BAKU was founded on the beaches of Sydney, through its original brand Bubbles Beach Co, in 1969.
1995 saw the introduction of the BAKU label and in 1999 the company changed hands to the next generation, brother and sister, Dax and Tamara Bykerk.
Dax and Tamara had ambitious plans for evolving their family business beyond a manufacturing and wholesaling model to also operating a retail presence. They believed this would allow their products to get maximum exposure and build a direct brand relationship with the end consumer.
Alongside running the day to day business operations, Dax and Tamara are also the dynamic design duo behind the brand. BAKU continues to make all its swimwear in Australia. Not only is this highly appealing to discerning shoppers looking for Australian-made products; it also allows the business to adapt its design and production in response to trends in the market and inventory replenishment requirements.
Growing to 21 retail stores and a high traffic eCommerce store, BAKU has come a long way under the leadership of Dax and Tamara and is now a flagship brand of the Australian swimwear market.
As BAKU increasingly expanded beyond its wholesaling roots into physical stores and eCommerce, it became more and more apparent that their old software systems were not configured to support the effective operation of this new retail component of their business.
They needed a software solution that would provide them with visibility and control over their multiple store locations, their online presence, and an intuitive Point of Sale system to handle transactions and customer data.
“It was also essential that the new POS software integrate with our manufacturing and wholesale software ‘Niche’, and our Shopify Plus eCommerce platform so that all levels of our business operations were working in unison.” Dax added.
“After researching a range of options, we were really impressed with the solution presented by Retail Express. It offered the functionality, integration and cloud capabilities we were seeking at an affordable level of investment. It was the only solution that seemed to cater to our medium sized, growing retail business. There’s lot of basic cloud POS systems on the market but they clearly aren’t designed with multi-store or omni-channel in mind. The only other systems offering the capabilities we wanted were very expensive and overly-complex enterprise software applications - most of which weren’t even cloud-based.” says Dax.
With the decision made to proceed with Retail Express, BAKU benefited from the guided implementation and training services that are included as part of the solution.
The first major advantage that BAKU saw as a result of introducing Retail Express — as well as an integrated RFID solution from Ramp - was regaining control over inventory management. These systems unveiled just how much inventory was moving between stores and provided new processes to help ensure the right stock levels were in the right locations at the right time.
“With swimwear we obviously have a lot of mix and match products and different sizes so it’s very easy for stores to become overstocked in some SKUs and understocked in others. Prior to using Retail Express and Ramp RFID technology, our stores were regularly transferring stock between each other in order to respond to demand. But that resulted in an uncontrollable system with lots of unnecessary and duplicated freight costs and staff time wasted. Now we have a clearer picture of how much each store has in stock and how much they are selling so we can adjust our production runs to directly replenish each store with the right stock.” says Dax.
BAKU’s visibility into their operations was even further enhanced with the introduction of Phocas — a business intelligence software solution that directly integrates with Retail Express.
By building out a Shopify Plus eCommerce presence that integrates directly with Retail Express, BAKU have been able to double their year-over-year online revenue as well as significantly increase in-store foot traffic and sales.
The integration has enabled them to introduce a wide-range of omni-channel best practices including:
Over 40% of web orders are now shipped from a store rather than a central warehouse and BAKU are expecting this trend will continue to increase with consumer demand for faster home delivery.
Dax has no doubt that BAKU’s integrated software ecosystem with Retail Express at the core was pivotal in their ability to navigate the most turbulent era that the retail sector has ever seen.