Dalibor Knecht (55) has become the new CFO of the fulfillment company Skladon. He joins the company after more than 20 years of his career at Komerční banka and three years at Mapo Group. At Skladon, Knecht will be responsible for strategic financial management, reporting, controlling and other activities related to the economic stability of the dynamically growing company.

Zuzana Wojewodová (47) has become a new HR Director at Skladon, a fulfillment company providing complete outsourcing of logistics to retailers. At Skladon, she will be primarily responsible for setting up functional HR processes from employee selection, through their integration into the team to subsequent development throughout the company.

It's increasingly important that online stores don't approach reverse logistics as a necessary evil, but instead as a tool to take their customers' shopping experience to the next level. Although retailers are taking different paths in this area, the most obvious trend is fairly obvious - it pays to digitise reverse logistics. What are the advantages of digitising returns and, conversely, are there any difficulties?

Fast and high-quality return logistics are essential for the success of an online store today. Fulfillment company Skladon has therefore decided to make reverse logistics significantly easier for its clients and has established cooperation with Retino, which has already provided its online tool for automating returns and complaints to more than 2 000 online stores.

Fulfillment company Skladon has decided to make reverse logistics significantly easier for its clients and has partnered with Retino, which has already provided its online returns and returns automation tool to more than 2,000 e-shops. This reduces costs for retailers and makes online shopping more convenient for customers.

There are currently more than fifty thousand e-shops in the Czech Republic, each of which ships several thousand orders per month. In order to achieve a positive customer experience, quality and reliable logistics are essential for e-shops. At the turn of the year, Skladon and Retino decided to map the standard.

Fufillment company Skladon has been ranked in the prestigious FT 1000 for the second year in a row. Among the 1000 fastest growing companies in Europe, the company, which provides complete logistics to dozens of medium and large retailers, moved up to 104th place, and was the third highest ranked Czech company out of a total of ten domestic representatives.

The idea that e-shops can avoid logistics problems that someone will completely solve for them is more than appealing. And in the Czech Republic it is still looking for its place. This is what Ostrava-based Skladon wants to profit from. From Mošnov, it is heading for a great future.

"From the distribution center at Ostrava Airport, it sends packages to 170 countries around the world. Although last year the volume of sales of Czech online stores declined for the first time ever, Skladon continued to grow. It received 60 percent more items at its distribution center year-on-year and increased turnover by EUR 1 million to EUR 6.1 million."

Digitalization of logistics processes is something that will enable a company to make its operations as efficient as possible, not only internally but also towards the customer," says Maxim Kovář, Director of Logistics at fulfillment company Skladon.

"It could easily happen that the number of returns increases unpredictably but significantly and there is simply not enough space in the distribution centre. Responsible logisticians should always work with a certain margin and not fill their warehouses to maximum capacity," recommends Patrik Babinec, CMO and co-founder of Skladon.

"Jan Balas joined the fulfillment company Skladon as Sales Director in January. With almost 20 years of experience in domestic and international trade, he will be responsible for the development of the sales department and the stabilization of internal processes before the company begins its international expansion."

Jan Baláš has held the position of Sales Director at Skladon since January. He joins the fulfillment company with almost twenty years of experience in domestic and international trade. At Skladon, he will be primarily responsible for the development of the sales department and stabilization of internal processes before the company begins its international expansion.

Of course, the final ranking was often decided by really close point differences, and despite the evaluation scale including the aforementioned half-points, the third place in the Top Logistics Service category went to two solutions - Emergency network for delivery across the Czech Republic by Liftago and DHL Express CZ, and the MySkladon client application by Skladon.

We have a number of retailers among our clients who have already decided to take concrete steps in this direction. Many of them demand, for example, special packaging material that is more environmentally friendly - a questionnaire among customers shows that almost half of the shoppers expect "green" responsibility on the part of the brands themselves," says Kovář, adding that, for example, at Skladon, they have defined with each client from the beginning what procedures to use to package products and what material to use for this purpose.

"Logistics in 2023 will thus, on the one hand, be coping with the consequences of the events of the previous year and, on the other hand, will be forced to react more and more strongly to the need for automation, sustainability or adaptability. The emphasis on greater transparency across the company and towards customers will also play a role."

Skladon, one of the largest fulfillment providers in the Czech Republic, has again succeeded in Deloitte's international Technology Fast50 ranking this year. The competition annually recognizes the fifty fastest growing technology companies in the Central European region. This is the third time in a row that the Czech company has managed to rank in the list, but this time a few dozen positions higher than in 2021.

"The total volume of shipments is already increasing ahead of Black Friday, with e-tailers shipping on average three to five times more on Friday itself than in the standard period. The higher demand always holds for a week after Black Friday, then tapers off for a few days and increases again as the holidays approach," says Max Kovář, logistics director at Skladon.

It is important to realize that in this way the retailer is not only taking care of a fraction of its customers, but on the contrary a significant part of them - the return rate is around 20 percent or more for shoes, for example. And whether a whole fifth of customers will buy again from a retailer has a rather significant impact on its overall revenue," says Patrik Babinec, CMO and co-founder of fulfillment company Skladon.

More and more popular is, for example, the personalisation of packages, i.e. a form of brand support for e-commerce companies through the use of personalised materials, cards with thanks, personal messages and so on. "This is also related to the choice of packaging materials, where we practically encounter two cases - clients who choose cheap packaging materials and, on the contrary, clients who choose expensive ones as part of their own brand image," notes Patrik Babinec, CMO and co-founder of Skladon.

