Since 1884, Breitling has been one of the world’s premier luxury watchmakers. But even a brand like Breitling needs help managing its inventory in order to limit stocking redundancies while providing customers with access to all of its products.

Rajesh Shanmugasundaram, Breitling’s global director of Digital Technology, Data and Business Applications, says the company had issues tracking its inventory for its boutiques and online stores under a unified system.

“Let’s say our customers go online and want to find a watch, but we don’t have a stock in place,” he says. “And, on the other side, if a customer goes into a boutique and wants a watch, some of them are only available online and not at that particular boutique.”

Due to the lack of a unified inventory system, Breitling couldn’t ensure that specific markets got the exact type of products they needed to fulfill customer demand. Breitling also couldn’t determine what markets needed the most attention without a unified inventory system, causing out-of-stock and overstocking issues in many of the company’s major markets.

Shanmugasundaram says that Breitling wanted to begin offering an omnichannel view of its inventory so that customers could purchase the watches they wanted and not be limited to what was available at the company’s brick-and-mortar stores. Improved inventory management would also cut back on stocking redundancies around the globe. So, Breitling and Shanmugasundaram sought the help of an outside vendor.

At the start, Breitling did not have a unified technology stack, meaning they had to use different vendors and outside companies to serve their online purchasing in various markets. Shanmugasundaram says that Breitling began searching for a platform that was “pretty simple” and could be “easily integrated” into the Breitling ecosystem, unifying all the markets. He selected the order management company Fluent Commerce because its technology was designed to integrate easily into Breitling’s existing systems. “Plus, it comes with what I call accelerators. Let's say you don't want to build a tech stack; then you can use what Fluent offers.”

Thomas Hindré, the vice president of EMEA Sales for Fluent Commerce, says that one of the first things he noticed about Breitling when the two sides started working together in December 2021 was that it didn’t provide a single view of the company’s inventory under one easily accessible system.

“They were using many different sources but struggled to aggregate that stock information,” Hindré says. “We wanted to help them figure out how to aggregate all of the company’s information into one system so that they could actually get a real-time view of stock availability.”

The total implementation of Fluent Commerce’s inventory tracking tools took about four months. A pilot program of the features was rolled out in Switzerland first, because that is where Breitling is headquartered. After that, the program was introduced to the U.S., Breitling’s biggest market.

Shanmugasundaram says Breitling started off small, integrating the solution one boutique at a time until it was eventually rolled out in all Swiss retail markets after about six weeks. After that, the inventory tools were launched in the U.S.

The results were immediate: Shanmugasundaram says online sales of Breitling watches increased by 20% in the U.S. in the month after the program was introduced, and online sales revenue increased by 15% to 30%.

Shanmugasundaram says that there is still work to be done, and more collaborations to come between Fluent Commerce and Breitling. Fluent has not been completely rolled out in 100% of Breitling’s markets, and ongoing expansion will focus on Europe and then China, he explains. Also, as Breitling opens more boutiques globally, he hopes to integrate Fluent Commerce’s services into those stores as well.

“Even if I leave the company, I would want to implement Fluent,” Shanmugasundaram says. “My first reaction would be to reach out to Fluent. In the end, the platform flexibility is so great.”