How ERA Group Helped Innovasport Reduce Its Packaging Costs by 53%

By redesigning its boxes and transitioning to a new supplier, Innovasport achieved significant savings without compromising the efficiency of its supply chain.

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The Client

Innovasport is Mexico’s leading sporting-goods retailer, with a nationwide presence through its physical stores and e-commerce channels, and brands such as Innovasport, Innvictus, and Ameshop. Its logistics operation moves hundreds of thousands of packages per year from its distribution centers to stores and end customers across the country.

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Challenges Before Engaging ERA

Before working with ERA, Innovasport’s corrugated-box category represented a significant annual expense, with a substantial purchase volume across several product families, historically managed with a single supplier and without market benchmarks.

The Current Situation Report prepared by ERA identified a clear opportunity: a relevant category operating with no market visibility, no reference prices, no evaluated alternatives, and no mechanism to guarantee competitive conditions over time.

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Decision to Partner with ERA

The decision to work with ERA Group was driven by the strategic mindset of the Innovasport team and its openness to challenging the status quo of its spend categories. ERA’s success-based model where fees are tied to verified savings and there is no financial risk for the client, fit its philosophy of continuous improvement: if there are no savings, there is no cost.

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ERA’s Approach and Implementation

ERA began with a diagnostic of the category and launched a competitive process comparing four technical packaging strategies in terms of resistance, cost, and box structure for each product family.

• The winning strategy was validated with laboratory technical testing, which also revealed variability of the original supplier against specification, while always safeguarding the service level as part of ERA’s commitment. The quoted potential saving was 53%.

• In 2025, at Innovasport’s request, ERA reopened the market with a second competitive round to evaluate alternatives and improve delivery times.

• In parallel, a unified box design for e-commerce 2026 was developed, standardising box sizes to simplify the SKU portfolio across channels.

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Long-Term Results and Impact

The collaboration transformed a category that operated on inertia into one managed with data: full month-to-month spend visibility, a 36-month history of reconciled information, and a partner that monitors the market on an ongoing basis, not just at the start of the project. When Innovasport identified an opportunity to improve delivery times, ERA reopened the market with a second competitive round, the relationship does not end with the negotiation.

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Main Benefit

For Innovasport, the relationship with ERA goes beyond cost reduction: it is a model of continuous category management, with innovation applied to packaging from the structural redesign of the boxes to the new unified design and a database that gives the team permanent negotiating power.

"The results of the project wit ERA were very satisfactory for innovasport, as they brought category management, with innovation applied to packaging from the structural redesign of the boxes to the new unified design and a database that gives the team permanent negotiating power." - Evelyn Vida, Supplies, Innovasport