit, is back at her real job as e-commerce chief of Office Depot (annual revenue: $11 billion), based in Delray Beach, Florida. She has a fistful of notes for her tech team. "When I came back, I told the IT guys, 'This is your worst nightmare, having me use the tools inside the store,' " she says, laughing.

Present at the Creation
Meet one of the fearless mavericks of e-commerce. Monica Luechtefeld has been directing online initiatives for Office Depot since 1994, when she embarked on a joint project with MIT to develop a business-to-business Web site for ordering office supplies. That was the equivalent of the early Bronze Age of the Internet, when few people aside from hard-core techies and members of academia had even heard of the Web. But Luechtefeld was excited by the opportunity, inspired by the vision of Web pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, and determined to position Office Depot at the forefront of the revolution. "Although most companies didn't see it yet, I really thought that this kind of technology was going to be a home run for corporate America in automating routine transactions for suppliers," Luechtefeld says.

Eight years later, her blend of spirited evangelism and results-oriented execution has produced an e-commerce grand slam. In 2001, Office Depot's worldwide e-commerce sales broke the billion-dollar threshold, topping off at $1.6 billion -- 14% of total sales. That makes Office Depot the second-largest multichannel retailer on the Web, trailing only Amazon.com, and puts the office-supply store some $650 million ahead of Staples, its nearest competitor. The company's recently announced partnership with Amazon, which will improve its access to individual -- as opposed to corporate -- shoppers (a market that Luechtefeld estimates at more than $90 billion), means that Office Depot is likely to reach chairman and CEO Bruce Nelson's goal of $2 billion in online sales this year without breaking a sweat.