Adidas

Adidas manages a sophisticated retail network, with a team of 130+ field specialists, spanning both direct-to-consumer (D2C) locations and wholesale partnerships with major department stores like Liverpool, Martí, and Palacio de Hierro.

The operation coordinates across multiple business units—Sportswear, Football, Training, Kids, etc.—each requiring specific product placement strategies and visual merchandising standards.

After experiencing persistent reliability issues with their previous visual merchandising platform, Adidas prioritized finding a solution with proven stability and responsive customer service. The selection criteria focused on three core needs:

• A reliable mobile app for field teams to capture high resolution photos
• Flexible location hierarchy support to accommodate the structural differences between wholesale and DTC operations
• Robust reporting and visibility capabilities for supervisors and stakeholders

The team also needed to eliminate the communication chaos created by relying on multiple tools for photo collection, documentation, and compliance tracking. Xenia's reputation for customer responsiveness and platform reliability, combined with its configurable hierarchy and photo management capabilities, made it the clear choice.

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Photo-Based Visual Merchandising Inspections

Using Xenia templates, field specialists conduct daily store visits and document how merchandise is displayed across areas like panoramic views, perimeter fixtures, launch zones, and footwear walls. All submissions are automatically organized by location, date, and template section, giving supervisors an immediate view into execution across the network.

What makes this process particularly effective is the high-resolution quality of photos captured through the app. Teams can zoom into specific display areas during review sessions to assess exactly how merchandise is placed and whether brand standards are being met, making Xenia the authoritative record for what is actually happening on the floor.

During new merchandise rollouts and seasonal campaign launches, inconsistencies are surfaced quickly across the full location network rather than discovered after the fact.

Flexible Hierarchy and Role-Based Permissions

Xenia supports two distinct location hierarchies set-ups within the same platform for wholesale and DTC which are organized in different ways. Each channel operates with the right number of hierarchy layers for how that business is managed, which drives better reporting, more accurate user provisioning, and access control that reflects how the organization actually operates.

Permissions follow the same logic. Visual merchandising specialists can access their own submission history, while senior managers and area leads can review submissions across all locations they oversee.

In previous systems, this kind of scoped visibility was difficult to configure and maintain, and forcing both channels into a single rigid structure made accurate reporting nearly impossible.

Centralized Review and Stakeholder Reporting

The submission reports feature has become the most-used capability within the Adidas deployment, with teams gathering regularly to go through reports photo by photo.

High-resolution image quality lets reviewers zoom in at the display level to assess compliance in a way that lower-quality captures simply would not support. Beyond individual submissions, the gallery view gives supervisors a broader picture of execution across locations, and adjustable photo sizing and timestamp visibility within reports give teams control over how information is presented to different audiences.

When a submission does not meet standards, reviewers flag it and notify the field specialist to resubmit, ensuring only compliant imagery reaches stakeholder reports and buying team presentations. Before Xenia, pulling together this kind of structured photo record for internal meetings required significant manual effort across tools that were never designed to work together.

Looking Ahead

Adidas is extending its use of Xenia beyond visual merchandising audits and checklists into the SOP and Documents add-on.

The goal is to store important standard operating procedures and reference materials directly in Xenia so that visual merchandising staff can access them on the go from the mobile or tablet app in real-time, without needing to navigate outside the platform.

A key requirement for this expansion is access control. Specifically, the team needs to manage who can upload, edit, and download documents. Xenia's role-level and document-level read, write, edit, and delete permissions address this directly, making it a strong fit for an organization of Adidas's size managing a large, distributed field team across multiple business channels.