Customer Story

GANT: Suiting up for global growth with Google Workspace

As retail becomes increasingly global and competitive, GANT is continuing its proud history of innovation by moving to Google Workspace, reclaiming 150,000 hours of employee productivity a year.

GANT is an international lifestyle brand founded in 1949 and headquartered in Stockholm.

Sweden
https://www.gant.com/

Features used

Gmail

Calendar

Docs

Drive

Forms

Google Meet

Sheets

As retail becomes increasingly global and competitive, GANT is continuing its proud history of innovation by moving to Google Workspace, reclaiming 150,000 hours of employee productivity a year.

Google Workspace Results

Reclaims 30 to 60 minutes every working day for each of its 800 users around the globe

• Streamlines M&A, onboarding entire companies in hours

• Improves order management and delivery times from suppliers

• Reduces travel costs by 20%

“Retail today is incredibly challenging—you need to move fast. When it comes to technology, we are always embracing change and getting better at what we do. Google Workspace helps our employees work faster and smarter to sharpen our competitive edge.” - Rickard Söderberg, Global Digital Workplace Manager, GANT

An established international lifestyle brand for almost 70 years, GANT is facing more competition than ever. Luckily, change is in GANT’s DNA and part of its credo—as fashion evolves, the company famous for bringing button-down shirts to the mass market in the mid-20th Century is committed to “Never Stop Learning.”

Today, GANT is focused on becoming the world’s leading lifestyle brand by 2020. Its products are available in 70 countries at 4,000 retailers and 583 GANT stores worldwide. Achieving its growth goals and keeping its global brand desirable requires close collaboration, from clothing design and manufacturing to marketing and sales. To connect its business through cloud-based tools, GANT moved to Google Workspace, replacing an email solution that was expensive and difficult to maintain. Since then, the company has grown quickly.

“Retail today is incredibly challenging—you need to move fast,” says Rickard Söderberg, Global Digital Workplace Manager for GANT. “When it comes to technology, we are always embracing change and getting better at what we do. Google Workspace helps our employees work faster and smarter to constantly sharpen our competitive edge,” says Rickard.

Connecting a global supply chain

GANT quickly moved beyond email, using Google Docs and Sheets to collaborate in real time with more than 50 suppliers in China, India, Portugal, and Spain to better manage orders and deliveries. The company also uses Google Workspace to communicate with its retail stores, leveraging Google single sign-on (SSO) to grant employees access to web services such as the GANT service intranet.

Working from six primary GANT offices—five in Europe and one in the United States—employees use Google Drive as a shared hub to consolidate accounting and retail information. GANT allows partner-controlled access to files on Drive and uses Google Team Drive to assign file ownership at the team level for security and convenience. If individuals leave the company or partnerships change, those people lose access to the files, but team access continues uninterrupted.

To connect employees and partners face-to-face, GANT uses Google Meet, enabling video meetings on any device. Outside every meeting room, GANT uses an Android tablet linked to Google Calendar to keep track of who has booked the room and for what times. Inside, the rooms are equipped with Chromebox for Meetings hardware and large flat-screen monitors. Users can also join Meet on the fly from the kitchen, from home, or wherever they happen to be.

“Google Meet is helping us change our culture to be even more video-oriented,” says Rickard. “People want to use it because it’s so easy and works so well. Soon we plan to start using the new version of Google Chat, to take advantage of all the latest functionality—we always look to Google first when we need new enterprise collaboration tools.”

Collaborating with every stitch

“Google Drive is a visual and streamlined way of working. We can plan, manage, and discuss our work in progress within one place—fabrics, styles, everything, right down to the very last stitch.” - Matthew Wood, Creative Director, GANT

Rickard collaborates on video assets with a colleague in London, storing large video files on Team Drive and using Drive File Stream to stream files directly from cloud to desktop. By managing content more effectively, without the need to email files back and forth, email usage has decreased by 40%. With single sign-on and less email, clothing designers have more time to focus on the creative process, unleashing innovation that was previously bottlenecked by outdated technology and business processes.

