Groupe Dynamite Leverages Manhattan Active® Omni to Deliver Seamless and Connected Shopping Experience [Interview]

Montreal-based retailer Groupe Dynamite, with fashion brands Dynamite and Garage, has partnered with Manhattan Associates to make the North American retailer an omnichannel commerce powerhouse. 

Groupe Dynamite Inc. (GDI) is leveraging Manhattan Active® Omni’s broad functionality to significantly reduce ship times, inventory levels, and customer call times while also improving sales, profits, and customer loyalty and satisfaction for its nearly 300 female fashion stores across North America.

“By adopting Manhattan Active Omni and embracing Manhattan’s Unified Commerce vision, we are able to give our customers the modern and personalized shopping experience they require and the outstanding results speak for themselves,” said Dave Stevens, Chief Technology Officer for Groupe Dynamite Inc.”

Groupe Dynamite has leveraged Manhattan Active® Point of Sale to turn their stores into omnichannel sales hubs. The solution’s endless aisle capabilities has saved sales in out-of-stock situations, improving the retailer’s store conversion rate creating a positive impact on their second half selling.

With just one distribution center in Montreal and a growing U.S. presence, GDI employed Manhattan Active® Store Inventory & Fulfillment to transform their nearly 300 stores into reliable and scalable fulfillment points. Exposing store inventory to online demand helped GDI significantly reduce store transfers, delivery times and shipping costs all contributing to improved margin. 

Today, the retailer fulfills the majority of its online orders from its stores. Using Manhattan’s solutions, the retailer is able to ship orders to customers in just 23 hours on average, much faster than the 3.307 day industry average.

“GDI is at the forefront of providing their customers with a seamless and frictionless omnichannel shopping experience,” said Stewart Gantt, executive vice president, services at Manhattan Associates. “The GDI/Manhattan partnership goes far beyond the typical software developer/customer relationship. These two industry leaders have pushed each other to build and deploy one of the industry’s most advanced and effective omnichannel commerce solutions.”

Groupe Dynamite Inc (GDI) is a privately held house of integrated omni-channel brands, designing and distributing accessible, trend-forward fashion for women since 1975. The organization’s mission of “Empowering YOU be YOU, one outfit at a time” is brought to life through the Garage and Dynamite banners, and represents the consumer-centric core of GDI’s long-standing success as a leading retailer in North America. Today, GDI operates nearly 300 stores across the United States and Canada, as well as shoppable brand experiences at Garageclothing.com and Dynamiteclothing.com.

Stevens said the retailer has made an aggressive push over the past few years with the opening of about 20 new stores each year in the United States. 

The Garage brand is targeted towards a Gen Z audience while the Dynamite brand offers more elevated styles focused around the Millennial female demographic. The Garage brand is the retailer’s primary brand in the U.S.

Of the total stores for the retailer, there’s 189 located in Canada. There’s 107 Garage stores in Canada and 82 Dynamite stores. In the U.S., the vast majority of stores are Garage.

Stevens said Groupe Dynamite started its partnership with Manhattan in about 2014 as a Warehouse Management System (WMS) client but over the years the retailer was looking at ways to improve operations and the next phase was moving to the Manhattan Active® Omni Order Management platform.

“One of the advantages of going with Manhattan was building into the Manhattan ecosystem and leveraging it because it’s already connected and allows us to ramp up fairly quickly,” said Stevens.

In 2019, Groupe Dynamite also added the POS system with Manhattan. All the stores across North America are now tied into the Manhattan ecosystem with WMS (Warehouse Management System), OMS (Order Management System), and POS (Point of Sale).

“We’re a customer centric organization and I know a lot of retailers probably say that, but we live and breathe it every day, from the top down. We constantly focus on how we can improve the experience for our customers whether they’re shopping online or shopping in one of our stores,” said Stevens.

“We want to make sure that the product is always available and we get the product to our customer as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, we’ve leveraged the Manhattan order management system to turn each one of our nearly 300 stores into a small distribution warehouse – a micro fulfillment center. So we can fulfill an order from every single store in our chain. 

“Owing to our partnership with Manhattan we’ve significantly improved our customer’s satisfaction (NPS – Net Promoter Score). Our customer satisfaction NPS rating since we’ve been using Manhattan Active Omni has increased by 20 points. We’ve also been able to deliver orders to the customer in under two days.”

Stevens said the partnership has allowed the retailer to significantly reduce shipping and fulfillment costs while the customer experience has improved which increases return visits and overall improves the retailer’s bottom line.

Today, 60 percent of the retailer’s ecommerce orders are being shipped from a store as opposed to from a warehouse.

“We see the cost savings whether it’s in Canada or whether it’s in the U.S. because of the proximity to the customer, and ultimately the customer is getting their purchase that much sooner,” said Stevens.

Manhattan Associates, based in Atlanta, is a global technology leader in supply chain and omnichannel commerce. It unites information across the enterprise, converging front-end sales with back-end supply chain execution. Its software, platform technology and unmatched experience help drive both top-line growth and bottom-line profitability for its customers.

Manhattan designs, builds and delivers leading edge cloud solutions so that across the store, through its network or from its fulfilment center, businesses are ready to reap the rewards of the omnichannel marketplace. For more information, visit www.manh.com.

Kevin Bass, VP of Professional Services with Manhattan Associates, said the company focuses on continuing to evolve its already leading cloud native solutions through close partnerships with companies like Groupe Dynamite by releasing new innovation each quarter while also allowing the extensibility for customer specific needs.

“We focus on our customers and our customer’s customer – adopting a B2B2C approach – whether the end user journey requires a world class warehouse management system or a world class omnichannel commerce solution inclusive of order management and point of sale seamlessly working together to improve the customer experience,” said Bass.

“We have more than 4,000 associates who wake up every day to deliver the latest expertise in supply chain commerce to our customers.”

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