Since September, Skladon, a provider of complete logistics outsourcing, has been handling the fulfillment of part of the shipments for the popular sports equipment retailer Sportisimo. The shipment of goods was officially launched at the beginning of this month, but the receipt of products and the preparation of systems have been underway for several weeks. Sportisimo plans to dispatch approximately 1,000 packages per day from the Mošnov distribution centre to all of its brick-and-mortar stores in the Czech Republic and other countries.

"The concept of fulfillment itself has become more established among retailers as a result of the covid pandemic, when the e-shop environment was the only possible sales channel for retailers," explains Patrik Babinec, CMO and co-founder of Skladon. "Increased customer demand, their growing demands and strong competition have led many retailers to consider how to make their logistics as efficient as possible, improve the quality and ideally also optimize the associated costs."

"Through outsourcing, retailers save on staffing costs for warehouse employees, as well as expenses related to warehouse rental and insurance. It also gives them the opportunity to easily turn their fixed costs into variable ones, as they only pay each month for the orders they actually handle and for the warehouse space they actually use," says Konstantin Margaretis.

Thanks to the pandemic, Skladon has grown by hundreds of percent. It plans further growth in the future, which should be helped by foreign expansion. This is also the reason why the Moravian-Silesian Innovation Centre Ostrava included it in the top ten startups of this year.

Skladon has officially expanded its premises by an additional six thousand square metres to a total of 16,000 square metres. This follows last year when it doubled its capacity in the Mošnov industrial zone. With its further growth, Skladon is responding to the increasing demand from retailers, for whom fulfilment is an increasingly common choice. The fact that the newly created space has been occupied since the first day of its operation is an indication of this.

In our distribution centre, we see every day how much digitisation of individual processes can make our work more efficient and how this then reflects in client satisfaction. Few people can imagine how many individual steps a typical logistics process has and how many minor and major adjustments these activities require. Although everyone sees warehousing and logistics as manual activities, there is always technology in the background that determines how functional the whole service is.

Skladon provides Czech e-shops with everything they need for their business - warehousing, receiving orders, picking goods and delivering them to the customer - the so-called fulfillment. The company is one of the fastest growing in the Czech Republic. Last year it increased turnover by 157 per cent and doubled its warehouse space.

Startup Skladon has already expanded its warehouses, which are located in the industrial zone of Mošnov near Ostrava, twice since 2020. Initially it used 5,000 sqm of space, by 2021 it was already 10,000 sqm and this year it expanded to 16,000 sqm.

The most frequently requested additional service by e-shops is clearly reverse logistics. According to Skladon's research, claims and returns are the part of the logistics process that clients often struggle with, and in a large number of shipments, they cannot always ensure that they go according to the customer's expectations. Particularly in segments such as fashion and especially footwear, the flexible return option is one of the deciding factors for buyers to purchase again on the e-shop.

"As part of our foreign expansion plan, Skladon provides its clients with consultations where we work together to come up with the ideal solution for each market. Thanks to our wealth of experience in working with others in different industries, we have knowledge of the logistics market across the world, including the specific products of individual carriers."

"The current situation on the industrial area market is becoming unbearable and is forcing more and more traders to think not only about how to save money, but also where to put the growing amount of stock. Thus, we see a strong tendency among e-tailers to leave the logistics worries to someone else while minimizing their fixed costs. Fulfillment allows them to do both - access to almost unlimited space and at the same time transform fixed costs into variable ones, as they do not have to deal with staff costs in the warehouse, energy costs, rent or even warehouse insurance," says Konstantin Margaretis, CEO and co-founder of Skladon, one of the largest Czech fulfillment providers.

"In an ideal world, automation should happen gradually, i.e. adapting its level to the situation and operation. At the same time, it should be ensured that automation and robotics are not too big part of the process and are not then an obstacle to the flexibility that is often needed."

"Especially in the initial phase of foreign expansion, when the e-shop operates with small volumes, fulfillment is very advantageous for it. Thanks to the high volumes of shipments, its provider can achieve significantly better prices for shipping and save the e-shop considerable money," says Patrik Babinec, co-founder and one of the heads of the Czech Skladon, which focuses on fulfillment.

What makes Skladon successful? The company provides outsourced logistics for e-shops and manufacturing companies trading online, and its success has been driven by steady growth over the last few years, as well as an extremely successful last year.

zech Skladon is one of the fastest growing companies in Europe. It is ranked 274th in the annual Financial Times ranking. Ten other Czech companies such as Favi, Rouvy and Dateio appeared in the prestigious list of the British economic daily. Among them, Skladon managed to take third place.

The aim of Skladon, which was co-founded seven years ago by Konstantin Margaretis, a Czech with Greek roots, is to take care of all the logistics for the e-shop owner so that he does not have to deal with anything similar himself. For this purpose, Skladon develops its own sophisticated software, which connects to the customer's store and can process the entire order and then deliver it to a specific location - even if it is thousands of kilometres away.

Skladon, a company that provides e-shops with warehouse space and complete logistics services for sending shipments, saw its turnover reach CZK 121 million last year. That's a more than one-and-a-half-fold increase compared to 2020. Almost 4.8 million items flowed through its warehouse last year, up from half a year earlier.

Skladon, a provider of complete logistics services for e-commerce, has started cooperation with the communication agency FYI Prague. The agency of Jan Řezáč and František Brož will help Skladon with corporate communication and profiling within the topics of warehousing, logistics and e-commerce.

"The current CBO and co-founder Patrik Babinec will be replaced by Michal Tyleček, who will have the opportunity to use his seven years of experience in e-commerce logistics. "With this step, Patrik moves to the position of Head of Marketing and Product, where he will be mainly responsible for improving our services to meet the needs of our clients' further growth," Skladon's Marketing Manager Tomáš Kohút informed."