Anne Fontaine manages international expansion with VCSTIMELESS technology

Anne Fontaine designs and manufactures its own products, ensuring quality control and flexibility over the entire retail chain from supply through to demand. It produces one hundred product lines per season ranging from shirts to knitted jersey tops. The average Anne Fontaine product retails at around €150. Over eighty per cent of all garments are produced and shipped from France.

Managing Expansion
As well as an increased retail presence in Asia, what Anne Fontaine hopes to achieve is better communication between all its outlets. It wants to improve links and provide far greater autonomy for the growing retail businesses in either America, Europe, Asia or the Middle East.
In 2003 the retailer opened ten new stores in the US and decided it needed an extra warehouse to serve them. But Chief Executive, Ari Zlotkin, soon realised that having several warehouses and several logistics managers was duplicating work.

"Expanding abroad isn't easy, and while its vital for a stable business, we wanted to avoid the headaches of having too many opposing cultures and too many people potentially doing the same thing," explains Zlotkin. "What we wanted was a central and automated information source that could help manage everything."

For more than ten years VCSTIMELESS, a European specialist in software and services for speciality retail, has supported Anne Fontaine's domestic and European development strategy. Anne Fontaine needed software capable of managing its business both locally in the US and globally as an international operation. Their new regional head office in New York allows them to generate reports and statistics to keep them apace with the American market. The retailer has also been using the VCSTIMELESS retail management solution, Colombus, to monitor everything from the supply chain to the point of sale. From its international headquarters based in France, Anne Fontaine has control and visibility over its entire global store network.

More Visibility
At the end of 2004 Anne Fontaine offered all its overseas stores exclusive online access to a sophisticated mix of integrated retail technology with Colombus Regional. Colombus Regional provides instant links for own-label stores, concessions, franchisees or independent retailers to the Anne Fontaine head office system, giving up-to the- minute information on available merchandise, suggested pricing, or even the time it will take to replenish a store. Concessions too, an important part of Anne Fontaine's business, can tap into the system to see, for example, where exactly an order is. According to Eric Quivy, head of research and development at VCSTIMELESS, the secure Intranet link gives a central point of contact to regional or overseas outlets, and effectively means that it's possible to choose a scaled down version of the group's software based on specific needs, rather than having to pay extra for something too generic.

"Technology allows us to know the sales of any store, any time, anywhere in the world. We use this information to determine our production schedules and organise deliveries. It all happens automatically and without it we simply couldn't manage an international retail business like this," adds Zlotkin.