Surfing gives you a real sense of freedom. When you use the power of the sea, the waves move you forward without you having to do anything.
Alexandre Pouey feels the same way when he’s behind the computer screen.
Pouey is in charge of making Volcom’s clothing available for sale online to sports fans all over the world as the digital project manager for the brand. Volcom is a boardsports business.
Based in the beautiful city of Biarritz on the southwest coast of France, Pouey and Volcom are working from one of Europe’s most popular surfing spots, which is in the bay of Biscay, which is known for its big waves.
Pouey, who likes to surf for fun, has found a way to make managing a global network of nine e-commerce shops and marketplaces for four brands like the waves in the nearby Atlantic Ocean.
Potential For Growth
Volcom was founded in 1991 and also sells snowboarding and skatewear. It is part of the Liberated Brands group, which runs other brands like Billabong and Quiksilver.
Pouey joined Volcom in 2013 and is now in charge of the company’s Magento-powered direct-to-consumer (D2C) online stores in Europe. Since then, Volcom has opened nine direct-to-consumer (D2C) stores that are all driven by Shopify Plus. The company is known for its famous stone logo.
The Trouble Of Steps
That was not good for Pouey. Volcom doesn’t just sell its clothes on its own website; its board shorts, wetsuits, and other clothes are also sold by many other stores around the world.
Now think about the fact that Volcom has a lot of different goods, or stock-keeping units (SKUs). It was hard to keep track of the listings for each of them on each site.
Volcom hired Quable, a company that makes software with a Product Information Management (PIM) tool for organizing information about products and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) tool for adding pictures and videos.
If Pouey only had to keep up a D2C approach, that would be fine. But Volcom also had to get those product ads out to a huge network of websites all over the world.
Thousands of SKUs turned into tens of thousands all of a sudden. When Volcom had to change prices for things like holiday sales, it became too much to handle. To put it simply, it felt like a defeat.
Swim Or Sync
Pouey and Volcom then learned about Make’s tool for linking apps and automating tasks.
Fabrice Pierre, a product data expert at the IT consulting company Numendo, brought the fashion brand to the platform because he thought it could be the answer to Pouey’s prayers.
“We needed to extract data from the PIM to other channels,” Pouey adds. “We were trying to find a way out.” A number of Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools had been looked at.
“We saw Make and we wanted to study the feasibility to carry out these tasks and also to automate a number of internal tasks which take up a lot of resources for the whole team.”
There was a proof-of-concept phase that teams from Volcom, Make, and Numendo all worked on together.
“The idea was to take a practical case, a slightly complicated scenario in which there was real added value,” Pouey says.
Automating A Huge Online Store
The group didn’t end there.
“We used Make to create a scenario that would tag assets in Box,” Pouey says. “This tagging lets us sort these assets so that we can send bulk assets to B2B clients.”
We automated jobs that used to be done by hand. For instance, we made a plan for sales based on how often different products sold out so that we could figure out the new prices for the sales. “And we automatically updated them on Shopify.”
They used Make’s Quable PIM integration to successfully sync data across various e-commerce stores, starting with Volcom’s French operations.
“The team was able to confirm that Make was a tool that would allow us to exploit the PIM in extraction and deliver the different channels at a good and easy pace,” Pouey says. “Then we decided that Make was a tool that would facilitate the work of the whole team.”
Getting The Value
Attention to detail Pouey had to be persuaded that Make was the right wave for Volcom to ride.
But working closely with teams from both Numendo and Make gave him the confidence and skills to move forward, which led Volcom to sign up as a business user.
“Fabrice was able to solve a number of problems with the Make and Quable teams,” he says. “They worked to fix connect problems, API problems, requests, and other problems.”
“We carried out workshops over several weeks, working on this scenario until I was able to acquire enough autonomy to finalize it and generate other scenarios.”
Go With The Flow
Three more people on Pouey’s team have now started using Make, and the tool is being used in more and more ways across Volcom’s ecommerce business. The tool is now being used not only in Volcom’s offices in Europe, but also in all of the company’s stores around the world.
“When I attend meetings, the idea of automating via Make is already in everyone’s minds,” Pouey says.
At the moment, the company runs more than 90 automations and more than a million scenario processes every year, which shows that automation is very advanced.
Pouey says that, like the best waves, it’s hard to put a number on how efficient Volcom is working.
But making it easier to move data by hand and speeding up the digital sharing of product data puts Volcom in a good position to take advantage of a market for surfwear that is expected to be worth more than $14.1 billion by 2030.
But that will happen in the future. Alex Pouey and Volcom are okay with things the way they are for now.