--- title: "Decathlon: Removing the training wheels from an MVP and scaling it across Europe" slug: "removing-training-wheels-mvp-scaling-across-europe" excerpt: "“I hope you don’t quit after seeing that.” On my very first day at Decathlon—a global retail leader and dream workplace for French product managers, the fog of war slowly lifted before my eyes. Multiple fronts appeared: price wars against Shein, H&M and consorts, intense competition with premium brands like Nike and Patagonia, E-commerce battles with Amazon and pure players, and the unavoidable tensions that come with fast-paced transformation." date: "2024-12-15" category: "Product Case Study" tags: ["MVP", "Product", "Scaling"] author: "Sébastien" image: "/blog/decat-wheels/image.png" bgFormat: "dark:bg-[#1B092D] bg-blue-100" articleFormat: "" imageFormat: "" cardFormat: "" status: "published" readingTime: "10 min" --- import Image from 'next/image'; # **Removing the training wheels from an MVP and scaling it across Europe** **“I hope you don’t quit after seeing that.”** On my very first day at Decathlon—a global retail leader and dream workplace for French product managers, the fog of war slowly lifted before my eyes. Multiple fronts appeared: price wars against Shein, H&M and consorts, intense competition with premium brands like Nike and Patagonia, E-commerce battles with Amazon and pure players, and the unavoidable tensions that come with fast-paced transformation. My own battle? Removing the training wheels from an MVP and scaling it across Europe.

Credit: Jess Zoerb for the pic, and me for the rest (Unsplash)

**This is the product story of how we scaled Decathlon's rental and subscription business from a few Google Sheets in France to a multi-million-euro platform across Europe.**

