In the fast-moving sportswear market, one must be nimble to stay ahead of the competition. The increasing popularity of online shopping, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, has brought entirely new challenges to retailers such as athletic and casual wear seller Puma. And the company has recently done some fancy footwork to make sure it stays in an omnichannel marketplace, now and far into the future.
Remember the bad old days when you ordered something online from a department store chain and then found you couldn’t return it to the brick-and-mortar outlet? Retailers quickly learned that the customer doesn’t want to be inconvenienced by whatever the internal fulfillment and returns processes are. So now, you can return a dress you ordered online to a physical retail store. But the truth is that, behind the scenes, there’s often a highly inefficient process still going on, as e-tail and retail try to inhabit the same universe and work seamlessly together. It’s not at all uncommon for retailers to have completely separate supply chains, fulfillment centers and returns protocols for in-person versus online purchases.
“Our customers don’t care how we are organized, especially on the front end within Puma, whether it’s geographically or in terms of distribution channels,” says Maximilian Molkenthin, head of logistics at Puma.
Read this case study today to learn how Puma achieved true omnichannel fulfillment through an automated warehouse solution.
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