Logistics: a key strength for Petit Bateau

Petit Bateau can thank Oscar. Oscar who? Oscar is not a person. Oscar, short for Customer Service Objectives with Agility and Responsiveness, is the tool that enabled Petit Bateau to get back on track, thanks to a change in its model in which logistics plays a major role. Put simply: in a textile and apparel market that has been shrinking for more than 15 years, the children’s fashion specialist, which celebrated its 130th anniversary in 2023, is performing remarkably well. Since 2019, its revenue has risen by 2%, reaching around €280–290 million, while the market itself was declining by an average of 7%.

Petit Bateau owes this success to a major transformation of its logistics model, initiated even before the Covid crisis. This is the now-famous Oscar project, implemented with the help of FuturMaster, a French software publisher specializing in supply chain optimization.

At the heart of the project was a very simple, almost blunt observation, as Jean-Philippe Gauthier, then CIO of Petit Bateau, explained in a webinar jointly organized by the French brand and its partner Futur Master: “Petit Bateau must adapt to a declining market.” The implication: a structurally declining market… This means that the model that has driven fashion’s success worldwide since the 1990s, centered on fast fashion, is reaching the end of the road. Commercially, fast fashion entails an ultra-rapid turnover of collections, with new items arriving in stores and online every week. Industrially, it means scaling up volumes to the extreme in order to produce the same thing very quickly everywhere, at the lowest possible cost.

The whole system worked wonderfully. But—and there was a but—it could not withstand any disruption. Yet, by the end of the 2010s, Petit Bateau had begun to see that disruption coming. “In 2019, as the company began to experience a slowdown in sales and a buildup of inventory, Petit Bateau initiated the idea of creating a framework to avoid committing to purchases too early,” Sylvain Chéret, Petit Bateau’s Supply Chain Director from 2020 to 2023, explained to Republik Supply.

Clearly, this means that Petit Bateau understood early on that its previous organizational models were no longer relevant. In the old world of easy collection sales, it was still possible to produce entire ranges before the season started—logical, since there was then reasonable certainty that everything could be sold quickly. But once that is no longer necessarily the case, inventory levels can rise very quickly, together with the associated costs. The entire economic balance is thus threatened.

The first task was to start from scratch and devise an industrial organization in which, rather than producing and then selling, the aim is to produce according to what will be sold. This requires reliable sales forecasting models in order to determine production needs with precision. AI is a major help in this respect.

All industrial processes were therefore modeled. The objective? To move away from a silo-based approach—one plant, one trade, and limited communication between them—and toward an integrated, interconnected system. Put plainly: a shortage of wool yarn at a given plant on a given day can potentially have repercussions everywhere else the next day.

Petit Bateau is therefore not merely the combination of a plant in France, near Troyes, another in Tunisia, and another in Morocco, each with employees responsible for knitting, dyeing or garment making. No: Petit Bateau is an interconnected whole comprising three plants and more than 3,000 employees. It is a multi-site, multi-trade organization that handles some 2,400 metric tons of knitted fabric each year, averaging as many as 100,000 items per day and ultimately producing 25 million items annually.

To grasp this multifaceted whole in all its detail, the company also had to move away from management through Excel spreadsheets—“certainly very flexible to use, but not always very reliable,” as Jean-Philippe Gauthier explains—and adopt much more relevant digital modeling. “Oscar enables planning of all production across all sites and all trades: knitting, dyeing, garment making and assembly,” notes Christian Bouillot, Petit Bateau’s former head of strategic projects, in the same webinar.

Petit Bateau now knows, at any moment and in real time, what resources each production site has available, in terms of materials—yarns—as well as machinery and personnel. “This enabled us to make our production plans reliable,” Jean-Philippe Gauthier stresses. “Previously, 40% of them could not be executed, either because we did not have the necessary materials available—no yarn or no critical supplies, etc. That is no longer the case at all.”

Thanks to Oscar, it is now clear that Petit Bateau can produce better. At the other end of the spectrum, Petit Bateau also knows the production volumes it will need through AI- and data-driven sales forecasting models, creating a winning model. As soon as an item leaves the production line, it is immediately offered for sale online. Based on the initial response, Petit Bateau’s teams quickly know its sales potential. All this information is then incorporated into the Oscar program, giving it all the predictive data needed for its production calculations.

Oscar then simply has to propose a planning cycle. At Petit Bateau, these cycles are now weekly. The project’s ROI could not be clearer: “We have gained one week in the planning cycle. Previously, 13 days elapsed between the time we issued a production forecast and the time we were able to execute the operational order at our sites. This lead time has now been reduced to 7 days,” says Sylvain Chéret enthusiastically. The direct consequence is that Petit Bateau can now manage up to one-third of its in-season procurement, as close to demand as possible. And the objective is to raise this responsiveness rate to 40% by 2025. The result is a more refined management model, beneficial for revenue through improved service levels and responsiveness, and for inventory levels, which fell by 25% in two years.

This reduction does not mean that Petit Bateau will scale back its logistics platform in Buchères, near Troyes. It was inaugurated in 2016 to replace two outdated warehouses in La Chapelle-Saint-Luc and Pont-Sainte-Marie. In 2018, the group centralized its logistics operations at this 43,500 sq. m platform. The development of Petit Bateau’s secondhand service is also prompting the adaptation of the Buchères warehouse to accommodate the flow of garments that must be washed, disinfected and restored to “like-new” condition, according to L’Est Éclair. At Petit Bateau, environmental and logistics transitions go hand in hand.