Narvar is one of Fast Company's Most Innovative

Narvar has once again been named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list, this year ranked #3 in the Logistics category! As we come to the one-year anniversary of sheltering-in-place due to the pandemic, it’s gratifying to receive this prestigious recognition for our efforts to support retailers early in the crisis.

“We’re honored to have been named a World’s Most Innovative Company for a second time by Fast Company,” said Amit Sharma, Founder & CEO of Narvar. “I’m proud of our team’s agility to adapt to the ever-changing business environment.

At Narvar, we’ll continue to foster this culture of innovation and provide the most engaging customer experience for the customers we serve around the world.”

The pandemic accelerated the shift to online shopping by 5 years in just 6 months, as well as hastening contraction of the physical store footprint. Retailers had to revisit their short- and long-term strategies to fit this new landscape and, in many cases, prioritize their digital transformation efforts. Narvar helped retailers maintain operations during a period when many stores were inaccessible by expanding our platform with timely new features that will continue to be valuable for years to come. 

How Narvar’s innovations helped retail

Here are a few examples which are representative of the impact we’ve seen across our client base:

Levi's®, one of the best-loved and forward-thinking brands in the industry, has valued and utilized Narvar’s innovations to remain agile and meet consumers’ evolving needs in the face of the pandemic. For example: 

• Narvar smoothly adapted automated returns processes to support Levi’s relaxation of return policies.
• Narvar enabled Levi’s to quickly route returns to a single DC, adjusting load and volume to accommodate staffing and operations challenges.
• Levi’s added printerless returns for consumer convenience during the pandemic, especially as many lost access to office or school printers, and saw 20% adoption of that method of return.
• Levi’s also added online exchanges to help consumers get the right size even as stores were closed, and saw 30% of potential returns turning into exchanges.

• For one of our outdoor apparel & equipment retailers, 94% of all returns traditionally come back to their stores, regardless of whether the items were purchased online or in-store. As non-essential retailers, they had to close nearly all of their locations during the pandemic and needed an immediate solution. Narvar was able to get them up and running with returns portals for both in-store and online purchases in 11 days. Within the first 30 days we facilitated over 65k returns across both online & in-store purchases for them.

• We were able to spin up online returns & exchanges for all 14 brands of one of our major shoe conglomerates in a matter of weeks, driving down support calls about returns from 50% to 30% of all contacts. They reported retaining about $1.5M in revenue in the first month just for their top 3 brands by being able to handle online exchanges.

• For a jewelry store group of 8 brands, we stood up Simple Returns in just 2 days so they could easily facilitate returns for their customers during shutdown — about 20k returns in the first 30 days on the platform.

About the list

Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies list honors the businesses that have not only found a way to be resilient in the past year, but also turned those challenges into impact-making processes for their industries and culture as a whole.

“In a year of unprecedented challenges, the companies on this list exhibit fearlessness, ingenuity, and creativity in the face of crisis,” said Fast Company Deputy Editor David Lidsky, who oversaw the issue with Senior Editor Amy Farley. This list provides both a snapshot and a road map for the future of innovation across the most dynamic sectors of the economy. 

Narvar was previously named to Fast Company’s MIC list in 2019.