The Grand Prize for the Omnichannel Experience is awarded to ...
An award presented by Olivier Theulle, Chief e-Commerce & Digital Officer at Fnac Darty
La Compagnie de Phalsbourg has just won the Focus Retail Grand Prix in the Omnichannel Customer Experience category, organized by BFM Business in partnership with Altavia and VusionGroup. The award was presented by Olivier Theulle, Chief e-Commerce & Digital Officer of the Fnac Darty Group, whose voice carries significant weight in the industry: Fnac Darty is one of Europe’s most advanced players in omnichannel retail, with e-commerce accounting for more than 25% of its sales and click-and-collect representing half of its online sales. That this recognition comes from this particular player, in this specific category, is by no means insignificant. It validates the technical and operational quality of the award-winning system.
This system was developed by Compagnie de Phalsbourg in collaboration with Wishibam, the group’s technology partner since the opening of The Village Outlet in 2018. The duo prevailed over top-tier finalists— Kiabi, Reversaio, Chapsvision , and Kesako Solution—each of which presented its own vision of omnichannel retail, ranging from unified commerce to AI-powered clienteling.
Why is this victory important?
Omnichannel has become a buzzword in retail. Most of the award-winning initiatives in recent years have focused on a single retailer unifying its own channels: a website, an app, a network of stores, and an OMS that orchestrates it all. The challenge is well-known, and the solutions are mature.
The Compagnie de Phalsbourg Outlet presents a different kind of challenge: how can it provide a unified shopping experience across an entire retail destination where dozens of independent retailers coexist, each with its own systems, inventory, and sales teams?
This is precisely what Wishibam has helped build—first at The Village Outlet in Villefontaine, which became the world’s first phygital outlet upon its opening in 2018, and then across the group’s entire portfolio of destination centers.
The concept: a single e-commerce site that aggregates inventory from all the mall’s stores in real time, makes every item available for purchase 24/7, and operates on a “ship-from-store” model without a central warehouse. Customers purchase an item from home, and a few hours later, it is retrieved from the inventory of a store in the mall; the order is prepared by the in-store staff, shipped directly, and the mall becomes a global showcase whose catchment area knows no boundaries.
What the jury recognized
Beyond technical excellence, the Focus Retail Grand Prix recognizes the consistency of the end-to-end customer experience. In this regard, the Compagnie de Phalsbourg/Wishibam initiative checks all the boxes that define a successful omnichannel approach today:
- Unified inventory at the SKU level across all stores in the center, updated in real time
- Seamless transition between online and in-store: web-to-store, store-to-web, click & collect, online reservations
- One shopping cart, one payment, one customer experience for dozens of different brands
- A distributed logistics system that relies on physical stores, without the need for a central warehouse
- A data reporting system that enables both the center's management and the individual stores to manage their performance with a consolidated view
All of this without requiring tenant retailers to overhaul their own systems: the Wishibam digital solution integrates with their existing systems.
A Substantive Partnership
What sets this partnership apart is its duration. Compagnie de Phalsbourg did not test Wishibam as a one-time initiative. Instead, it chose a technology partner to help it fundamentally rethink the role of digital technology in its centers. The Village Outlet led the way, followed by other rollouts across the group’s portfolio.
Such consistency is rare in the industry, where retailers frequently switch from one solution to another, overburdening their IT systems without ever establishing a stable operational model. BFM Business’s Focus Retail Grand Prix recognizes the results of this long-term consistency.
What This Victory Says About the Wishibam Model
For Wishibam, seeing one of its clients recognized in the top category of the Focus Retail Grand Prix means more than just a trophy for the software provider. It confirms that the decision made in 2018—to connect the inventory of multiple independent retailers in real time on a single e-commerce site to enhance the end customer’s experience—was the right one. And that this model—originally designed for shopping malls and outlet destinations—can now be applied to all multi-retailer retail configurations: franchises, retail groups, vertical marketplaces, and networks of independent stores.
Beyond the Compagnie de Phalsbourg, it is Wishibam’s entire client portfolio—including Marques Avenue, Via Outlet, Helsinki Outlet, Intersport, E.Leclerc, and the BHV—that demonstrates the strength of this approach.
What now?
This distinction comes at a time when the retail industry is seeking to reinvent itself. Shopping centers that fail to transform themselves into phygital experience destinations risk losing foot traffic—a trend that Philippe Journo, President and CEO of Compagnie de Phalsbourg, anticipated as early as 2018 when he predicted that retailers that did not evolve toward a multichannel model would disappear within ten years.
The Focus Retail Grand Prix confirms a hunch. The industry now needs to adopt a model that is no longer the exception—it is becoming the standard.