“With Home Index, the customer becomes actor of their consumption”

How did Home Index come about?
Pauline Toulemonde: In 2020, we recognised the need to support the offer teams in improving the social and environmental impact of products, and we created the first version of the Home Index. Home Index is an indicator that assesses the social and environmental impact of the product, throughout its entire life cycle, to evaluate its performance. Today, it uses 31 criteria that address various environmental, societal and social issues, which are used to evaluate the product from 0 to 100. It’s this score out of 100 that we translate into a score from A to E, A being the highest score for best product performance.

Home Index, a mark of confidence
Home Index makes it possible to mark a product from A (the best score) to E (the lowest) depending on its environmental and social performance. It’s a visual indicator that’s easy to identify and understand.

How does Home Index align with the ADEO platform strategy?
Pauline Toulemonde: Home Index impacts the company and its activities across the board. It affects our relationship with our suppliers and the contracts we have with them, the data that we request from them and the tools used by the offer teams to improve products, so all the teams in charge of supplier relations and product referencing have been major stakeholders in the project. In addition, once we decided to communicate the Home Index to our customers, this had an impact on communication on our retail websites, our in-store sales operation tools, displays and signage… which is how teams from marketing, web, merchandising, communication and more all go involved too. So it’s the alignment of an entire cross-platform collective that today makes it possible for the Home Index to serve the offer teams and our suppliers, as well as our customers, so that together we can improve our impact.

How did you deploy Home Index at Leroy Merlin France?
Pauline Toulemonde: Home Index worked so well with the offer teams and our suppliers that we decided to make it available to our customers. Leroy Merlin France was the first Business Unit to deploy it. We started by identifying all the people in the company that would be affected by it, because the programme is so transversal that many different teams are involved. We established a governance that would enable us to deploy the project in all the divisions concerned.
Alice Fruchart: Once the governance was established, we then tackled the key issue of data. To evaluate our products, we need information from suppliers. We organised a variety of events for them over a two-year period (conventions, round tables, etc.), in order to explain our approach and encourage them to join us. Then, we worked on the communication aspect: creation of a name, a logo, a graphic identity, a message and a teaching method. We also worked on the customer journey, both on the website and in the store. I would also like to highlight a very important point: we share our method with our ecosystem (Federation of DIY shops, Castorama, Ademe, etc.). In fact, our ambition is to make Home Index a universal and widely used standard.

“Our ambition is to make Home Index a universal and widely used standard” Alice Fruchart, Manager of the More Sustainable Offer and in charge of Home Index deployment at Leroy Merlin France.

Why share Home Index with customers?
Pauline Toulemonde: Because above all, it’s a way of improving the offer we make to customers and providing them with information, leaving them free to choose, but giving them all the elements they need to do so. This is all the more relevant as, in addition to price and customer opinion, our customers are very interested in information on the impact of products. With Home Index, we offer them a simple, intuitive scoring system with the possibility, on our site, to click to access more information.
Alice Fruchart: Our customers often mention their interest in the origin and composition of our products. If we want the home to become a place of more sustainable consumption, we must offer them the keys to interpret this so that they can compare several products for the same usage.

At what stage are you at in the process?
Pauline Toulemonde: On the Leroy Merlin France website, out of just over 1 million visible references, 40,000 carry the Home Index score. This tool is deployed internally in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland and within ADEO Productions. We have a 3-year roll-out plan for all BUs, our marketplace and publication to our customers.
Alice Fruchart: At Leroy Merlin France, we first deployed the Home Index scores on our own brand products we then extended it to national brands on a voluntary basis. There are currently 40,000 products that display a score, three-quarters of those products are from our suppliers, more than 600 of whom have joined us in the initiative. In 2024, the publication of the Home Index score is included in our contracts for all our suppliers.

“This initiative contributes to the reduction of our carbon footprint, it leads to greater transparency and the continuous improvement of our products”. Pauline Toulemonde, CSR Product Manager at ADEO.

What will be the long-term benefits of Home Index?
Pauline Toulemonde: There is a direct link between the improvement of the Home Index – a truly emblematic example of interdependence – and ADEO’s social and environmental impact. This initiative contributes to the reduction our carbon footprint and leads to greater transparency and the continuous improvement of our products. Ultimately, our customers will be able to buy in good faith from a transparent and responsible brand that provides information on all the components of the product.
Alice Fruchart: We will be able to keep our promise of reducing our environmental impact and unite our teams around a common goal: half of our listed products must be scored A, B or C by 2025.

What is your feeling at this stage of deployment?
Pauline Toulemonde: I feel a certain pride and pleasure in seeing that the company is embracing this topic and that the offer teams want to use this tool.
Alice Fruchart: I am very proud to have participated in the development of a complex, wide-reaching and useful project.

Also worth reading
Making our homes positive places to live