Beneath a grid of aluminum rails in Vendenheim, near Strasbourg, 98 small robots glide over stacked bins, pulling PUMA merchandise for shipment without a single forklift crossing the floor. ARGAN, PUMA and logistics operator ID Logistics formally inaugurated the 41,000-square-meter facility on November 2, 2026, according to a GlobeNewswire release issued by ARGAN. The site is built around an AutoStore cube-storage system and is designed to process up to 57,000 order lines a day for PUMA's French B2B operations.
ARGAN, a French real-estate developer that specializes in logistics property, acquired the site after developer LCR built it, and the sportswear brand's third-party logistics partner, ID Logistics, now runs daily operations. ARGAN already operates a separate Vendenheim warehouse for Auchan, making the new PUMA site its second large facility in that logistics corridor.
Why AutoStore over conventional racking
AutoStore's grid-based design stacks storage bins directly on top of each other rather than spacing them along aisles, letting robots retrieve items from the top of the stack and deliver them to picking ports at the perimeter. The approach trades some retrieval speed for a dramatic reduction in footprint compared with traditional pallet racking or even most AMR-based systems, which is why the 98-robot grid can support a brand-specific throughput target as high as 57,000 lines daily inside a mid-sized building.
AutoStore has positioned itself as the default dense-storage robot in European third-party logistics, competing with Attabotics' vertical totes and Exotec's Skypod shuttles for a similar segment of mid-volume, SKU-heavy retail and apparel fulfillment. PUMA's choice suggests the system remains a default pick for apparel brands balancing seasonal SKU churn against real-estate costs in dense European markets, where land near major cities carries a premium that favors compact automation over sprawling manual warehouses.
The real-estate angle behind the robots
ARGAN's interest in the deal is less about robotics than property economics: the company structures these buildings as long-term real-estate investments and leases them to retailers and their logistics partners, collecting rent regardless of which automation vendor the tenant installs. ARGAN's portfolio stood at roughly 3.9 million square meters across about 110 warehouses as of mid-2026, generating annual rental income near €224 million and a portfolio valuation close to €4.3 billion.
The Vendenheim building also carries a BREEAM Excellent sustainability rating, with rooftop photovoltaic panels supplying on-site electricity and LED lighting throughout — features increasingly standard in new European logistics construction as retailers face pressure to report warehouse-level emissions. For PUMA, the facility consolidates B2B fulfillment into a single automated site rather than spreading volume across smaller, manually run warehouses, a shift that mirrors how other apparel brands have centralized European distribution around one or two large automated hubs instead of regional depots.