Zappos Will Try Kiva’s Robots

Wade Roush2/25/08

Zappos.com, the Las Vegas-based online purveyor of shoes, handbags, and other fashion accessories, said today that will install a “mobile fulfillment system” from Woburn, MA-based Kiva Systems at its Shephersdville, KY facility. As we wrote last October, Kiva deploys fleet of squat wheeled robots across a warehouse with barcode-based navigational cues inscribed on the floor; the robots pick up mobile shelving units and bring them to stationary human workers, who can then grab the items required for each order and sort them into boxes. Zappos said it chose Kiva because it needed a fulfillment system that could be scaled up or down as required and easily transplanted to a new facility.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.