Says Matthew Wood, creative director at GANT: “Google Drive is a very visual and simple way of working. We can plan, manage, and discuss our work in progress within one place—fabrics, styles, everything, right down to the very last stitch.”

Reclaiming 150,000 hours a year

GANT employees can also be more mobile, using Google Workspace. Most GANT offices have eliminated desktop PCs, encouraging employees to move around and work together in environments that are most conducive to innovation, whether in a conference room or at a coffee shop. Because employees don’t have to log into multiple systems and can be productive from wherever they are, GANT is reclaiming 30 to 60 minutes every working day for each of its 800 users around the globe.

“With Google Workspace, our employees have everything they need accessible at all times, from any device,” says Rickard. “As a result, we’re reclaiming approximately 150,000 hours a year for global innovation.”

Employees find the Google Workspace tools easy to use, giving them the confidence to automate tasks and solve problems. For example, store employees in Sweden used formulas in Sheets to track and calculate their overtime pay.

“For nontechnical users, Sheets is much easier to use than a traditional spreadsheet,” says Rickard. “It’s intuitive and not intimidating, inspiring people to be creative. Users love the Explore panel for generating quick insights.”

Streamlining acquisitions

Using Google Workspace tools also helps GANT’s IT department be more efficient, reducing CapEx and OpEx. When GANT acquires new companies, retains consultants, or hires new employees, it’s easy to provision more secure, single sign-on access for new users. Training is conducted online using Google Meet, reducing travel costs by 20% and enabling new employees to be productive immediately.

“With Google Workspace, we can onboard an acquired company of 40 people in just a few hours, set up online training, and provide a seamless experience anywhere in the world,” says Rickard. “Drive has accelerated the employee onboarding process, giving new employees access to their documents and resources from day one.”

Keeping branding consistent

As a visually focused brand, GANT has its own font and wanted to use it on business documents. The company worked with Google to make the font available in Google Workspace, giving employees an easy way to include consistent branding in all their communications.

“Consistent branding means a lot for a company like GANT, both consumer-facing and also internally,” says Rickard. “When you are representing GANT, it should look GANT: premium and preppy!”

Google introduces new Google Workspace features almost daily, helping GANT stay productive and more secure. For example, since Google launched Drive File Stream to enable easier access to Drive files on demand, user adoption increased even further. Users also enjoy the recording feature in Google Meet, which they use to capture meetings and training sessions for future reference.

“A major benefit of Google Workspace compared to other products is that we get access to new features and functionality all the time, with no upgrades to worry about and at no extra cost,” says Rickard. “Like GANT, Google never stops learning, changing, and improving its products.”

Continuing a history of innovation

“Cloud collaboration is the modern way of working, and with Google Workspace, we’re ahead of the game. Our employees, customers, and even competitors consider GANT to be an advanced, forward-thinking company, and a big part of that is because we use Google Workspace.” - Rickard Söderberg, Global Digital Workplace Manager, GANT

Using Google Workspace, GANT empowers employees to exceed customer expectations. The company that helped define the shirt with now-classic touches such as the box pleat, locker-loop, and back-collar button is bringing its legacy of innovation into the 21st Century.

For example, the company has launched GANT Tech Prep, a “preppy” shirt with properties usually found only in sports and training wear, such as breathable material with wicking and quick drying abilities. The GANT Beacons Project creates shirts and other garments partly by using up-cycled plastic collected from the oceans. GANT is also innovating on the marketing front, boosting brand awareness by producing a six-part show for YouTube called “Couple Thinkers” that features comedian Craig Ferguson and his wife Megan Ferguson exploring some of life’s more interesting questions. The point? Never stop learning.

Staying ahead of the game

GANT is now working on major CRM and product lifecycle management initiatives that will move the company forward—projects that may not have been possible without the collaborative freedom that Google Workspace provides.

“Cloud collaboration is the modern way of working, and with Google Workspace, we’re ahead of the game,” says Rickard. “Our employees, customers, and even competitors consider GANT to be an advanced, forward-thinking company, and a big part of that is because we use Google Workspace.”