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.
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!
DECATHLON works with suppliers in 45 countries or regions. Some 2,245 teammates manage production in the country or region in which they are located, and if necessary, production in neighbouring countries that do not have a Decathlon production office. The company also owns nine production sites where it manufactures some of its products.
The group is developing the “DECATHLON Manufacturing Way” network at these sites to promote operational excellence. This network enables in-house teams and partner suppliers to share ideas and draw inspiration from the best practices known to date.
*figures for 31/12/2023
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!
