Kusmi Tea Case Study

Kusmi Tea is a French premium tea brand, founded in 1867 in St Petersburg and established in Paris following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Renowned for its sophisticated blends, distinctive visual identity, and carefully curated customer experience, the brand combines elegant boutiques, department store corners, and a dynamic e‑commerce presence.

Owned entirely by Orientis Gourmet, Kusmi Tea operates 85 boutiques across France and is present in 35 countries worldwide. Its teas, crafted in Normandy, are instantly recognisable for their colourful packaging. Environmentally committed, the brand is 100% organic, reduces plastic use, and prioritises recyclable packaging.

Recognised for the quality of its products and its premium positioning, Kusmi Tea sought to strengthen the management of its retail network by leveraging qualitative, reliable, and directly actionable data to compare and challenge store performance. In 2015, the brand launched its first project with the installation of traffic‑counting sensors through Sensormatic Solutions’ ShopperTrak Analytics, designed to measure store attractiveness and conversion rates. The collected data was integrated into Kusmi Tea’s internal Power BI environment.

While these initial analyses proved useful, they quickly revealed their limitations: store managers could only access the data on a next‑day basis within the BI system, which restricted their engagement in daily performance management. The challenge therefore became to enrich the analysis with more precise KPIs, available in real time, to guide strategic decision‑making and support a culture of continuous improvement at the point of sale.

To optimise the performance of its retail network, Kusmi Tea rolled out the ShopperTrakAnalytics ( STan) application at the end of 2021. This advanced analytics tool consolidates and enhances data from multiple sources, providing a centralised platform for actionable insights.

The project builds on a technological framework established as early as 2015, when a network of 3D traffic‑counting sensors was installed across 85 stores in Europe, primarily in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

With a reliability rate exceeding 97%, these sensors deliver consistent and accurate data at 15‑minute intervals. The deployment covered the entire network, including both company‑owned and affiliated stores, ensuring a coherent and scalable data foundation across all levels of the business.

The STan platform has greatly enhanced the use of data in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. There was a genuine surge of interest, both among store managers and at head office. Real‑time data monitoring has enabled the introduction of daily and weekly targets for stores, based on insights provided by the application. Store managers now benefit from a clear view of their individual performance, while regional managers gain a comprehensive overview of their territories - visibility that is also shared at the national level.

To provide context for the analyses, Kusmi Tea introduced a classification of points of sale according to their typology: shopping centre, railway station, or city centre. This segmentation makes it possible to interpret performance in light of the dynamics specific to each environment — for example, denser but less qualified footfall in the city centre compared with that of a store located in a station.

The implementation of this approach was supported by a dedicated team, providing personalised guidance that included a sales representative, a Customer Success Manager (CSM), a project manager, and a technical support specialist. This structure ensures tailored follow up that is responsive and results oriented. Whereas some solutions require site specific adjustments, ShopperTrak Analytics stands out for its ability to adapt seamlessly across the entire network. With intelligent sensors, a proven methodology, and a structured deployment process, the solution is delivered consistently, swiftly, and reliably - whether for a single store or fifty.

The Customer Success Manager (CSM) plays a pivotal role in supporting Kusmi Tea’s teams. They provide training on the use of the STan platform and ensure ongoing follow‑up over time. The objective is to embed the tool into daily practices, optimise data utilisation, and adapt usage in line with evolving operational needs.

Thanks to STan, Kusmi Tea monitors its key performance indicators (KPIs) with data refreshed every 15 minutes. Footfall figures are cross‑referenced with till receipts and turnover, enabling the calculation of conversion rates and a clear assessment of traffic impact on sales. This cross‑analysis provides a detailed view of each store’s performance, supporting decision‑making both locally and at head office.

Real-time Data Access

One of STan’s major strengths lies in the accessibility of data, refreshed every 15 minutes, for both store teams and head office. This transparency enables agile management, responsive monitoring of KPIs (such as conversion rate and footfall), and the ability to make rapid adjustments in line with developments on the ground.

Hourly Analysis: the “Power Hour”

The platform also enables detailed hour‑by‑hour analysis of footfall, identifying peak periods of customer traffic. These insights have led to:

• Optimised staff scheduling aligned with periods of high demand.
• Adjusted opening hours to maximise commercial effectiveness.
• Improved task allocation in‑store (checkout, customer advice, etc.).

Overall Impact on Performance

Thanks to the STan platform, Kusmi Tea now has a powerful tool to better understand customer behaviour, optimise human resource management, and enrich the in‑store experience. Real‑time data measurement and analysis, combined with detailed segmentation and rigorous KPI tracking, have delivered a significant improvement in commercial performance across Europe.

With reliable and contextualised data now at their disposal, teams are able to make more informed decisions aligned with strategic objectives. These objectives are defined through concrete analyses, supported by leadership, and reinforced by targeted initiatives that strengthen engagement in the field. Our analytics platform, STan, has thus established itself as a strategic lever, both in terms of time savings and operational management. Building on this momentum, Kusmi Tea is looking to deepen its customer understanding by exploring new AI‑powered capabilities within ShopperTrak Analytics, including unique visitor recognition (Re-ID), dwell time analysis, and socio‑demographic segmentation.

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Sensormatic Solutions, the leading global retail solutions portfolio of Johnson Controls, powers safe, secure and seamless retail experiences. For more than 50 years, the brand has been at the forefront of the industry’s fast-moving technology adoption, redefining retail operations on a global scale and turning insights into actions. Sensormatic Solutions delivers an interconnected ecosystem of loss prevention, inventory intelligence and traffic insight solutions, along with our services and partners to enable retailers worldwide to innovate and elevate with precision, connecting data-driven outcomes that shape retail’s future. Please visit Sensormatic Solutions or follow us on LinkedIn, X, and our YouTube channel.