Bored with the thought of a typical ‘nine-to-five’ job, Superette owners and friends, James Rigden and Rickie Dee setup their first bricks and mortar retail space on Drake Street in Auckland in 2002.
Their goal was to create a collection of curated fashion and lifestyle goods from all over the world.
Fast forward to today and Superette has cemented itself on the map as one of Australasia’s leading style destinations.
Now encompassing twelve retail stores and a flourishing online presence, the Superette brand has become a one stop shop for all things exciting, desirable and unique.
Curational buying ensures every product has a story and relevance to Superette’s ethos, influenced by the flow of the zeitgeist and trends of the fashion industry.
Early on in their journey, as Superette expanded beyond a few stores, they found their retail POS software was increasingly restricting the innovative practices they wanted to roll out.
Although their current system was cloud-based, it was not designed with a multi-store operation in mind and was presenting more and more headaches for James and Rickie.
While researching options, it became abundantly clear that Retail Express offered the best fit for their needs:
Innovation and agility are seen as two major sources of competitive advantage by James and Rickie. By constantly pushing the boundaries of retail practices, they’re able to offer a truly unique customer experience and to continuously improve operational efficiency. By having flexibility within their business operations, they can adapt to the increasingly dynamic retail market.
In order to achieve this, they have invested much attention and energy into building out an ecosystem of feature-rich, agile cloud software systems with highly flexible integration capabilities.
At the core of this ecosystem is Retail Express – providing the real time source of truth for sales and customer data, a best of breed in-store Point of Sale and sophisticated omni-channel inventory and fulfilment management processes. This is augmented by Black Pepper for eCommerce, Phocas for Business Intelligence and EMARSYS for Marketing Automation.
Powered by this integrated, agile cloud-ecosystem; Superette have been able to introduce a wide-range of omni-channel best practices including:
“We’re constantly trying to improve the shopping experience so that we truly earn the loyalty of our customers. We try lots of small experiments and measure which work best, then scale out the best ones. However, none of these ideas would ever be able to be tested or scaled out if we hadn’t invested in the right integrated software stack. Retail Express and our other systems allow us to test and learn quickly and have the power and flexibility to quickly roll out the good ideas across all our channels and locations.” says James.
The advanced omni-channel operations that Superette have implemented has inevitably created a need for more sophisticated systems for planning inventory across stores and distribution centres. With each store not only needing the right inventory mix for in-store visitors but also to fulfil web orders, there is a more complex and interdependent demand pattern to plan for.
With Retail Express in place, Superette have been able to gain full, real-time visibility of their stock and product mix in each store, how much is being sent from distribution centres and which stores are actually fulfilling the order. They have also been able to introduce smart rules to identify the optimum location to fulfil a web order based on geographic proximity to the customer and the inventory cover for the items on order.
By using the in-store surveys feature in Retail Express, Superette’s store staff are able to capture key profile data about their customers which can then be leveraged by the powerful marketing automation capabilities of EMARSYS. Superette can automate marketing campaigns with exclusive promotional coupons that offer the right product at the right time to drive repeat sales and loyalty. With Birthday and Anniversary month being captured using the Retail Express in-store survey, Superette have been able to automatically send campaigns to all applicable customers with promo codes that are valid for 30 days from issue date.
James believes that while the future of retail is certainly looking to be increasingly dynamic and challenging, businesses with the right capabilities and an ability to embrace change should see much opportunity from this. With a cloud-based omni-channel ecosystem that integrates best-in-class software solutions, Superette are certainly well positioned in this regard.