About Decathlon
Decathlon is a French sporting goods retailer founded by Michel Leclercq in 1976, with its first store in Lille, France. Its holding company was formerly known as Oxylane. With over 2080 stores in 56 countries and regions, it is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world. The company manages the research, design, production, logistics and distribution of its products in-house; partners with global suppliers; and markets its own brands directly to consumers in Decathlon-branded big-box stores.
Requirements
For a large retailer like Decathlon, with its extensive showroom areas and region-wide seasonal refits, visual merchandising is particularly important. The company invests significant resources into designing and implementing its store layouts and product displays, and it is essential that these efforts deliver a strong ROI. By continuously monitoring its visual merchandising activities, Decathlon can make data-driven decisions to optimise its store layouts and product placements, ultimately driving sales growth.
Additionally, by sharing insights with its brand partners, Decathlon can strengthen its relationships with these key stakeholders and drive mutual success.
Decathlon was looking for a plug-and-play solution to pilot across a number of stores that would enable it to track its campaign performance across multiple stores and regions.
Solution
Decathlon turned to Aura Vision, a video AI analytics platform that delivers reliable in-store analytics. Aura Vision offers total privacy and ownership of the physical store's data and uses existing CCTV camera infrastructure to calculate the number of customers in each area of the store, as well as their dwell duration and engagement with products and marketing materials.
By utilising Aura Vision's advanced technology, Decathlon, in a matter of weeks, was able to:
- Capture segmented footfall data — granular visitor counts broken down by zone and segment
- Efficiently plan staff rotas — align staffing levels with real-time traffic patterns
- Track sport segment performance — measure engagement across product categories
- Identify the ROI on refits — quantify the impact of store layout changes
- Improve refit performance — act on recommendations that identify the biggest wins from past performance
This allowed them to turn their physical footprint into an insights platform for their internal teams and brand partners.
Decathlon was able to meet its analytics demands and adjust its product display layout, test new marketing, introduce new product segments, optimise customer movement between departments, and ultimately enhance the shopping experience for its customers.
Value
This data-driven approach allowed Decathlon to benchmark location busyness with passer-by traffic counts, identify local demographic conversion trends with unique customer segmentation technology, and take action with industry-leading footfall counting accuracy. Through careful analysis and optimisation, Decathlon was able to maximise the effectiveness of its visual merchandising efforts and drive a 0.5% sales conversion uplift in a few weeks.
