Logistics Feasibility Study: A Premium Smartwatch Launch in Besançon

The brief for the E-Commerce and Logistics course, taught by Christophe Bruneau in the second year of my Master’s in Management, E-Business & Digital Marketing at CNAM Paris, put each group of five inside the logistics department of a hypothetical company entering a product market of its choosing. The task: benchmark two real competitors, then design a “reasoned” outsourcing-and-insourcing logistics strategy differentiated enough to justify the new entrant’s existence. My group picked the premium smartwatch sector, benchmarked against Apple and Garmin, and set our fictional brand’s launch in Besançon.

I wrote this with four groupmates, Roxana Samson, Sodalin San, Vishnu Karthikeyan, and Haris Iltaf. It’s a hypothetical company and a hypothetical launch, not a real one, but the market data, the competitor logistics models, and the regulatory landscape it’s built against are real.

Why Besançon

Besançon is France’s historical watchmaking capital, home to the Pôle des Microtechniques and the TEMIS technology cluster. That gave us a genuine “Made in Besançon” sourcing story for the watch’s housing and precision components, rather than a marketing line bolted onto an otherwise generic supply chain.

What the Study Covers

Part I benchmarks how Apple and Garmin actually run their logistics, Apple’s ship-from-store model and volumetric packaging optimization against Garmin’s vertically integrated manufacturing and 3PL partnerships, and maps both companies’ customer journeys end to end. Part II builds our own strategic plan on top of that comparison: near-sourcing high-precision components locally while consolidating electronic parts through a European hub, a make-or-buy decision splitting manufacturing and warehousing (outsourced) from quality control (kept in-house), a micro-fulfillment hub inside the TEMIS cluster, and a last-mile plan built specifically around Besançon’s pedestrian old-town “Loop”, cargo bikes, bollard-restricted access, and a network of pickup points chosen for proximity rather than sheer count. It closes with a reusable-packaging reverse-logistics loop meant to turn returns into a retention tool rather than a cost center.

The full study, with its customer journey maps, appendices, and bibliography, is free to download below.