Monica Luechtefeld Makes the Net Click

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.

What's even more remarkable than this track record of growth is Office Depot's seven-year track record of profitability. The company's site has made money since its first year of operation. There was never starry-eyed talk of reckless spending in an attempt to attract eyeballs, increase stickiness, or monetize traffic. "From day one, it was all about the sale," Luechtefeld says. "You had to have initiative and vision, but you also had to figure out how to make it work in the real world and make real money."

The company also decided early on that the Web site would not be a stand-alone venture, Luechtefeld says, but a front door into all of Office Depot's other sales channels. "We've always viewed the Web as an enabler to doing business as opposed to a discreet channel," says Robert Keller, president of business services.

That meant a no-silo strategy: At launch, the online division was integrated into the company's back-end systems, organization chart, and business planning. Web-based transactions were also built into compensation plans for the sales force, instantly heading off squabbling over who would get credit for which orders. "From an internal-accounting point of view, it didn't matter to us whether the order originated over the phone or online," Luechtefeld says. "So we weren't pulling sales from one channel to another. We were letting the customer choose." Now some 60% of Office Depot's corporate customers do their business on the Web, and CEO Nelson predicts that that number will climb to 80% in the next three to four years.