Columbia Sportswear, one of En Pointe Global Services’ retail distribution partners, already had strong brand awareness and high volume distribution worldwide through partner channels.  Employing nearly 3000 employees around the world, Columbia Sportswear products are sold in approximately 90 countries.  Through a acquisitions such as Mountain Hardware, Sorel and Montrail, Columbia Sportswear was quickly becoming a leader in outdoor apparel technologies from head to foot made for all climates.  The strength of both their own products and internal marketing campaigns presented a unique problem for Columbia Sportswear, their retail partners were ceasing the local marketing support of the product that had helped build the brand because the product simply sold itself.

Never a company to rest on the laurels of yesterday’s hard work, Columbia Sportswear decided to rise to the new challenge by creating their own retail presence.  With only a couple specialty stores, with expansion already underway Columbia Sportswear realized the internal support structure was not ready to support rapid expansion into retail support, so they approached En Pointe.

En Pointe Retail IT PMO Services

En Point’s consulting services quickly surmised that there were several areas in which Columbia Sportswear required support; planning, procurement, configuration, installation, support and life cycle asset management.  By combining all these services into a single project En Pointe removed the bottleneck for Columbia Sportswear allowing growth to match the speed of business.

The extraordinary level of service and support provided by En Pointe led to additional engagements to further assist the business including low voltage and security installation for retail locations and server engineering, network engineering and desktop support services for the corporate offices.

Thanks to the partnership established between En Pointe and Columbia Sportswear, Columbia Sportswear has opened stores on time every time at rates up to five stores a month since the engagement started in March of 2007.