A profound sense of freedom is embodied in surfing. When you embrace the power of the water, motion becomes automatic and effortless as the waves carry you ahead.
Alexandre Pouey experiences the same emotion when he is in front of a computer screen.
Pouey oversees the digital project management of Volcom, a boardsports brand, and is in charge of enabling sports enthusiasts worldwide to purchase the apparel of the firm through online sales.
Based in the picturesque town of Biarritz on the southwest coast of France, Pouey and Volcom operate out of one of the main surfing hubs in Europe, tucked away in the bay of Biscay, which is known for its exceptionally large waves.
Being an avid surfer, Pouey has discovered a method to make sure that the responsibility of overseeing nine e-commerce sites and marketplaces across the globe for four companies flows as naturally as the surrounding Atlantic currents.
Possibility Of Growth
Founded in 1991, Volcom is a division of Liberated Brands, which also owns the brands Billabong and Quiksilver. Volcom also sells snowboarding and skatewear.
After joining in 2013, Pouey assumed management of Volcom’s Magento-powered direct-to-consumer (D2C) online businesses in Europe. With its well-known stone logo, Volcom has since expanded to run nine direct-to-consumer (D2C) stores using Shopify Plus.
The Suffering Associated With Procedures
Pouey, though, had a dilemma. Volcom sells through a variety of retail partners worldwide in addition to its own platform. Its clothing line includes board shorts and wetsuits.
Now suppose that Volcom offers hundreds of individual items, or stock-keeping units, or SKUs. It was a pain to keep track of their listings on every storefront.
Volcom resorted to Quable, a software provider that provides a Digital Asset Management (DAM) application for uploading images and videos as well as a Product Information Management (PIM) solution for centrally managing product details.
That would be OK if Pouey’s only requirement was to keep up a D2C plan. However, Volcom also had to make those product listings available throughout a vast global network.
When Volcom needed to alter prices to match seasonal deals, for example, thousands of SKUs had suddenly multiplied into tens of thousands, and the suffering became unbearable. It was quite literally a wipeout.
Sync Or Drown
Pouey and Volcom then learned about Make’s platform for integrating apps and streamlining processes.
The fashion brand was introduced to the platform by product data expert Fabrice Pierre of IT consulting firm Numendo, who thought it would be the solution Pouey had been waiting for.
“We needed to extract data from the PIM to other channels,” Pouey explains. “We were trying to find an answer. A few Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools has been examined.
“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.”
Teams from Make, Numendo, and Volcom started working together to develop a collaborative proof-of-concept phase.
“The idea was to take a practical case, a slightly complicated scenario in which there was real added value,” Pouey explains.
Automating A Massive Online Store
The group did not end there.
“We used Make to create a scenario that would tag assets in Box,” Pouey explains. “We can deliver bulk assets to B2B clients by filtering these assets thanks to this tagging.”
“We mechanized the manual tasks that were already in place. For instance, to determine the new rates for the promotions, we drew up a promotions plan based on the various product sell-out statistics. And we automatically updated them straight to Shopify.”
They successfully employed Make’s Quable PIM connector, working first on Volcom’s French operations, to synchronize data across several e-commerce stores.
“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.”
Demonstrating The Worth
meticulous Pouey required persuasion that Make represented the ideal wave for Volcom to ride.
However, working closely with teams from Numendo and Make provided him the courage and skills to take the next step, which led Volcom to sign on as an enterprise client.
“Fabrice was able to solve a number of problems with the Make and Quable teams,” he says. “They worked to resolve requests, API problems, connectivity problems, etc.
“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.”
Follow The Tide
Make is now being used extensively throughout Volcom’s e-commerce business, and three additional members of Pouey’s team have joined the platform. The tool has been utilized not only at Volcom’s European offices but also in all of the company’s retail locations worldwide.
“When I attend meetings, the idea of automating via Make is already in everyone’s minds,” says Pouey.
With over 90 automations and a million scenario operations annually, the organization demonstrates a high level of automation maturity.
Pouey claims that it is challenging to measure the extent of the efficiency that Volcom is achieving, much like the best waves.
However, by easing the agony of manual data movement and boosting the digital distribution of product data, Volcom is better positioned to take advantage of a market that is expected to grow rapidly—more than $14.1 billion globally for surf clothing alone by 2030.
However, it is for later. Volcom and Alexandre Pouey are content to go with the flow for the time being.