From 14 to 37 stores, Decathlon pushing ahead with Singapore expansion plans

AT a time when many retailers in Singapore are cutting back on their physical space due to the triple whammy of lower footfall, soaring rentals and higher manpower costs, French sporting goods retailer Decathlon is busy doing the exact opposite.

The company opened its first physical store here 5 years ago and there are 14 today. Its newest outlet - a 4,200 square metre Experience store at the Northshore Plaza mall in Punggol - is set to welcome its first customers on Oct 29.

The plan, said Decathlon Singapore's new managing director Stephan Veyret, is to more than double the size of this network to 37 locations islandwide over the next few years.

This "golden number", as he puts it, will comprise 7 larger Experience stores that carry the full range of some 5,000 products, as well as 30 smaller "click-and-collect" outlets where customers can conveniently pick up the items that they purchased online.

Of the 22 new branches in the pipeline, only one of them will be an Experience store, and this will be sited somewhere in the northern part of Singapore where Decathlon does not yet have a footprint.

"It's a very challenging property market in Singapore, and we don't need to open Experience stores everywhere. At the end of the day, they will just compete with one another and that doesn't add value for us," said the 48-year-old Veyret in an exclusive interview with The Business Times.

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The other 21 stores will all be "click-and-collect", and the company's expansion team has already identified specific places where they would like these to be.

"We know where these locations are, and when the space will become available. What matters is we will open the 21 stores exactly where we want them to be," he said, adding that there is no pressure in the short term to expand.

"We want to be as close to the people as possible, to be within 10 to 15 minutes away from where they live. We want to be in convenient locations where people go to on a daily basis, such as the MRT stations. So people don't need to come to us, but rather they pass by us naturally."

Veyret noted that some 7 million people patronised Decathlon Singapore in one way or another in 2020. While more consumers these days are turning to e-commerce to do their shopping, he feels that the future for retail is to have a strong online presence while still maintaining brick-and-mortar stores that allow people to "discover, touch, try and feel" the products and services.

"The strategy in Singapore is a mix of the two. Actually, we don't talk about being digital or physical. We try to merge the two into one seamless omnichannel experience," said Veryet.

Decathlon's roots date all the way back to 1976 when it was founded by Michel Leclercq and a small team of sports enthusiasts.

The Lille-based company now runs nearly 1,700 stores in over 60 countries. The group's annual revenue was 11.4 billion euros (S$17.8 billion) in 2020, down 5.8 per cent from the 12.4 billion euros the year before.

There are more than 93,000 employees on the payroll around the world, of which around 700 are in Singapore.

Veyret, a Frenchman who speaks 4 languages including Mandarin and German, has worked at Decathlon for the last 23 years.

He's had stints in China, France, the UK and most recently, Germany, where he spent 7 years before taking up the post of managing director in Singapore in July. He arrived in the Lion City with his wife and two children in the middle of August.

When asked if the lockdowns and work-from-home being the default have been a boon for Decathlon Singapore as more people see the benefits of an active lifestyle and desire to exercise more, Veyret said the impact has been mixed.

"We have products from 60 sports, and the growth of some sports has compensated for the fall of others. Singaporeans like to ski, but when they cannot travel, then the sales of that sport suffers. It's the same if the swimming pools or the hockey pitches are closed," he said.

It's no surprise then, when asked to name some of the top-selling items during the pandemic, Veyret rattled off a list that includes bicycles, yoga mats, dumbbells and running shoes.

From January to July this year, Decathlon Singapore saw a 190 per cent spike in sales of cross-training bands and toning bands, and a 57 per cent increase in sales of dumbbells, kettlebells and weight sets over that same 7-month period.

With Decathlon being a vertically integrated company, it owns the retail stores as well as all the research and development and manufacturing too.

The company sells products from its own brands - 85 of them, at last count - and some of the most popular ones, according to Veyret, are its "two-second tent" (a tent that sets itself up within seconds of being opened) and the "Easybreath" mask, a full-face mask used for snorkelling.

Decathlon is also a firm believer in making use of technology and digitalisation as much as possible, whether it's providing cashless payment options at its stores or using robots to carry out inventory tracking throughout the night.

The most popular service at Decathlon Singapore, according to Veyret, is where customers can get personalised 3D measures of their foot size and gait to help them pick the most suitable sports shoe.

"From our point of view, we want to do all we can to reduce as many manual tasks as possible that do not bring added value (to the employee or the customer), and that is where these technological solutions come in," he said.

"We have a long tradition of innovation over 45 years of history, and we are very keen to continue to invest and develop new solutions and ideas."