Material Handling

Skinfit (A)

Skinfit scores highly with its flexible goods warehouse

Yvonne van Vlerken is a multiple winner of international Ironman triathlons and in 2012 she set a course record in Florida. Like many other elite sportsmen and women and ambitious athletes worldwide, the internationally successful triathlete and duathlete puts her trust in high-performance products made by Skinfit when choosing her sports clothing. At Skinfit's central warehouse in Koblach, Austria, Wanzl provides support to ensure flexible warehouse management and on-time deliveries.

Around 3,000 items leave the Skinfit central warehouse each day.

"The deliveries are taken directly to our Skinfit shops in Austria and abroad, as well as to end customers primarily based in Europe," says Paul Hügli, Operations Manager at Skinfit, explaining the company's sales system. Skinfit has been making direct sales to end customers by catalogue ever since the company first started up in 1997 – an approach which provides an attractive price-performance ratio. The sportsmen and sportswomen provide continuous feedback and new suggestions for the constant improvement of the premium sportswear.

From sports underwear to outerwear for sport, Skinfit offers a harmonious and optimally versatile range of functional clothing that supports athletes and helps them to reach their full potential. Its numerous lines of clothing comprise garments that are adapted to specific weather conditions, sport types and levels of intensity.

Skinfit products are designed and developed exclusively in Austria.

All products bearing the red-white-red flag are made from materials produced by Austrian manufacturers, in compliance with ÖKO-TEX guidelines. "At Skinfit we believe in fairness and sustainability and these values are at the heart of our work," explains Paul Hügli discussing the company's philosophy when it comes to procurement. Skinfit therefore only cooperates with producers and suppliers who trade in accordance with these same principles. Wanzl is one of these partners. Wanzl implemented its flexible EasyStore warehouse system in mid-2012 and since that time it has been helping to keep direct sales of approximately 200 sports products efficient, day by day. 

Top performer EasyStore

Wanzl has developed a tailored prototype model of its mobile EasyStore warehouse concept to meet the requirements of Skinfit. 2500 mesh baskets are currently used to store Skinfit products at the central warehouse in Koblach. Each module is formed by six stacking baskets with optimal dimensions for Skinfit products (width, height and depth of 500 × 800 × 330 mm) along with a mobile chassis with four castors, enabling easy manoeuvring and with two brakes for secure positioning. Wanzl has now delivered more than 420 of the mobile chassis in total, as Skinfit rearranges its warehouse every six months to adapt it to seasonal demand for particular items. Paul Hügli states that "Our goal is to achieve short order picking times." The flexible EasyStore warehouse concept from Wanzl certainly fulfils this goal, and it represents a highly convenient solution: where required, the versatile modules can be quickly moved to a new storage position for optimised access in just a few easy steps. The entire warehouse management process is IT-supported; every order picker has a tablet and Bluetooth hand-held scanner at their disposal, supported by one of the new, easy-to-manoeuvre KT-T order picking trolleys from Wanzl.

Top performer EasyStore