How Staples Canada is pivoting to the new hybrid reality as tech replaces paper and pens

Digital learning was supposed to replace more analogue education, yet demand for supplies like crayons and notebooks remains high. Remote work was supposed to kill the office, but demand for office supplies is increasing.

“It is absolutely evolving, but it is not swinging to fully digital,” said Rachel Huckle, the CEO of Staples Canada. “There’s still a human aspect, and I think that people realized over the pandemic how much they missed and value human connection.”

Huckle, who joined the U.S. office supply giant in 2019, now oversees its 11,000 associates across 300 stores in Canada, a position she couldn’t have anticipated when she studied nursing, following in her mother’s footsteps.

After kick-starting her career with Shoppers Drug Mart, Huckle ended up staying with the pharmacy giant for the next 25 years, as well as its parent company Loblaw Companies Ltd., eventually going back to school to earn an MBA from Rotman in 2017. Along the way she developed a reputation for giving familiar, legacy retail brands a modern makeover.

Huckle spoke to the Star from Staples Canada’s head office in Richmond Hill about this year’s back to school shopping trends, how buying habits have changed since the pandemic, and how shopping patterns provide a unique insight into everything from flexible work policies to classroom experiences to AI adoption.

My mother is a nurse, and growing up I saw how much she loved working with patients. She’s 82-years old and still working at St. Michael’s Hospital.

When I graduated there were a lot of changes in the health care field, and there weren’t many jobs available. One day I was walking by a Shoppers Drug Mart and saw a pharmacy technician role available, and so I applied, and I got it. Once I got in, I committed to the role, and I loved it.

It’s an outstanding organization that gave me opportunities to grow. I had some great associate-owners that I worked with, and great leaders when I moved into field operations and later, the corporate office. We had amazing senior leaders that took chances on me and gave me the opportunity to do things like help bring PC-Plus together with Shoppers Optimum, designing new store concepts and working on a digital health app.

It was a great culture, a great brand, a great mission, and I think great leaders who gave me opportunities, and I always put my hand up to grow and learn.

Having been there for a good chunk of my adult life, there was a part of me that wondered what else was out there. When I met the leadership team, I was inspired by their vision around reforming the company to the Working and Learning Company, and I thought it was a great opportunity for me to once again challenge my thinking and grow.

It started with understanding who our customers are, and being very clear that we service everything from the solopreneurs to large enterprise customers, from students to educators to parents and employees.

Then we considered how that shapes the customer experience, the product and service offering, our physical retail, our digital offering, our delivery capabilities, even our sales force. It underpins how we’re thinking about curating our assortment, our strategic partnerships, our store design, and everything in between.

One of the major changes was we bolstered the services offering — everything from print and marketing solutions to passport photos — and introduced several new partners. We now work with all five major shipping carriers, we offer Amazon returns, introduced Bell telecommunications for individuals, students and businesses. We also partnered with Allstate on our warranty program.

Then we spent time working with our associates coast-to-coast on processes to help them direct more of their time to supporting customers with new tools, training and development to keep them fresh and knowledgeable on what’s happening in the market.

We also partnered with major technology manufacturers like Apple, Microsoft, Lenovo, Samsung and Google to provide our associates with training on new generative AI and AI-enabled technology.

We had a national meeting already in the schedule for the third week of March of 2020, and at the time we knew something was happening, but we didn’t really understand what. There was this energy in the room, you could tell people were nervous. I remember pulling up a chair and saying, “I know we have an agenda, but let’s just talk.”

I started by sharing that my mother, who was elderly and living with me, was still going into the hospitals every day. When I told them about sending my mom off to work that morning my voice cracked a little, and in that moment, I realized how nervous I was for my mom. So, I said, “this is how I’m feeling; let’s talk about how you’re feeling.”

After that, we got to work. I think we were one of the first retailers in Canada that repurposed our store development and construction folks and our vendors to start working on store renovations for things like Plexiglas dividers, because we were considered an essential service.

Even in the digital era, sometimes you just want to go and grab what you need and maybe explore and discover what else is out there.

We hear from customers that they still love the touch and feel, they still want someone to talk to about the products. People realized over the pandemic how much they missed and value human connection.

One customer sent me a letter saying that after his son was born, he started taking photos and writing stories about him, and when he turned 18, he had hundreds of photos. So, he went to our store in Scarborough and asked for some help with the photo machine, and the associate in our print shop found out what he was working on and helped him turn it into a beautiful bound book to give to his son on his 18^th birthday. He would have been there a long time if he had to do it all alone, but our associate took the time to help him. So to me, it isn’t binary; digital is table stakes, but we love the retail experience as well. 

In our most recent study, we found much more of a combination of online and offline, digital and manual. We are still seeing demand for paper and notebooks and crayons, but tech is making it into baskets at a much earlier grade than we’ve seen historically. We’re also seeing students in higher grades asking more about AI-enabled tools, and we find that parents are more comfortable providing those tools when the school has identified and endorsed them.

Tech is on a lot of people’s lists, both educators and students, but we see a lot of our curated ‘Prep Rally’ collections of totes, backpacks, water bottles, binders — with all matching design patterns — in high demand this season. Things like calculators, binders, and dividers, there’s still huge demand, and in our kid’s area, Crayola and art books continue to do well, so there’s still an emphasis on art and creativity.

Yes, and we are seeing more people going back into offices, and more demand from mid-to-large enterprises who are making bulk orders of facilities products — like cleaning, bathroom and breakroom supplies — but we’re also seeing that hybrid is here to stay. We see commuter bags and travel accessories, mobile technology and audio equipment like headphones doing exceptionally well, which suggests that people are preparing to bring their work back and forth.

We are aware that it’s getting harder for our customers, and we’ve been focused on adding promotions and special pricing. Customers will see, both online and in store, a new program called Red Dot Savings, where you can find our best deals. We also offer a finance program with Flexiti that enabled customers to take products home today and make monthly payments for them later, and we continue to offer price matching to ensure our customers have access to what they need.

I think it’s a culmination of all my experiences, but there’s an element of compassion, an element of listening, an element of identifying the needs of the person you’re working with. Whether it’s being employee-centric, customer-centric or patient-centric, if you’re constantly focusing on the needs of others and how you can provide solutions or challenge them, it enables you to have impact.