Pioneering omnichannel
Cervera, is Sweden’s leading homeware retailer, with an online platform and 74 retail stores. Over the past years, the brand has set an ambition to become pioneers within qualitative household goods, creating a strong voice for ethical consumption.
To become a thought-leader and sustainable player in the realm of homeware, Cervera partnered with Sonat in an omnichannel structured supply chain and e-commerce platform that inspires, challenges, simplifies, sharpens and improves.
It takes visibility to create an ambitious value-led supply and distribution chain. At Sonat, we see it as a strategic as well as an operative challenge. At first, the role of Sonat was a business instigator, a situation analysis was made, and a brand direction was formulated: Cervera should become an integrated retail player with a centralised supply chain with full visibility across retail stores and a contemporary sales structure online and offline. In other words, shorter, climate-smart, routes to market, and better products.
We then operatively built and orchestrated a transparent logistics solution transforming the business flow at Cervera through centralised methods, enabling shorter, closer, more agile rhythms. A work that could only be done while listening carefully and studying the brand, empowering Cervera to make the large changes needed.
Transforming a business is never easy, but with an ambition to change and grow, there is great pride in eliminating non-effective, siloed structures. At Sonat, we entered Cervera strategically providing a build, operate and transfer mechanism that supported Cervera with the necessary skills and capabilities to become profitable and better for the environment. First, acting as Cerveras supply chain function, by building a centralised stock facility, second, making sure that every inbound purchase is done through one platform sound and transparent, creating a voice and communication around an ambitious value-led supply chain.
Today, Cervera’s central stock facility is closer to the business core, both physically and mentally, this to increase proximity, sensitivity and shorten the route to distribution and sales, immediately resulting in lowering climate impact with 30 per cent. ‘We are convinced that logistics is vital for offering our customers a better experience online as well as in our physical stores. Our work is just as much about becoming more effective as it is fighting our footprint,’ says Peter Rimbäck CEO at Cervera to Dagensnäringsliv in an article published December 2019.
For all five hundred and thirty employees at Cervera, an omnichannel structure has led to deeper relationships across the organisation, more improved sustainable decisions, strengthening employee brand, and building a voice in the industry.
Our partnership with Cervera has proved a fruitful one, and sales figures are steadily growing online and in stores. However, there is still a journey to be made. Which is why, Cervera will have to consciously work to make the supply chain more transparent and shorten all distribution from supplier to central stock facility, from the warehouse to stores and from brand to the end-user, both physically and in the mind.
