Do you know how many times a product is tested before being approved? Well, neither do we. But one thing is for sure, we don't neglect the test phase in the lab or the field. By the way, we don't neglect any of the product design stages!
We have our laboratories. It's pretty handy for testing our products at every stage of their life cycle: prototype, at the start of production, etc. And to perform even more accurate tests, we have two types of labs: the ones devoted to product knowledge, and the others dedicated to observing the human body. When the product needs to be certified, it goes through a partner laboratory to validate that it's compliant with standards!
Before arrival in sales departments, a product must be put through tests, and prove it meets a certain number of international or local standards.
Good news: our standards for approving products go way beyond the standards in force. They are more stringent. We create our standards, the “DECATHLON standards” when none existed. And our machines to approve these new standards. To give you a better idea, here are few examples of tests to make the grade: components’ robustness, resistance to climatic changes and exposure to UV rays, assembly reliability, etc.
In the picture: the Tech’Off laboratory in the B’TWIN Village. The yellow machines, made by us, serve to validate our “DECATHLON standards”.
To test the durability of a bike fork, we put it through the same movement 150,000 times.
Our sports user's safety is critical:: 100% of our helmets are tested.
Shoes are submerged in water.The flexes imitate the foot motion to measure the product's waterproofing.
In the B’TWIN Village (Lille, northern France), our teams develop and conduct tests on all products in the DECATHLON product range made of plastic, composites and metal (bikes, scooters, weight training equipment, etc.).
We have our research centre devoted to the human body: the SportsLab. In actual fact, it's not one but 4 laboratories: a thermal comfort lab, a movement sciences lab, a body morphology lab and sensory and behavioural sciences lab.
They are all equipped with measurement and analysis tools to explore how the body works and what its needs are in each environment..
The product manager and test manager organise tests in real-life conditions of use, in the sports user's environment because they are the one most concerned by the product. They are the best testers for us. They carry out two types of complementary tests:
Mission tests
These are tests conducted in the intended conditions of use, often for relatively long periods. What actually happens? We lend the product to a few sports users who test it in their favourite place to use it, which sometimes is in extreme conditions. To test the first travel bike designed by DECATHLON, the Riverside team lent fully developed prototypes to adventurers who travelled the world! A wonderful example of full-scale testing and co-designing.
Field tests
These are tests conducted on specific product features, such as the grip of football goalkeeper gloves with the ball, for example. We invite testers to give their feedback on the product, in situ. We also test the gloves' grip in the lab, but we need to get sports users' perception to improve the product.
To be able to exchange with sports users, we created a dedicated platform enabling them, wherever they may be in France, to apply to exclusively test DECATHLON products. Come this way to join our community of enthusiastic testers:
These are tests we conduct virtually on a computer. They reproduce real-life conditions and let us detect the product's potential weaknesses and improve them before carrying out tests on our machines.
What is the advantage?Huge time saver!We can carry out tests in a few minutes or a few hours on computers that would otherwise take weeks to do on machines.
The digital simulation also helps to assess and understand the interactions between the body and the product in the lab, as well as in the field. We use onboard measurement tools to observe products and sports users even better.
