Courir at a glance
Founded 45 years ago in the world of men’s sports and performance, Courir has undergone a profound transformation. Today, it is Europe’s favorite sneaker specialist among women. With more than 300 stores, 3,300 employees and an ambitious target of €1 billion in revenue by 2026, the brand operates in a market that is as exciting as it is unpredictable.
Sneakers are, first and foremost, a social phenomenon. Driven by social media and influencers, a pair can go from unknown to bestseller in a matter of hours. What does this mean for store teams? Constant, maximum agility, in both actions and mindset.
What sets Courir apart from mere “box sellers” is the strength of its customer relationships. Its sales advisors are genuinely engaged and embody the brand’s DNA every day. To achieve this, the company recognized a truth that is too often overlooked: you cannot give what you do not have. Taking care of employees is the essential condition for them to take care of customers.
To meet these challenges, Courir set out to build its HR strategy around three main pillars: employee engagement, retention and recruitment. For a group in full growth, it was essential to structure, harmonize and align its HR processes across all countries.
« With Zest, you can’t hold a performance review until the employee has initiated and started working on their own self-assessment. It’s always the same principle: I start with the employee and work up from there. That’s what made me choose Zest. »
Sandra Ottavi, Group HR Director, Courir
Modernizing management rituals with Zest
When Courir turned to Zest, the company was facing several major HR challenges. First, it urgently needed to digitize and modernize all its management rituals, which until then had been handled inconsistently and often manually. The goal was to centralize these processes on a single platform for greater consistency and efficiency. At the same time, Courir wanted to make better use of its HR data and build a reliable history, giving it a clear view of its human capital.
Finally, Courir aimed to launch a Talent Review initiative across the entire organization. This strategic project was designed to identify, develop and retain high-potential employees in an objective and fair way.
To lead this transformation, the HR department took a resolutely field-based approach. Rather than designing HR policies from an ivory tower, every initiative was co-developed with frontline managers through back-and-forth exchanges, adjustments and iterations. A SpeakUp survey sent to all 3,000 employees first provided an honest, and at times uncomfortable, diagnosis. It revealed that one in three people left the company within their first three months. Store atmosphere was the leading driver of motivation, and the manager relationship was the leading cause of departures. This diagnosis shaped the entire action plan.
In its search for the right solution, Courir defined several key selection criteria:
✅️ Ease of use for employees and managers, to ensure fast adoption and effective day-to-day use.
✅️ Strong back-office flexibility, with extensive configuration options to tailor the tool to the company’s specific needs.
✅️ A natively multilingual tool, given Courir’s international footprint, to easily manage bulk translation of review templates.
✅️ A platform with built-in People Review functionality, to seamlessly connect this process with annual reviews.
✅️ A true partner able to support the HR team and ensure a successful rollout.
✅️ Autonomy in database management, so the HR team can run the tool effectively on a daily basis.
Zest met all these criteria and stood out as the ideal solution to support Courir’s HR transformation.
Zest is at the heart of our performance and development strategy. We run all our management rituals on Zest, including annual reviews, mid-year reviews and onboarding reviews for every new employee, in France and abroad.
Laetitia Genot, HR Development Manager, Courir Group
Benefits: closer management and stronger performance
After 18 months of using Zest, Courir has seen significant benefits in its HR management and overall performance.
With the Réussir module, the company has digitized most of its management rituals and streamlined how they run. These include annual performance reviews, professional development reviews, mid-year reviews, and onboarding follow-up and completion reviews.
Courir has seen a marked improvement in team monitoring and development. Centralized data now supports the rollout of personalized development plans.
HR teams also save a considerable amount of time. With administrative processes automated, they can focus on higher-value work.
Implementing Zest has fostered a “symmetry of attention” at Courir. Better management rituals have directly improved customer service quality, with employees who are better prepared and more responsive to customer expectations. In short, caring for team wellbeing has had a positive impact on customer experience.
Collecting and analyzing HR data is simpler thanks to Zest’s dashboards, which deliver valuable insights into completion rates and employee engagement. These analytics have helped Courir make better-informed, more strategic decisions.
Digitizing these rituals has also helped overcome a longstanding pitfall. Managers saw the annual review as a chore, while employees saw it as a meeting with no follow-up. By spreading the manager relationship across the year through regular briefs, monthly check-ins and mid-year reviews, managers have gradually adopted these rituals as genuine performance management tools rather than an HR requirement. The stated goal is to build a lasting culture of continuous feedback. And because store staff have an average age of 27 and do not use computers, every ritual is accessible directly from a smartphone. This is essential for real adoption in the field.
On internal mobility, Courir has opened a job board to all 3,000 employees, backed by a structured assessment process. In two years, the assessment success rate has risen from 60% to 80%. This result reflects the traceability of data and the quality of follow-up by local HR teams, who make sure development plans are acted upon rather than left on paper.
Zest is the Swiss Army knife of career management.
Co-developing a key feature
One aspect Courir particularly valued was the co-development of the People Review feature through a genuine win-win partnership. On one side, Courir was able to share its specific needs for the feature’s development, ensuring the tool would fully address its talent management challenges. On the other, Zest was able to adapt its solution to market realities, drawing on the expertise and hands-on experience of a major retail player.
The result is an innovative feature for running talent reviews in a way that is both simple and sophisticated. Evaluation criteria can be customized to each company’s specific needs.
At Courir, the People Review has been extended all the way down to sales associates. This is a rare ambition in retail, made necessary by structurally high turnover. Succession planning is impossible without building a talent pool at every level. Each review brings together several perspectives: the direct manager, the second-level manager, sometimes a manager who worked with the employee in another context, and HR, who ensure objectivity and consistency across business areas.
A valuable asset: Zest’s support
Zest’s support proved to be a major asset for Courir. The Zest team of experts acts as a true strategic partner and provided end-to-end support, from technical setup to user adoption. The team’s responsiveness, solution-oriented approach and dual expertise in HR and data helped Courir unlock the platform’s full potential. This close collaboration not only eased the rollout of the tool but also helped optimize Courir’s HR processes and talent management strategy.
From an HR perspective, the big advantage is the expertise and responsiveness of the Zest teams, which are well above average compared with the other providers I work with.
