Forty Winks

A multi-store franchise success story

Founded in Melbourne in April 1984 by an experienced group of retailers, Forty Winks started its journey as a member co-operative with a handful of stores located in Victoria. Fast forward to today, and they are a thriving network of more than 106 family-owned and operated franchise stores, servicing all major cities, territories and regional centres.

As one of Australia’s most iconic specialty bedding brands, they offer consumers a quality range of mattresses, bedroom furniture and top of bed accessories, featuring leading Australian and International brands.

However, what truly makes them stand out is their dedication to an exceptional level of customer service, backed up by employees trained in the field of sleep science.

Building an integrated Omni-channel tech stack

As a franchise business, Forty Winks identified that their future success relies on fully unifying data at all levels of their business — across their individual stores, eCommerce store and national office operations.

With this vision in mind, they have set about building an innovative integrated technology stack that allows them to:

• Centralise and aggregate data from their stores at a National level and leverage this for the benefit of their members
• Feed data from the National Office to individual stores to provide powerful insights and consistent, up-to-date operational information across the network

The project will mean that data from their eCommerce platform and the in-store POS software used by their members will feed into a centralised CRM and data warehouse, which then connects to a Marketing Automation Platform.

As part of this project, Retail Express' POS system integrates with the centralised data warehouse and BI tool (DOMO). With this two-way data exchange and the right tech tools in place, Forty Winks head office team will be able to maximise support to their members by:

• Creating automated marketing campaigns and customer experience processes on behalf of all their network members to drive more foot traffic and sales
• Achieving a single omni-channel view of customers that both national office and franchisee stores can leverage
• Eliminating the need for stores to import and maintain product and pricing data
• Delivering benchmarking data so franchisees get insights into their performance versus other stores

Centralised data for marketing automation and single customer view

With Retail Express' POS software integration with Forty Winks data warehouse and BI platform, individual store data is continuously fed into the National Office without the need for any manual data admin. Store and eCommerce data can then be combined to create a unified view of each customer and leveraged by the Marketing Automation platform.

Streamlining data management for franchisees

Product, pricing and customer data can also be fed from Forty Winks National Office into member stores using Retail Express without any manual admin. Not only will this allow these stores to maximise their productivity, but it also ensures they have reliable, up-to-date data to base their operational processes and business decisions off.

Delivering powerful benchmarking data to stores

By having the POS data from stores fed into a centralised data warehouse, the National Office team are able to provide their franchisees with insightful benchmarking data. They can compare their performance against other similar stores within the group.

POS Software Maximises Support to Franchisees

Forty Winks recognise that the POS system used by franchisees will play a critical role in the unified data model they are building: