Arvato and Sephora Launch New Picktower in Düren

Arvato Supply Chain Solutions is expanding its capacities for the cosmetics company SEPHORA at the Düren location. The customer has moved into a new hall module with 7,000 square meters of floor space and seven hall gates. The centerpiece of the expansion is a new picktower with four storage levels, from which the goods are picked. The facility has 40,000 storage locations for 20,000 items. “This makes it ideally suited to SEPHORA’s rapidly growing online business,” explained Julia Börs, President Consumer Products at Arvato Supply Chain Solutions. “With the new picktower, we can represent a large volume of storage on a relatively small footprint.” The project duration was only six months. The investment volume amounts to 3.3 million euros.

(Gütersloh/Düren) SEPHORA entered into a partnership with Zalando last year. Since then, the products of the beauty brand and its partner companies have also been offered on the online platform, leading to rapid growth in e-commerce orders in Europe. Arvato has been storing, picking, and packaging items for SEPHORA at the Düren location since 2018 and ensures distribution to end customers in the German and Austrian markets. In addition to goods receipt and dispatch, Arvato also handles services such as inventory management, value-added services, and returns management. To manage the continuous growth in volume more quickly and flexibly, the customer has now moved into a new hall module with a picktower. The facility has a total of four storage levels with drawers, ensuring optimal and flexible separation of up to 1.3 million items. Once the orders have been picked by the employees, they are transported via an elevator to two packing lines, where they are prepared for shipment.

The beauty company also expects further increases in volume in the future. Therefore, the new hall is already designed for expansion. In the future, up to 50,000 packages can be dispatched daily. Automation of the packaging process is also planned. “Arvato Supply Chain Solutions is a professional provider with extensive e-commerce expertise, which not only has a very powerful team but also always keeps the end customers in mind,” says Björn Überschär, Managing Director Germany of SEPHORA. “The collaboration is not only going very well in Germany and Austria but also in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, and Turkey. These are good conditions to further expand the collaboration in the future.”

Photo: © Arvato Supply Chain Solutions / Image caption: (l. to r.): Jacques Pellissier, Director Supply Chain EME (SEPHORA), Julia Börs, President Consumer Products (Arvato Supply Chain Solutions), Björn Überschär, General Manager Germany (SEPHORA)