Carhartt wants to boost innovation and technology for its consumer-facing operations. But the company is also reimagining how it functions on the back end.

The workwear brand recently automated a facility just outside Columbus, Ohio, with the help of Locus Robotics, a Massachusetts-based firm. Third-party logistics company DHL is a client of Locus and does end-to-end fulfillment for Carhartt across its retail, wholesale, and e-commerce businesses.

Carhartt has seen growth over the past several years, and in April, announced a new chief information officer who’s focused on overcoming supply-chain challenges for the Michigan-based company. The partnership with Locus Robotics via DHL offers a peek into how Carhartt is using automation to optimize the supply chain for its 35 branded stores and 5,400 employees this holiday shopping season.

Locus’s fleet of robots deployed at the facility has automated all of Carhartt’s checking and replenishment functions, and CEO Rick Faulk says Carhartt is seeing significant productivity gains, which is measured in the number of units moved per hour. Carhartt’s SKU count at the Columbus facility expanded greatly and the company also needed faster order shipments.

• Carhartt was previously running roughly 60–70 units per hour with humans. Now that figure is almost 180 units per hour, about a 3x increase.
• An added benefit for Carhartt is the company can request more robots if it needs to fulfill more orders on a short turnaround.

“When humans are required to get to work in these buildings, it’s really hard to do so,” Faulk said. “Doing it with automation, we can add extra bots for seasonal peaks.”

The cynical take on automating tasks for humans is that workers lose jobs. But Faulk says that’s not the case. Now, Carhartt uses the extra labor for other functions, like packing and receiving orders and handling returns.

Keep reading here.—KM

Cue the drum roll: Sandro is bringing its secondhand platform to the US. After launching Seconde Main in France last year, and in Germany in July, the French luxury retailer has debuted Sandro Secondhand in the US. The only difference is the US program is peer-to-peer, which allows customers to list and fulfill orders directly, as opposed to the managed-resale program the company operates in Europe. This is a first for Sandro and will essentially eliminate the need for the brand to physically clean, manage, photograph, and list the products.

While the European resale program includes both men’s and women’s RTW, alongside accessories, the American program is kicking off with womenswear only, with an eye toward expansion.

To launch the digital initiative, the retailer has partnered with Archive, a resale-tech company that builds customized resale marketplaces for brands and currently works with 26 other luxury retailers across the US, Canada, and Europe.

Isabelle Allouch, CEO of Sandro, told Retail Brew that the idea behind working with Archive was to make the process of reselling seamless and easy. “It takes just a few clicks to create a listing, and a prepaid shipping label is provided to the seller,” she explained. “Once an item is received, the seller will receive their choice of cash or credit towards their next Sandro purchase.”

• Sellers can get 70% of the selling price of the item if they pick cash, or 100% if they choose Sandro online shopping credit.
• Archive CEO Emily Gittins added the brand tested the tech with a few customers initially, and saw a great response, but it’s TBD on whether it will incorporate menswear and accessories in the near future.

Keep reading here.—JS

Today’s top retail reads.

Trade-off: President Biden’s Made in America policies are irking leaders in the EU and Asia. “We are having concerns that a number of the provisions are discriminatory against EU companies, which of course obviously is a problem for us,” said Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU’s commissioner for trade. (the New York Times)

Cheap trick? How the growth of low-price retailers—like Shein, Primark, and others—in the US has been helped by inflation. (the Wall Street Journal)

Call of duty-free: The travel-retail channel, including duty-free stores, is bouncing back, with beauty brand Shiseido reporting an 18% increase in travel-retail sales in the first half of this year compared to pre-pandemic 2019. (WWD)

The SKU: A Retail Brew Summit is kicking off next week in NYC, and this year’s event is shaping up to be one to remember!

Engage in professional networking, interact with presenters, connect with fellow retail leaders, and go home with strategies that you can immediately implement. Plus, peep a knockout roster of speakers from top retail brands like JCPenney, Sam’s Club, and many more. If you’re a retail leader, you won’t want to miss out on the most action-packed retail event of the year. Get ’em now while supplies tickets last!

At the mall, it’s where band tees are the only tees. In Retail Brew, it’s where we invite readers to weigh in on a trending retail topic.

By now, you’ve heard that on Friday, Kroger, the second-largest US grocery company, announced plans to acquire Albertsons, the fourth largest.

In a press release Friday, Kroger said that if it buys Albertsons, shoppers could notice a difference when they’re buying spring mix.

“Kroger plans to invest in lowering prices for customers and expects to reinvest approximately half a billion dollars of cost savings from synergies to reduce prices for customers,” it stated. (Our overlords send us an Edible Arrangement whenever we get the word “synergies” in the newsletter.)

But the merger is expected to face headwinds from regulators, and some consumer advocates already are speaking out.

“There is no reason to allow two of the biggest supermarket chains in the country to merge—especially with food prices already soaring,” Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, said in a statement quoted by the Financial Times.

You tell us: Do you want Kroger to acquire Albertsons?

Circling back: Starbucks recently fired a barista named Will Westlake who worked at a store near Buffalo, New York, because he repeatedly refused to remove an anti-suicide pin from his uniform, which violates the company’s dress code. The barista told Bloomberg that he wore the pin to honor a Starbucks coworker who died by suicide earlier this year, and that the real reason he was fired was because he had been active in trying to organize a union at his store.

But Starbucks denies his union organizing had anything to do with Westlake’s firing, and claims it was entirely due to him violating the dress code by wearing the anti-suicide button.

So we asked if you thought Starbucks should have fired Westlake. Most of you were on Team Will, with 62.8% saying Starbucks should not have fired him, while 34.5% said he should have been fired, and only 2.8% of you saying you didn’t know or had no opinion (probably because you hadn’t had your coffee yet).

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• How the Tylenol murders of 1982 ushered in tamper-resistant packaging
• Wayfair, Rite Aid ink deal for Google Cloud technology
• How the strengthening dollar is impacting fashion retailers