GANT rolls out Cegid Retail across international business
GANT, the branded apparel retailer with over 750 stores in 80 countries, is close to completing a rollout of Cegid Retail’s POS and Unified Commerce solution across Europe in a bid to improve stock management and customer service across multiple channels and territories.
The cloud-based point-of-sale and merchandising solution has recently been added in France and went live in the UK in March. This is part of the brand’s strategy to introduce more omnichannel and digital technologies and standardising systems throughout the group. The initiative follows a move to bring more of its overseas franchise partners under the same roof – such as Portugal and Spain during 2020 – as wholly-owned subsidiaries, sharing the same processes and accelerating a shift towards more digital services like “click-and-collect”.
Managing a global retail brand
The seventy-year-old fashion retailer started out as a shirt-maker in New Haven, USA to eventually become a global lifestyle brand combining traditional American style with European flair. The collections comprise clothes for men, women and kids. In addition, watches, footwear, eyewear, fragrance, underwear and home furnishings are licensed under the GANT brand.
In addition to its network of stores and e-commerce sites around the world, roughly half of global sales are via wholesale and selling through franchise partners and over 4,000 selected retailers and department stores.
GANT’s best-selling product internationally remains a white “Oxford” shirt. Its most popular shirts come in five or six sizes and colours are often dictated by seasonal trends, so Cegid’s software has to be able to determine which sizes and colours are selling at what rate. With around fourteen thousand different product references to manage each season, Joelsson says it’s virtually impossible to monitor without dedicated technology.
Improved visibility and data accuracy
Without a single view of stock across e-commerce, wholesale operations and retail stores, the challenge for many retailers, he says, is knowing at any given time where stock actually is.
To compound the issue, the apparel brand stocks a wide range of style combinations to suit varying tastes and regional preferences. For example, UK customers tend to favour short-sleeve shirts, while Nordic countries prefer long-sleeved. However, few stores are big enough to stock everything, so ranges need to be carefully curated. Offering customers access to digital catalogues in-store (increasingly, these days, on mobile devices) provides more choice and better service, he says. It’s another digital add-on service – referred to as “endless aisle” – that’s helping retailers bridge the divide between traditional stores and online retail.
Cloud adoption
The retail software is also pre-configured to take care of complicated tax regimes which tend to change year to year and vary from country to country. For instance, VAT and receipt rules in Portugal differ widely to those in France and Sweden.
The retailer says it wanted a single retail IT management system to run across the international business and preferred a fully hosted, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) set up, because it meant less upfront investment and more flexibility for the future.
Other brands like Lacoste, The Kooples and Aigle – belonging to the same parent holding company, Maus Frères Group – also use Cegid’s Unified Commerce Platform, which means they can all benefit from shared experiences within the group.
Find out more here.
