Where Did You Go This Summer?
LONDON 2012!
The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games saw CDL Logistics provide bespoke fulfilment services to the Sports Hospitality Industry that was working on behalf of the London 2012 Sponsors – including household names such as BP, Cadbury, EDF, GE (General Electric), GSK (Glaxo Smith Kline), Lloyds TSB and NBC.
The 2012 programme commenced with CDL developing a bi-lingual e-commerce website offering games merchandise on behalf of one of the sponsors throughout the games-time period.
The next task was to ensure that the many thousands of corporate invitations issued worldwide reached their targets. Mailing Campaigns were not only large but included numerous VIP guests with a strict requirement to protect privacy. Differing styles of invitations and pre-departure packs required CDL to use its expertise in hand-finishing to produce high quality mailings and merchandise packs for these guests.
Great Britain was on display and the sponsors were showcasing their businesses to guests from a global audience. These guests were going to be given an experience of a lifetime!
The Hospitality Industry recruited a small army of hosts to look after the guests and CDL ensured the hosts were provided with branded uniforms of the sponsor, which in itself was a logistical challenge. To facilitate this, a temporary fulfilment warehouse was sourced and staffed with CDL operatives and a fleet of dedicated delivery vehicles was provided for the games period. Uniforms were delivered in from all over the world checked in, stored and when the details of the hosts were known (which was more often than not last minute!), sent out – on time, in full!
Throughout the Games, CDL continued to provide fulfilment and logistics services to each successive campaign including supplying more uniforms as the numbers of hosts increased, producing personalised gift packs for guests and delivering these time sensitive goods into the heart of London. This often involved CDL working around the clock to fit in with the demands of the hosts’ sites for deliveries amidst the driving and hour’s restrictions imposed by the Olympic and Paralympic Road Networks – if that meant the West End at midnight, midnight it was!
As the games ended the hotels that were used by the sponsors were “bumped-out” onto our fleet and returned to the CDL warehouse where the goods had to be checked, repacked and returned to the sponsors. Within a week of the closing ceremony of the Paralympics the temporary warehouse was empty of goods and the infrastructure of CDL’s operation removed leaving a lot of tired looking people with big smiles all enthusiastically eyeing the holiday calendar! All that remained was one final mailing to all the guests who were sent a photo memory of London 2012.
