SUpporting decathlon to deliver their brand mission: making sport accessible for the many

Decathlon are a sports retailer constantly looking to stay ahead. In the UK, over the last 5 years, there is a strong track record of digital and data innovation for increasing participation in physical activity. After seeing the momentum of OpenActive, Decathlon started engaging with market players around potential partnerships to help tap into that momentum.

After speaking with the team at imin, Decathlon realised that they could create a new type of sport ecosystem, and through the power of open data, tap into existing networks of sport providers to better meet their goal of making sport more accessible to the many.

imin was uniquely positioned to help Decathlon deliver this ecosystem - enabling them to build and evolve their own consumer facing platform, whilst tapping into the huge opportunity that OpenActive provides.

The ecosystem should also enable Decathlon to gather more data on consumer preferences around sport and activity, by delivering a genuine value-add product to help consumers discover more activities local to them.

In winter 2019, Decathlon launched Play. Play enables Decathlon users to find and book activities, as well as to explore information, articles and products to help them to be more active. Play will combine Decathlon's own activities (often hosted from within their stores around the UK), with activities from ecosystem providers being delivered by the imin platform, enabling Decathlon to show activities from sports venues and clubs from across the UK.

By integrating the imin Platform into Play, Decathlon are accessing real-time, filtered data about activities from their initial launch partners, Fusion Lifestyle. The service initially launched with well over 800 articles and 5,000 weekly activities.

Dean Armoogum, Fusion Lifestyle’s Head of Marketing, Digital & CRM, says: "Through our collaboration with imin, we’ve been able to work with a number of public sector organisations in the attempt to reach new audiences - but now, with Decathlon as the first major private sector brand to come aboard, we’re really excited about the potential this holds to get more people more active, and a sign of things to come as OpenActive continues to gain momentum.”

imin also provides a branded, GDPR compliant and cybersecure whitelabel checkout to Decathlon - enabling their users to quickly and easily book and pay (without having to leave the Decathlon website). The book and pay functionality is available from venues that are part of the imin's growing bookable provider network.

imin continues to lead on partnership work for Decathlon to grow the Play ecosystem to different types of sports providers as well as different parts of the UK, recently adding bookable runs from Goodgym to the platform.