Explore our supply chain development work with Rituals

Supply chain development is essential for a fast-growing brand like Rituals. Building on a long-term partnership, Involvation and Rituals launched the first Rituals Supply Chain Academy in 2023.

Here, Jeroen Scheepers, Partner at Involvation, explores the Academy’s co-design around Rituals’ end-to-end supply chain, and why a supply chain development program matters for ambitious organizations.

Understanding Rituals' Supply Chain Learning Needs

In complex, global supply chains, efficient thinking remains important — but it’s not everything.

“Organizations need agile, adaptive, highly skilled supply chain teams, so implementing a robust supply chain development program is vital,” Jeroen explains. “It’s part of driving growth, efficiency, and resilience. It also enables brands to retain their brightest supply chain brains, through opening up opportunities for professional development within their organization.”

Involvation has worked with Rituals since 2016, so we already knew each other’s ways of working. But we took time to understand the brand’s business challenges, and related supply chain learning and talent development needs, more deeply:
- Rocketing business growth: From 2016-2023, Rituals’ revenue grew from €300 million to €1.7 billion. The Amsterdam-based supply chain team expanded to keep pace, from 25+ to 90+ in seven years.
- Differing supply chain knowledge: Rituals hires its fairly young, motivated workforce from wide-ranging professional backgrounds. Ensuring everyone had fundamental, end-to-end supply chain knowledge — and avoiding silos — was essential to manage the brand’s increasingly complex stages of supply chain development.
- Portfolio concept: The Rituals brand centers around product assortments, with constant innovation. This impacts on developing a supply chain strategy: If a single product isn’t available, that deflates the overall Rituals concept.
Designing the Rituals Supply Chain Development Program
1. Define supply chain learning objectives and target audience
  - To engage our target audience, we co-designed the supply chain development program with the Rituals Supply Chain Management Team and the HR department. “We shaped the content around the supply chain department’s ambitions, challenges, and growth strategy,” Jeroen elaborates. “As the Rituals team have a range of business backgrounds, we made sure the content was accessible for attendees with lower supply chain development knowledge and experience, but also interesting for attendees with more.”
2. Design the supply chain learning program
  - Phase 1: Embedded e-learning modules in Rituals’ learning environment
    Known as The Book of Rituals, the brand’s internal learning platform is where employees access and complete their training. “We can seamlessly place our e-learning modules into clients’ learning environments or give their employees access to our e-learning platform, if that’s more convenient,” explains Jeroen.
    
    Involvation has developed 60+ e-learning modules via The Value Chain Academy. The Rituals team started their supply chain development program by working through the 10 virtual modules they’d selected from this range. They ran these e-learnings remotely, in various sessions taking up 1 day in total.
  - Phase 2: Tailored Foundation modules
    Rituals’ Foundation modules covered end-to-end stages of supply chain development (supply chain strategy, S&OP, logistics, fulfillment, and customer service). We worked through the Foundation phase in a one-day in-person workshop in Amsterdam, in cross-functional teams.
  - Phase 3: Tailored Essentials modules
    The Essentials modules then dived into each team’s expertise areas. Each supply chain learning module reflected Rituals’ actual scenarios, needs, and aims. We included best-practice examples from wider industry: AI forecasting using point-of-sale data, for example. For the Essentials phase, we ran two half-day in-person workshops with each team's specialists.
  - Pitch to colleagues during whole-department monthly review
    Each Rituals team pitched on two supply chain development topics during the department’s Monthly Supply Chain Review. Applying their supply chain learning directly to Rituals’ real-life scenarios, they suggested solutions to supply chain blockers and voted on an overall winner.

Engaging Employees in Supply Chain Development Programs

To foster engagement with learning and talent development (for supply chain and beyond), we always formulate our training programs based on the client’s business goals.

“We work with management to generate buy-in and motivation for learning programs across all seniority levels,” says Jeroen. “At Rituals, for example, management attended all our training sessions, which underlined the brand’s commitment to investing in talent development.”

Our Supply Chain Academy is a proven resource for employees’ professional growth, supporting lateral and vertical career progression. For employers, that makes it a valuable resource for retaining talent, as well as for developing a sustainable supply chain strategy.

Expanding to More Employees: Beyond a Supply Chain Development Program

Supply chain is often a valuable starting point for talent development within an organization — and ripples tend to spread from there!

Our first supply chain development program with Rituals received positive employee feedback, leading to wider plans with the company’s HR team and other departments within Rituals, such as Business Technology.

Make Supply Chain Learning Count

Via The Value Chain Academy, we’ve implemented supply chain development programs for major and mid-sized multinationals. “We’ve diligently developed our blended program with e-learnings, webinars, workshops, games, coaching, learning-on-the-job, and more, ready for tailoring to each client’s supply chain learning needs,” Jeroen adds.

We’ve also shaped evaluation frameworks to demonstrate our supply chain development programs’ lasting impact: How they apply to your people’s daily work, elevating collaboration and solutions. For making a sustainable supply chain strategy work, this customizable approach and ongoing evaluation are key.

A well-structured learning and development framework brings organizations return on investment beyond the supply chain: Boosting cross-team cohesion, nurturing and retaining talent, and priming business-wide growth.

To find out more about shaping your supply chain learning program, contact Stefan Hoogervorst.