Veepee opens its first innovation center outside France in Barcelona

Veepee continues to bet on Barcelona. After opening a new corporate headquarters in the Marina Factory building in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat in autumn 2021, the leading e-commerce company in flash sales has decided to locate its first innovation center outside France in the facilities of its Spanish subsidiary.

The new Innovation Lab will be launched in the second quarter of the year and its main mission is to attract young talent and develop new projects that improve the purchasing process and customer satisfaction, with initiatives linked to augmented reality, machine learning, optimization of search processes and the logistics chain. "This involves the development of actions with a direct impact on the business that will strengthen the company's position as a leader in flash sales," says Veepee, which will use the center to train young people and guarantee access to qualified professionals to cover the vacancies that are recurrently generated in its innovation department.

The Barcelona campus will try to replicate the experience of the Innovation Lab that the company opened in Paris in 2007 in collaboration with the computer programming school École 42. Since then, it has had the participation of 90 students from different countries and in projects of all kinds, from robotics to 3D, including the development of chatbots and augmented reality and open innovation initiatives.

Veepee, which has already started the process to select the first candidates, estimates that 50 students will pass through the Barcelona center in two years, which will be located in the new headquarters in L'Hospitalet, designed to foster collaborative work and innovation between departments. In Spain, the group has a thousand employees, 670 of whom work in the new corporate offices, which were previously located in the old Loewe factory in 22@.

"Innovation at Veepee is essential, as it is part of our DNA," explains Jean Phillipe, the company's Innovation Director. "In addition, having a new Innovation Lab in Spain is fundamental to be closer to the local team and to better respond to their needs."

The new Innovation Lab in Barcelona will be made up of intern students who will work in groups of 3 or 4, advised by senior R&D profiles from Veepee and in direct collaboration with various departments of the company. "It is a complementary training for them to develop technological skills working on very specific projects with a direct impact on the business," says Jean Phillipe.

According to the French group, which acquired the Catalan company Privalia in 2016, this young talent that will pass through the center will be retained through internal hirings once the internships are finished. "The launch of this initiative will help us to be a benchmark in attracting young talent, favoring the diversity of our team," points out the multinational.

The former Vente Privée, founded by Jacques-Antoine Granjon, was the company that invented online flash sales, that is, the commercialization of a limited stock of products for a also limited period of time. The group currently operates in ten countries and has diversified from the textile sector to many other areas, such as home, decoration, leisure, beauty, travel, and gastronomy. Its continuous campaigns allow some 7,000 brands to liquidate their surpluses, with prices that, according to the company, are between 50% and 70% lower than the recommended retail price. Veepee has more than 5,500 employees and 66 million users, with sales that reached 3.8 billion euros in 2020.