“When it came to rolling out Retail Express, it was really easy – the implementation team were there for us from the start, the training was great and there were plenty of support materials. Our staff at both head office and store level found it very easy to embrace”
– James Rigden, Co-Founder
Return on Investment Summary
From a New Zealand start up to a leading Australasian Fashion Destination
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.
Multi-Store Growth Required a More Scalable Solution
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:
"Our old POS software system was becoming a major burden instead of being an enabler in our business. We wanted a new solution that ticked quite a lot of boxes: we wanted it to be cloud-based and avoid the overheads of managing physical servers, designed for multi-store and multi-channel, easy to use, agile so we could experiment and introduce best practices, affordable AND with support and operations located within our time zone. When we looked at all the options, choosing Retail Express was an easy decision. It ticked all of those boxes.”
– James Rigden, Co-Founder
Transforming to an Agile, Omni-Channel Cloud Tech Stack
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.
“By choosing Retail Express we have been able to select other software applications that are the best fit for our business and integrate everything together via flexible APIs.
With all this in place, we’re able to constantly introduce new ways of doing things that cut across our in-store and online operations.
This gives our customers a better omni-channel experience. And it means we can quickly switch different processes and practices on and off to adapt to any changes in the market - without spending weeks and months on software development.”
– James Rigden, Co-Founder
Putting Best Practice Omni-Channel Experiences Into Action
Powered by this integrated, agile cloud-ecosystem; Superette have been able to introduce a wide-range of omni-channel best practices including:
Leveraging all their store inventory online to maximise customer choice and sales potential
Presenting live inventory levels for online orders to increase customer confidence and conversion rates
Displaying live Stock-in-Store and offering instant Click & Collect to satisfy customers demand for immediate access to goods and to drive in-store foot traffic
Shipping orders from any nearby store locations with optimum inventory cover to enable faster and more flexible home delivery - including 3 hour and evening delivery options
Providing customers with a unified in-store and online profile so when they login they can see all their order history across all channels
“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.
Reducing Stock Movement Costs by 30%
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.
“The result is that there is less movement of stock and involvement of staff between stores to fulfil web orders because the system is identifying the optimum fulfilment location. This has allowed us to reduce the movement of stock between stores by 30% which is a massive labour cost and time saving and it means the customer gets their goods as fast as possible.”
– James Rigden, Co-Founder
Driving a 90% Named Sales Rate and Personalised Marketing
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.
Ensuring Future Retail Readiness
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.
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