NEW CONCEPTS
Decathlon Goes Big In San Francisco
French sporting goods retailer trades in low prices, private brands By Marianne Wilson Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, has dropped anchor in the United States. But don’t expect Nike, Puma or any other familiar global brands. The value-priced French retailer, which operates more than 1,500 stores across 51 countries, entered the U.S. in spring 2018, opening an 8,313-sq.-ft. “lab” store in downtown San Francisco where it tests and sells products. It opened its first full-scale location, a 47,000 sq. ft. “experiential center” at East Bay Bridge shopping center in Emeryville, Calif., this past April. Next up, in November, is a 38,000 sq. ft. store at Potrero Center, a power center in San Francisco. As a retailer, Decathon is an outlier in the sporting goods industry in that it is completely vertically integrated. Founded in 1976, the company began designing and manufacturing its own products in 1986. To date, it has created more than 25 private brands across nearly every sport and fitness category, from running and golf to snorkeling and fishing to badminton and table tennis. It files up to 40 patents annually. “What really sets Decathlon apart from
other sports retailers is how we innovate, design and manufacture our own brands for each individual sport, which we make available direct to our community of sports lovers,” stated Decathlon USA’s chief executive officer Michel d’Humières. “Each of our products is the result of extensive innovation to ensure the highest quality product at the most affordable price, thereby making sports more accessible to everyone.” Decathlon’s vertical business model allows it to sell products at prices far below other sporting goods retailers that, for the most part, still rely on well-known brands. The assortment in Decathlon’s U.S. stores include all its in-house brands plus a few U.S.-based items, including some baseball gear and U.S.-made bike brand Detroit Bikes. Technology: Decathlon’s U.S. store experience is infused with technology, with an eye to making shopping as seamless as possible. The retailer runs store operations — including payments, clienteling, inventory management, fulfillment, and order routing — in its Emeryville location via iPhones. The employees are equipped with a corporate
Tally, a fully autonomous inventory robot, roams store aisles to help monitor inventory.
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iPhone that runs the NewStore omnichannel platform, which features an integrated, cloud-based order management system and a mobile POS solution. The store has no traditional checkouts. Customers can approach any employee when they are ready to make a purchase. The associate places a customer’s item (or entire shopping cart) inside a mobile checkout station that is equipped with an internal RFID scanner that automatically reads all the items. The associate then uses their iPhone to scan a unique QR code on a static sticker placed top of the mobile checkout station, which receives all the price data on the items inside. This opens a scrollable shopping cart in the employee app, which can also be used to scan individual products. The NewStore system is connected to store security systems, so items that have been paid for will not set off security alarms when a customer exits the store. Associates can also use their iPhones to offer endless aisle inventory access to shoppers. By scanning an item’s barcode, associates can inform customers of all available colors, sizes and other variations of the product, and locate any desired SKU. If a specific item is not in stock, the associate can have it shipped to the store and filled for a home delivery or in-store pickup. (A 50,000 sq. ft. warehouse in the San Francisco suburb of Oakland currently services all of Decathlon’s U.S. stores and online ordering.) Decathlon also deploys autonomous inventory robots (“Tally,” from Simbe Robotics) in its U.S. stores. Connecting to the retailer’s back-end systems, the bot roams the aisles, using RFID and computer vision technology to conduct precise, daily inventory counts and provide specific location information for products. All of Decathlon’s in-store technology frees up store associates, said Decathlon’s director of communications and public relations, Jennifer Tetrick. “This allows our teammates to interact more with customers, offer input on product and provide a better overall experience,” she explained. Rather than a massive retail launch across the country, Decathlon has chosen to focus on San Francisco. Expansion plans beyond 2019 will largely hinge on the success of its initial group of stores.
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
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