Meeting with Pierre-Yves Marteau, director of operations at Camif

How do you orchestrate Camif’s logistics and what does this first half of 2024 look like?

The internal team is made up of around twenty people all based in Niort at the Camif headquarters, in order to have maximum agility and responsiveness. Logistics flows are organized around two main distribution circuits. The first brings together the products corresponding to the references which are used the most. It represents the vast majority of our volumes. The second is drop-shipping where the manufacturers we work with make the goods available in their factories while we charter a carrier to ensure delivery to the customer. For stocks, we rely on three warehouses: a main site of 6,000 m2 located in Vernouillet (28) and operated by Log’s for a year. Bulky products are processed there (bedding, sofas and furniture). We opened a second warehouse during the Covid crisis to absorb excess activity with our partner L@D Logistics in Gellainville (28). The site specializes in kit furniture. The third and final depot is located near Niort, in Chauray (79), next to our premises. It is managed by Stock AZ on a multi-client basis. This warehouse concentrates our household linen and small decoration activities, therefore small footprint products.

In 2023, we recorded a slight decline in activity (-5%), in line with the trend in the furniture market overall. The first half of 2024 seems to be looking more positive with a return to growth. We hope this continues.

Camif is a company with a mission. How does this translate into the supply chain?

This requires us to have a slightly different model. We cannot play on the same volume effects as big players in the sector like Ikea, La Redoute or Maisons du Monde. We do not have the same flexibility regarding margins since most of these brands source their supplies largely from Asia. This is explained: we work exclusively with French and European partners. On a logistical level, this also translates into concrete terms. We choose local logisticians and transporters on a human scale. We try to collaborate with them in a win-win agreement. For example, StockAZ has been our partner for ten years. On delivery times, while being efficient, we are not in a race for the fastest delivery. This is not at all our objective because it is a major source of pollution. Carrying emptiness is an inconsistency. For example, whether for collection or chartering to carriers, we prefer the occupancy rate of our shuttles to be maximum, even if it means extending the customer’s delivery time by a few hours. This is something we can explain to them from our customer service center which is 100% in-house and also based in Niort.

Operationally, with the arrival of Log’s a year ago, we chose a storage method based on the package and not the product, which allows us to maximize customer returns. If the returned order is made up of several packages and one of them is defective, we do not throw away the entire product, but only part of it and we restock the rest. In the same way, we can return a part, in the event of a defect or after-sales service to be provided. We will not return a complete product, but a single package. We need slightly more precise manufacturer specifications to be able to do this, but the most important thing is to have an IT system that allows it. In terms of flows, this was a real challenge to overcome. This has been in place for three years at L@D Logistics. It has also been operational for a year with Log’s, as well as in our main depot in Vernouillet.

How do you manage product returns?

Another achievement of which we are proud is precisely the return enhancement solution that we built with SmartBack in fall 2022 ⁽¹⁾. This is also starting to become more popular with other players getting into it like Alinea and Vente-Unique. com. But before we started this collaboration with SmartBack, we had already implemented recovery and recycling solutions within our warehouses. We were reconditioning the items and were already offering our customers second-hand products at an attractive price. But our wish was to progress to improve two points: the fight against unnecessary transport and efforts in favor of the circular economy and reuse. Concerning the first point, there was not necessarily any interest in bringing a product back into our warehouses when we risked not being able to valorize it. The second point fueled our collaboration with SmartBack. From now on, any item that cannot be returned to our stocks will be sent to a local player. And when we say local, we are talking about a radius of 25 kilometers around the customer’s home from which the product is taken to be either resold, if possible, or sent to a repairer, a recycler or an association, always in the same surrounding perimeter. In 2023, more than 500 returns were entrusted to them, which represents a significant part of the quantity processed.

Is the world of packaging innovative enough to support your sustainability efforts?

We have in mind a target objective of zero plastic, zero expanded foam materials for example. We’re not going to get there in a few months, it’s going to take time. But today we have made progress on these issues. For example, 40% of our household linen product offering is already packaging-free. There is just a cord. Still for small products, we were among the first to offer reusable packaging with Hipli envelopes which can be rotated up to a hundred times. This saves raw material. Our ambition is to deploy the packaging-free offer on almost our entire range of small products.

Does artificial intelligence have a place in your logistics?

For three years, we have been using AI within our sales forecasting and inventory optimization tool called Flowlity. Its implementation aimed to help our teams focus on high-stakes products and suppliers and to let the algorithms drive lower-rotation references, while always keeping an eye on them obviously to ensure that everything is correct. Furthermore, some of our carriers also use artificial intelligence to optimize their routes in order to be more efficient and reduce the number of kilometers traveled and therefore fuel consumption.

What major organizational milestones have marked 2024?

In May, we internalized all of our customer service which was previously partly outsourced to Teleperformance. We did this in order to create a bond and trust with customers. It’s a real strength. We recently changed our ERP by migrating to a more sustainable solution, with more features and more performance. The idea was to make our database, our flow exchanges more reliable and to be able to take advantage of new features such as extranet sharing with our drop-shipping suppliers. This is in order to have delivery times updated in real time and to be able to measure the performance of our suppliers and carriers.

What strategic projects are on the agenda?

We have launched a BtoB offer (offices, teleworking, lodges and hotels). The idea is to offer BtoB players products respecting the same values ​​as those we market to the BtoC public, namely quality products made in France and the rest of Europe. This represented a lot of sourcing work done by our supply team, but this has consequences on our business because the orders are much larger and leave, most of the time, from several shipping points. This therefore requires detailed monitoring and control steps to ensure that all products will be delivered at the same time to the end customer with new transport and assembly partners specialized in this BtoB-oriented activity.

At the same time, we continue to deploy our roadmap with new delivery and customer experience solutions. We are working on making a carrier appointment during check-out and setting up relay points for bulky products, which constitutes a real alternative for people who do not necessarily have the opportunity to be at home during the week. We are working on creating new services such as product repairs that we want to promote for better sustainability. On the inventory side, we must improve availability and control of deadlines. Finally, on the customer service side, we want to launch a loyalty program with the objective of having even more links with customers who trust us and who fully adhere to our approach. Camif’s brand image is strong. Our NPS has been at 70 for almost a year now and we want to thank our customers for that.

(1) Camif and SmartBack won Bronze in the Supply Chain category at the 2023 E-Commerce Trophies