What does manufacturing mean at decathlon?
We are a product designer. This means we imagine and think them through to answer your needs. Once we complete this stage, we have to bring them to life to make them available. This stage is called manufacturing.
Industrialisation, just before manufacturing
Once a product has been through all the design stages, we work on its industrialisation before putting it on sale.
What is it? It's the entire manufacturing process: from the prototype to the mass production. This process lets us go from rudimentary or handmade production to manufacturing large-scale quantities. How? Simply by using industrial machines.
Afterwards we move on to MANUFACTURING: MASS PRODUCTION!
Focus on our industrial division
Created in 1996, the DECATHLON Industrial Division currently brings together 600 people. Its role: structured around thirty or so industrial processes (textiles, footwear, helmets, bags, metal, electronic, etc.) to offer our own sports brands effective components and manufacturing solutions. The product components and assembly choices are key stages that allow the product to be unique, relevant and sustainable.
Who produces decathlon articles?
To achieve large-scale production of your sports goods, we call upon a panel of suppliers distributed in no fewer than 44* countries. Our teams are permanently in contact with them and on the ground, in our 43* production offices. In concrete terms, it represents 2245* teammates working in production. They travel to factories, talk daily to our suppliers, making sure manufacturing runs smoothly.
We share with our suppliers the same desire: offering you products with the best value for money. A goal that must be achieved in the right conditions, where everyone benefits from an optimal operational framework. For this reason, our partners are committed to providing their employees a good quality working environment, based on respect, the teams' fulfilment and preserving the environment.
*figures for 31/12/2021
How do we choose our suppliers?
Different types of suppliers come into focus in the context of manufacturing your products.We can distinguish them by tier:
- Tier 1 suppliers: those that work directly with us
- Tier 2 suppliers: those that work with our suppliers
- Tier 3 suppliers: those that work with the suppliers of our suppliers
And so on!
To facilitate discussion with the different factories, our teams have adapted their organisational structure by “industrial group” (textiles, heavy-duty clothing manufacturing, electronic, metallic equipment…). In some of these groups, people are in charge of selecting the supplier partners. They are called “buyers”. It is a complex assignment given they have to take into account lots of technical, logistics and ethical criteria to select them.
Among our technical and logistics criteria, our partners:
- must be able to produce on a large-scale
- must be competent and have real know-how
- be able to manufacture a product with the best cost, quality, lead-time and environmental footprint
- must not be located in the same geographical area as the other factories to control the risks
Among the ethical criteria, our partners:
- must share and comply with our commitments
- must have the same willingness to be transparent, being able to understand how the price is determined and how they justify it.
- must share with us the overall objective of making sport accessible to the many
Our partnership can start when a factory meets all these criteria!
How does decathlon accompany its suppliers?
By the end of 2021, we work with 930 tier 1 suppliers (finished products and components) and 355 tier 2 suppliers located in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Russia. Among these factories, nine belong to us.
Our aim is continual improvement, that's why we have a network of people we refer to on the ground in our production offices. We call them “production leaders” and they each have an expertise: quality, supply, industrial development, sustainable development. In addition, we regularly carry out audits to assess employees' working conditions.
This meticulous selection of suppliers and this rigorous monitoring has allowed us to forge solid relations based on trust. This results in establishing long-term collaborations. We greatly favour these types of long-lasting relationships, given they are more aligned with our values.Our aim is to subsequently augment the number of our suppliers in favour of long-term partnerships.
