Mecalux shelving for costumes and party items e-commerce business

Deguisetoi.fr, the party specialist

Founded in 2007, the Jadeo company started doing business with the Deguisetoi.fr website and, since then, has grown by leaps and bounds to become a benchmark in the French e-commerce landscape. With an ambitious plan to diversify and expand internationally, Jadeo currently has three new brands to its credit: Vegaoo.com (the equivalent of Deguisetoi.fr in Germany, Denmark, Spain, Finland, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden), Vegaoopro.com (for the B2B market) and Vegaooparty.com (focused on party decoration).

Jadeo has well over 120 permanent staff who are responsible for managing the sale and shipment of the 2,000,000 items available in its party products catalog. Whatever the occasion (Halloween, Mardi Gras or a birthday party), everything is ready and waiting to get the party started.

At first glance

When setting up an online sales logistics platform, such as Deguisetoi.fr, two aspects should be kept in mind: storage capacity and quick order preparation.

Recently, the company has moved to a new distribution center in an area known as Ilôt des Sables, located in Vaulx-Milieu (France), to acquire space to accommodate more products. As Quentin Drosson, logistics manager at Deguisetoi.fr, explains, “We used to have a 1.48 acre warehouse with rows of selective pallet racking and 6.6' high picking systems. We have had to respond to two challenges to keep growing: on the one hand, to increase storage capacity and, on the other, to boost our production rate substantially.”

With this new 5.19 acre warehouse, the company can efficiently manage all the SKUs its catalog carries (i.e., costumes and party items).

Party merchandise sales is a highly seasonal business. The company must face very high peaks in demand at very specific times of the year, especially as Mardi Gras or Halloween approaches. “During this time of year, good organization of all warehouse operations is essential to guarantee on-time preparation and dispatch of orders,” points out Quentin Drosson.

Deguisetoi.fr also offers the option of making same-day deliveries of online purchases. Strict control over products is indispensable to make this happen (know their availability and distribute them in the warehouse based on their characteristics and rotation rate).

The warehouse is split into two zones: an area with selective pallet racks, and a zone with a block of shelving for picking with walkways.

Quentin Drosson - Logistics Manager at Deguisetoi.fr
“Our new warehouse meets our current expectations because it lets us deal efficiently with massive order processing in as short a time as possible. Also, setting up an area for pallet racks and another for picking has helped us optimize operator movements considerably.”

Selective pallet racks
The racking bays, 33' high divided into six different tiers, provide storage capacity for 9,568 pallets of 32" x 48". The pallets are oversized (up to 71" high), so the racks had to be adapted to this unique characteristic. The products they hold are diverse in terms of size, shape and weight. “Pallet racks fill a large surface area; they make good use of warehouse space and provide greater capacity,” says the company's logistics manager.

Picking shelf units
Made of a large four-level block of picking shelves with walkways, this area can store around 115,000 boxes. The shelves are 33' high and raised passageways are built on them to create each story.

Carton flow picking shelves have been installed on one side of this block, with slightly inclined platforms equipped with rollers. Products slide along from the higher point and gravitationally glide to the end leading to the pick aisle. Such a system enables a larger number of SKUs to be stored: each SKU occupies a channel and boxes of reserve stock are stored behind, in the quantity the rack’s depth permits.

According to Quentin Drosson, “products are distributed in the floors according to their rotation rate. In other words, products with the lowest turnover will be stored on the upper floors.”

As with selective pallet racks, shelving for picking is also specifically designed to accommodate a wide variety of products. Likewise, they give direct access to goods, a crucial factor in fast order picking.

Aisles are wide enough so that operators move around with handcarts. A conveyor circuit is located in the aisle that connects all floors and ends in the consolidation area, where orders are sorted and conditioned.

Advantages for Deguisetoi.fr

• Space purposing: the picking block has multiplied the useful storage area by four, providing the highest possible capacity.
• Warehouse flexibility: warehousing distribution offers more flexibility when processing orders. The racks can also accommodate a multitude of products of various dimensions and rotations.
• Fast order picking: direct access to products makes order picking faster.