A Multi-Year Bet on an Outside Fulfilment Partner
CDS Superstores, which trades as The Range, wilko and Homebase, has agreed a multi-year extension of its fulfilment and courier management partnership with THG Fulfil. The original deal began in 2024, and the extension signals that CDS Superstores sees enough value in the relationship to commit further rather than bring the capability in-house or shop it to a competitor. Tom Killeen, COO of THG Ingenuity, said fulfilment is central to customer excellence and brand reputation, framing the renewal as proof the partnership is delivering on that standard. Neither side disclosed the length of the new term or its financial value, which is typical for logistics contracts of this kind but leaves outside observers without a clean benchmark for how committed either party actually is.
Ben Exall, Group Chief Digital & Marketing Officer at CDS Superstores, tied the extension directly to growth plans across all three banners, saying the deal gives the business capacity and flexibility as it scales, alongside reliable delivery. That framing matters because CDS Superstores is not a single retailer managing one brand's volume. It is coordinating fulfilment across The Range, the relaunched wilko, and Homebase simultaneously, each with its own product mix, store footprint, and customer expectations, all running through the same outside logistics partner.
Ninety-Five Percent Automated, Four Vendors Deep
The headline figure in this deal is that roughly 95% of units CDS Superstores sells now pass through some form of automation during fulfilment, including a fleet of Geekplus goods-to-person robots. That is a genuinely high automation rate for a discount and home goods retailer, and it did not come from a single system. THG Fulfil runs the logistics and courier layer. Geekplus supplies the physical warehouse robotics. Those are already two separate vendor relationships sitting underneath one fulfilment number.
Layered on top of that, CDS Superstores is using Google Cloud AI to improve search and product discovery specifically on wilko.com, and Mirakl's platform to support the growth of The Range's online marketplace. That brings the total to four distinct outside vendors covering search, marketplace infrastructure, logistics, and warehouse robotics, each solving one piece of the operation. The 95% automation figure is real and impressive, but it describes an outcome assembled from parts that CDS Superstores itself does not own or build.
Why Composable Infrastructure Fits a Relaunch
Context matters here. Wilko collapsed in 2023 and has since been relaunched under CDS Superstores ownership, which means the brand's technology stack is being rebuilt largely from scratch rather than incrementally upgraded. For a retailer in that position, buying proven capability from four specialists is a faster path to a working operation than attempting to build equivalent search, marketplace, and warehouse systems internally while simultaneously trying to re-establish a brand's presence on shelves and online.
That logic is sound, and it explains why composable, vendor-assembled infrastructure makes more sense for CDS Superstores right now than it might for a retailer with a mature, stable technology estate that has already paid down its integration debt. The harder question for 2027 and beyond is whether CDS Superstores has a plan for consolidating or renegotiating these four relationships once wilko's relaunch stabilizes, or whether the patchwork becomes the permanent architecture simply because nobody revisits it once it is working well enough to stop drawing attention.
The Coordination Cost Hiding Inside the Automation Number
Four vendors covering search, marketplace, logistics, and robotics means four separate contracts, four separate support relationships, and four separate points where a service degradation or price increase can disrupt the retailer's operation. When Geekplus updates its robotics firmware, or Google changes how its commerce AI ranks wilko.com search results, CDS Superstores absorbs that change without necessarily controlling its timing. The 95% automation figure measures throughput, not resilience, and the two are not the same thing.
None of this makes the deal poorly structured. The real work of this fulfilment overhaul sits in the vendor governance happening behind the headline automation percentage: service level agreements, escalation paths, and contingency plans for each of the four relationships if one underperforms during a peak trading period. That governance rarely makes it into a press release, and it is precisely the difference between 95% automation that holds up during Black Friday week and 95% automation that quietly becomes four separate points of failure at the worst possible time to discover them.
What This Means for the Next Fulfilment Decision
CDS Superstores' extension with THG Fulfil, stacked alongside Geekplus, Google Cloud AI, and Mirakl, is a clear example of how discount and home goods retailers are now building fulfilment capability. Rather than consolidating around one platform vendor or building proprietary systems, they are assembling best-of-breed pieces and accepting the integration and governance burden as the cost of moving fast while rebuilding a damaged brand. That approach will keep spreading as more retailers find themselves in CDS Superstores' position, rebuilding rather than steadily upgrading.
For CTOs weighing a similar overhaul, the practical lesson is to budget for vendor governance as its own workstream, not an afterthought bolted onto procurement. Decide in advance which of four or five vendor relationships would get consolidated first if performance or pricing pressure forced a choice, and build that optionality into contracts now, while demand for your business is high enough to extract real terms. The retailers that treat vendor coordination as core infrastructure work, rather than a side effect of buying good tools, will be the ones whose automation numbers survive contact with peak season instead of becoming the subject of next year's postmortem.
