How Safilo turned sales data into a driver of growth

The eyewear industry moves fast: its global value is around $220 billion and continues to grow at more than 10% per year. In this market, one of the key competitive factors for companies is real-time visibility into what’s happening in their wholesalers’ stores.

Safilo’s challenge: a tailored data flow

For Safilo, a global eyewear player, the challenge was not simply to collect sales (sell-out) and stock data, but to ensure a seamless exchange of information with its wholesale network across more than 100 countries, integrating it into Smile, the tool used for Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI).

Not all customers are the same: some work with standard data flows, while others require tailored processes. Making this valuable information easier to exchange, without adding complexity to internal systems or to relationships with business partners, was essential to turning Smile from a monitoring tool into a driver of growth.

Aton’s .Sell out Service: a direct connection to wholesalers’ sales data

How can heterogeneous data, collected every day from stores across Europe and Asia, be transformed into a strategic asset shared across the entire value chain?

To meet this need, Aton has supported Safilo for more than ten years as a single point of contact, centrally managing communication with a specific cluster of wholesale customers.

It does this through the .Sell out Service, a unique combination of universal data acquisition technology — from Excel, CSV, PDF, email, POS and more — that handles data cleaning, normalisation and consolidation, together with human oversight, which ensures data quality and validation.

“Our collaboration with Aton provides strategic support for our business, especially when managing customers that do not have standard data exchange flows. Thanks to Aton’s .Sell out Service, we can also work with companies that require access to dedicated portals, are not set up to generate the required formats, or need customised data flows. This allows us to extend our services to an increasing number of customers, overcoming technical and operational constraints that would otherwise limit adoption,” says Francesco Ferraro, Team Leader Global Replenishment VMI at Safilo.

The result is clean, reliable data aligned with Safilo’s corporate systems and ready to feed automated replenishment processes, enabling more proactive sales support.

One source of data, three levels of value

The value of the sales and stock data collected in this way lies in the ability to share it, make it available across the organisation and turn it into actionable insight:

• actual sell-out data becomes the basis for building demand forecasts for each customer, prioritising product references and identifying seasonality and trends in advance, so replenishment can be driven by predictive rather than reactive logic
• the Demand team uses the data to fine-tune production planning, the Marketing team to analyse the performance of previous collections and help shape future ones, and the Sales team to refine commercial strategy based on what is actually happening in stores
• validated data becomes a tool Safilo can make available to its business partners to improve assortment planning: analysing trends and performance by store, building and monitoring KPIs, and supporting customer growth with evidence-based insights rather than relying solely on historical forecasts

The results

The benefits of the Smile project can be seen at several levels, from internal processes and sales performance to the way data is shared and used across the value chain:

• higher sales thanks to real-time visibility of sell-out data across the wholesale network
• lower risk of stock-outs on fast-moving products, thanks to replenishment driven by actual sell-out data rather than historical forecasts
• reduced excess stock and lower inventory management costs, thanks to more accurate allocation across locations and channels
• more effective internal processes across production, marketing and sales, thanks to data shared consistently across teams
• stronger and more transparent relationships with specific clusters of wholesalers, supported by a single point of contact for communication and data exchange

The impact can be seen in the day-to-day work of teams across the business, who no longer have to chase a late Excel file just to understand what is happening in stores.

Looking ahead

Safilo is moving towards an increasingly data-driven model, where the ability to collect, integrate and extract value from data is becoming essential to support decision-making and drive growth.

“In this context,” continues Francesco Ferraro, “being able to rely on a partner like Aton means having the flexibility and expertise needed to support the evolution of the business and seize the opportunities created by technological transformation.”