Background
Foussier is a distributor specialising in personal protective equipment and industrial supplies, with a network of 82 stores across France, each employing between 2 and 6 people. Workwear allocations have traditionally been handled by in-store teams, with no centralised process or dedicated tool.
In PPE distribution, renewing allocations is a recurring administrative burden. According to a Malakoff Humanis study (2022), administrative tasks unrelated to the core business take up on average 20% of frontline managers' time in retail, an issue felt particularly keenly in small units where every hour counts.
The problem
With small teams and a centralised HR department, Foussier faced a twofold constraint. On the one hand, collecting the sizes of hundreds of wearers spread across 82 sites meant a heavy volume of exchanges, back-and-forth by email or phone, and a risk of data entry errors. On the other, returns and exchanges of ill-fitting items generated logistics costs and equipment delays that weighed on operations.
Without a reliable, centralised size chart, every allocation campaign depended on managers' memory or on self-reported measurements, whose reliability is known to be limited. A study published in the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education (2016) found that self-reported body measurements show average discrepancies of 2 to 4 cm in chest or waist circumference, which is enough to cause common sizing errors.
“Every allocation campaign took up resources out of all proportion to what was at stake. Collecting sizes back and forth across 82 sites meant dozens of hours lost, with unreliable results.”
The WeeFizz solution
WeeFizz was built into Foussier's allocation process. Roll-out across the whole network took a few days, with no disruption to business. A single internal message was enough to inform the in-store teams.
The WeeFizz body shape engine generates a size recommendation from four pieces of data provided by the wearer: gender, age, height and weight. This recommendation is then refined by the matching engine against the size chart specific to the products Foussier supplies, loaded into the platform beforehand.
- Wearers do not enter any body measurements directly; the journey is guided and simplified
- HR teams run campaigns from a centralised interface, with no technical intervention
- Foussier's size chart is loaded once and applies to all subsequent campaigns
Do you manage allocations across several sites?
Discover how WeeFizz PRO lets you centralise your allocation campaigns and make them more reliable, whatever the volume.
Book a demo →Results
Wearers' acceptance rate for size recommendations exceeds 95%, reflecting a high level of confidence in the accuracy of the system and automatically reducing the volume of returns and exchanges.
HR teams are fully autonomous: no back-and-forth with the stores is needed to collect or approve sizes. The roll-out across 82 stores was carried out with no dedicated technical resources on the client side, relying on a single internal message.
Beyond the immediate results, Foussier now has a centralised body measurement database that grows with every campaign, helping to anticipate renewals and optimise orders with suppliers.
