How OVS connects 8,000 employees on a single mobile app

In brief

OVS replaces bulletin boards and top-down cascades with WELLO, a branded mobile app built for store teams. Within six months, the full workforce of 8,000+ people connected. Page views reach 1.2 million in the first year.

The context

OVS S.p.A. leads the Italian apparel market for men, women, and children, and also operates in underwear, beauty, and home decoration. The company opened in 1972 and has been listed on the Italian stock exchange since March 2015.

The group employs more than 8,000 people across a network of over 2,600 stores in Italy and abroad, under the OVS, Upim, and Goldenpoint banners.

Internal communication sits with the Human Resources Department, which works as a strategic partner close to people and their needs. The team runs a structured system of listening and engagement while collaborating across Corporate Communication, Training, and Employer Branding.

The challenge

Eight in ten OVS employees work in stores, away from a personal corporate workstation. Information travelled through physical bulletin boards and top-down cascades, and reached the shop floor late.

Store teams felt professionally distant from the company. Growth through acquisition added brands, each with its own history and culture, which made a shared identity harder to build.

The team set out to build a cultural bridge rather than a mobile app. The measure of success: a sales assistant in a small regional store reaches the same information as a manager at headquarters, at the same moment.

Three goals framed the project:

• Reach every store employee directly, on a phone
• Give one shared identity to teams across OVS, Upim, and Stefanel
• Turn frontline workers into recognized contributors to the group story

The solution: a zero-friction mobile hub

OVS deploys WELLO, a branded mobile app designed as a virtual hub. Store teams work with limited time between customers, so every design decision protects those few minutes.

The adoption: WELLO DAY

OVS built a human-to-digital ritual around the launch.

Store Managers and local leads trained first. Then a synchronized event ran across 2,600 stores on the same day. Every Store Manager gathered the team in the morning for a collective kick-off and introduced the platform with the physical WELLO Welcome Kit.

The kit guided colleagues through their first login and turned a technical download into an official welcome into the company community. WELLO arrived as a benefit rather than as a new tool.

Today WELLO is the reference point for everything outside store operations, from HR documents to personal services.

The results

• 100% of the workforce, 8,000+ people, connected within six months
• 8,000 unique mobile users and 1.2 million page views in the first year
• Average session time close to three minutes
• "OVS Per Me", the benefits area, ranks among the most visited sections
• Upim brand community: 1,500 members, 1,000+ posts, and 21,000 reactions

A model that scales

The same environment welcomed the teams of OVS Innovation and Sustainability, which confirms that the model travels well across the group.

A frontline that sees itself differently

Area Managers and Store Managers describe a clear shift in how store teams perceive their place in the company: from working out of sight to holding real visibility. The corporate experience now adapts to individual needs, and the sense of belonging grows with it.

What made the difference

What's next

OVS keeps WELLO close to the people it serves. The team continues to extend the model to newly integrated companies, and to grow the space where store teams speak, share, and contribute.

Our partner

Huware guided OVS in developing Wello, a digital workplace designed to connect all employees, from stores to headquarters. Using a design thinking and change management approach, Huware created an intuitive, personalized, and omnichannel platform that improved internal communication and engagement and strengthened the company’s identity, while fully leveraging the capabilities of LumApps to meet OVS’s specific needs.