Locus Robotics Automates Fulfillment at The Creative Club

Locus Robotics, a provider of flexible, AI-driven warehouse automation, today announced the successful implementation of its LocusOne™ platform at The Creative Club. This platform will take over the central orchestration and management of 45 autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) of the Locus Origin type, continuously improving task allocation, route planning, and resource utilization, thereby enabling an efficient, scalable, and data-driven warehouse operation.

(Stuttgart/Schenefeld) The Creative Club is a leading online retailer of fabrics, sewing supplies, and digital sewing patterns based in Schenefeld near Hamburg. The company pursues a multi-faceted business model: On one hand, The Creative Club offers a wide range of fabrics and haberdashery to sewing enthusiasts through its twelve online shops across Europe. On the other hand, it enables external designers to sell their digital sewing patterns and e-books related to sewing. Additionally, TCC acts as a fulfillment service provider for smaller companies and startups, handling the storage, picking, and shipping of their products. This combination of creative e-commerce offerings and powerful logistics makes The Creative Club a versatile player in the European online market.

The company automated its approximately 11,000 m² fulfillment center in just a few weeks using Locus Robotics technologies, optimizing its entire warehouse processes. In particular, the previously manual picking and shipping preparation of ordered items is now a thing of the past. With the support of the deployed mobile robot fleet, which Locus offers as part of a highly flexible robot-as-a-service (RaaS) model, a significantly more efficient order processing is now possible. This not only increases customer satisfaction but also enables an extremely fast return on investment (ROI).

Completely New Logistics Setup

Before the collaboration, The Creative Club faced particular challenges: Continuous business growth alongside the goal of reducing variable costs required a completely new logistics setup. Therefore, the company executives set out to find a scalable solution that offers innovative ways to redesign and adapt the setup and processes in the warehouse. For example, the picking of fabrics in running meters, which requires a special cutting process, was particularly complex. Before automation, these fabrics had to be transported over long distances from the warehouse to separate cutting stations, processed there, and the leftover quantities had to be restocked – a time- and labor-intensive process that affected the efficiency of the entire fulfillment center.

Photo: © Locus Robotics