ConcretePlatform will help expand retail giant’s F&F clothing range into new markets

ConcretePlatform will help expand retail giant’s F&F clothing range into new markets

Tesco has chosen ConcretePlatform to expand its F&F clothing business into new international markets.

The three-year agreement, which will enable Tesco’s F&F brand to be traded by its global franchise partners, comes soon after the announcement of F&F’s first international franchise partner in Saudi Arabia.

The platform’s vendor, said its product – offered as a subscription-based cloud service – contains a number of tools designed to enable retailers to trade with their partners across wholesale, franchise and wholly owned markets, as well as their supply chain network.

Centralised information access

It added that ConcretePlatform will allow Tesco’s F&F team to benefit from a secure cloud repository for all of its business critical information, including business documentation and print-ready marketing collateral. It will therefore become a central repository for all of the F&F team’s digital assets, including its marketing materials, retail operations guidelines and manuals, visual merchandising and training materials.

The platform will also give Tesco access to artwork automation tools, allowing it to create localised point-of-sale printing in all markets – initially in five different languages and currencies – to reduce the time and cost to market for these materials. Likewise, any other templates and/or variable data produced at Tesco head office can also be tailored to meet the needs of individual markets in order to deliver print-ready artwork.

It will also use ConcretePlatform’s Review & Approve + Zoom & Annotate (RAZA) application to enable more effective collaboration on localised materials. With RAZA, Tesco’s franchise partners will be able to initiate an online review and head office approval of items like advertisements, store signage, store layout and so on, complete with any on-image annotations and an audit trail.

Exploiting web publishing capabilities

The platform’s project management module will allow Tesco’s international clothing division to coordinate new store developments and marketing projects more easily. And its web publishing and communication application, will give each different part of Tesco’s F&F business the ability to distribute key materials quickly and easily. For example, the visual merchandising team can use ConcretePlatform’s web publishing capabilities to provide detailed information on how to visually merchandise an F&F store.

Mark Knowlden, F&F business development manager, commented: “ConcretePlatform is already connected to most franchise partners in the world, and we were particularly pleased to learn that our chosen franchise partner, AlHokair, was already familiar with Concrete through some of the other brands that they’re working with. This not only helped to reinforce our decision to go with ConcretePlatform, but more importantly has allowed us to go from standstill to fully operational in just a matter of weeks.”