Enabling 20% growth & safe in-store shopping for a leading athletic apparel retailer

Brief

SkillNet supports an athletic apparel retailer‘s ambitious plans for growth by enabling localization of store systems in 20+ countries across Asia, Europe and North Americas and safe store experiences during COVID-19.

About the client

The client makes athletic apparel for men and women for yoga, running, training and most other sweaty pursuits. The company has expanded internationally via their online platform and about 500 brick and mortar locations spanning North America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Asia.

Challenge | Ensure rich in-store experiences across geographies

The client was bullish about achieving consistent double-digit growth through international expansion across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. The expansion in these regions was planned via a decentralized model, allowing for local community insight and consumer preferences to drive in-store experiences.

This meant that the client had to upgrade their payment systems and integrate their Xstore POS systems to support richer in-store experiences store including staff mobility. Other disparate retail systems also had to be integrated simultaneously to a tight deadline. For each country implementation, data migration, quality analysis and deployment delays had to be addressed in a timely manner.

Solution | Enabling seamless in-store experience with localization of retail systems

The Retailer partnered with SkillNet to deliver rich in-store experiences in 20+ countries. The program encompassed upgrade of POS systems and included country and region-specific localization. One of the key challenges of the upgrade was the large amount of data that needed to be migrated. In order to expedite the process of migration, SkillNet used its StoreHub platform to load data to the new solution. StoreHub, allowed the team to use the service connectors available in Oracle Xstore thus avoiding customization. Given the tight deadlines, SkillNet introduced DevOps for the automation of build, tests and releases and ensured productivity early on in the program.

Results | Contributing to 20% growth & COVID-19 readiness through safer and richer in-stores experiences

The partnership has seen more than 20+ successful store solutions roll outs across geographies. It is live in close to 400 stores and there are plans for adding more stores in the coming months. The upgrades have not only ensured richer in-store experiences through staff mobility which allows for better customer support but also ensured safe shopping during COVID-19. Guests who shop online can now ship gifts to home, and also drop off their returns at the door instead of entering the stores. The upgrade also improved reporting capability for better decision making.