Revenue

+€5M

4× YoY - 2023

Countries

🇧🇪 🇳🇱 🇪🇸 🇮🇹

Subscriptions

+30 000

3× YoY - 2023

Operations

-50%

workload

Sources: Decathlon Financial Statements

--- ## Decathlon’s transformation In 2022, Decathlon was changing fast: - A new CEO — the first external hire *and* the first woman, ex-IKEA, - A new Comex, with profiles more Silicon Valley than Mulliez Valley - A bold new brand strategy - Hundreds of digital recruits, for the first time based outside Lille — in Paris and Amsterdam The company was shifting gears — reinventing its original (and wildly successful) recipe to face a challenging future: **The blue flagship had to sail away from the red ocean.** Auchan’s mass distribution model from the ’70s generated billions, but now everyone sells affordable sports gear: Amazon, H&M, Zara, Temu, Shein… And with commitments to reduce CO₂ emissions using better materials and cleaner supply chains, the low-cost strategy was no longer sustainable. Pun intended. **A mass retailer brand and 70 sub-brands needed consolidation and a move upmarket.** While Decathlon’s vertical integration — from design to distribution — was highly successful, it had hit a glass ceiling. Its premium and mid-range products suffered from consumer bias compared to similar offerings from competitive brands. A stronger brand would help. **Digital infrastructure and e-commerce had to pick up the pace.** In a race where Amazon, Nike, and other pure players kept raising the bar: same-day delivery, frictionless and inspirational UX, Decathlon couldn’t afford to run behind. **Giant retail stores needed to display less, and showcase more.** Decathlon also needed to adapt — moving beyond its classic ’80s retail vibe, where products were stacked to the ceiling in endless aisles — toward showcasing its best products and supporting new consumer habits: omnichannel experiences, services, and rental… rental? **Stop selling, rent.** To meet its sustainability goals, Decathlon aimed to scale its circular initiatives. Among them, a promising POC launched in France in 2019 allowed parents to rent kids' bikes… And that’s where I came in, right in the middle of this transformation, with one mission: turn that MVP into a product that could scale across Europe. ## The challenges of scaling rental The ambition was simple enough. The path forward, less so. ### **1. Hundreds of millions in growth expected** With a target of hundreds of millions to reach in just a few years, we had to build a platform that could scale in two directions: – **Horizontally**, by expanding into new countries – **Vertically**, by launching new rental offers and subscriptions beyond kids' bikes. ### **2. Unifying fragmented MVPs** Consensus in the European Union is hard, especially when it comes to transferring sovereignty. At Decathlon, a dozen countries had built their own rental MVPs, each tailored to local needs. With funding shifting from local teams to the “Union,” we suddenly had a mandate to replace 27 MVPs with a single product. As easy as aligning countries on the single currency, and roadmapping their entry into the Eurozone. ### **3. Running lean inside a giant in transformation** It could’ve been a bad joke: two Spaniards, one Italian, and a Frenchman… But instead of walking into a bar, we walked into Decathlon, at a time when 10,000 other techies were focused on transforming the company, roadmaps were full, and resources were scarce. That meant building off-grid, from scratch, running lean — while ensuring future compatibility for when integration became possible. **So what did we build?** ## **Behind the (product) scenes** ### **Solo beginnings → Discovery time** **What’s a PM without developer? A designer? A product marketer? A product researcher?** For my first few months, I was a team of one — which gave me the time (and space) to go deep on discovery, market research, and figuring out what we would actually build. ### **Our inherited product** It’s hard to define an MVP, way easy to describe one: - Google Sheets, manually updated by teammates with kids' bikes, pricing, and services data - A (very) costly SaaS tool managing payments and storing pricing logic — one we knew we had to kill - Two monolithic JSON files, manually edited by PMs and devs, holding the logic of the two sources above - A basic API exposing both JSONs to a few consumers It was as good as MVPs get, now we would need something else to scale. ### **Our inherited market** Armed with curiosity, empathy, and a love for diagramming tools, I embarked on a solo quest of exploration and mapping: - Mapped Decathlon’s rental initiatives across Europe - Benchmarked competitors like Bike Club and Swapfiets - Evaluated Subscription SaaS like Zuora - Visited stores and warehouses — renting bikes, folding cardboard, loading trucks (shoutout to Exotec’s robots) - Conducted interviews with clients, staff, and stakeholders, anyone I could talk to really. I had the insights. I shaped the vision. All I was missing? Engineers. Then came a surprise mercato, I was lent 3 players from Madrid. We were ready for take-off. ## On the delivery side We finally had a team: three backend engineers and one PM (👋🏼) #### **Ready for Takeoff, but Returning to the Gate** Just as we began making changes to our data model and platform, our plane was grounded. - **Severe weather:** The pressure to deploy the existing MVP was too strong. Countries had been waiting for years, budgets were tight, and a profit warning pushed urgency to the top. - **Runway congestion:** Our consumers and suppliers had full roadmaps, which meant they couldn’t take in any changes to our data model or API. So we changed course: **deploy now, refactor later**. > The trade-off brought a step increase in rollout and maintenance costs, but it unlocked short-term growth. > > > We phased our work and shipped improvements as dependencies cleared, and in between rollouts. > **It was like repairing a plane mid-flight. Please fasten your seatbelts.** ### **What We Actually Built** Despite all the turbulence, we stuck the landing. **→ Bye bye JSON files, hello PostgreSQL (and continuous data model improvements)** We replaced the two manually edited JSON files with a proper relational database, and finally began improving the data model. No more thousands of duplicated entries across countries and languages. No more pushing to production just to launch a cute pink bike with flowers in Spain. 🌸 **→ Refactored our Consumer API** Goodbye, monolithic JSON blob that took 2 seconds to load and regularly timed out. Hello pagination. Hello milliseconds. **→ Hello Internal API, goodbye SQL** Roze kinderfiets. Bicicleta rosa para niños. Vélo enfant rose. Bicicletta rosa per bambini. For a while, I took care of most of the operational “run” so the team could focus on more valuable things — like coding. But as fun as it was at the start, running SQL queries to bump prices by €1, or adding pink bike translations in every market, didn’t exactly scale. Our new internal API cut operations by half — and saved me from accidentally dropping a table in production. Win-win. **→ What’s better than Google Sheets?** A clean, tailored web app that enables non-tech teams to change the price of any pink bike across Europe. While the backend team shipped our API, I designed and built the final touch: a low-code tool on top of our new endpoints that brought the whole product together. ## **Impact & Results** Well, this was it — the story of how we turned a scrappy MVP into a scalable product, enabling: - **Expansion into 5 countries** and multiple segments: kids' bikes, adult bikes, golf, and home fitness - **4× revenue growth** in one year — reaching **€6M in 2023** and tripling subscriptions to 60,000 - **50% less ops workload** and **rollouts cut from days to minutes** - **Cost savings:** Eliminated an expensive SaaS dependency, saving thousands annually - **Scalable foundation:** Paved the way for expansion into 7 countries and 100,000+ subscriptions by 2025 ## To conclude In the end, we took the little wheels off the MVP — and gave them to me. I became the unofficial “fourth developer,” rolling through SQL, JavaScript, API design, and low-code tools. I survived it all — and never broke production. 🎖️ But the real complexity didn’t come from tech or product. It came from navigating trade-offs and aligning teams, planets, and priorities — across 100,000 people in 67 countries — all during one of Decathlon’s boldest transformations. Renting required a completely different model, both digitally and physically: different products, payment flows, supply chains, operations, tools — even sales culture. In a company generating billions through retail, everything was optimized to design, manufacture, and sell at scale. Our product didn’t fit — and that’s partly what saved it. We were able to grow it without deep integration, while still gaining traction. Not all initiatives were so lucky. *We Play Circular* — a subscription model where people could rent multiple products each month — was eventually shut down. With Decathlon evolving on so many fronts, let’s see if circularity becomes part of its DNA.