Lightspeed at So High Soho

After 17 years of selling costumes and fancy dress gear, So High Soho have amassed a 30,000-item stock that their existing inventory system simply couldn’t handle. Looking for a simpler, more user-friendly and more robust system, they turned to Apple and Lightspeed ePOS...

“We had a chronic need to update our system because we were suffering as a business,” said Anna Boyle, So High Soho’s manager. “We were using a system that never really worked as it was sold to us and we were having to overcome difficulties everyday.”

Determined to find a sales system that would actually support staff rather than taking up a huge amount of time and effort, Anna’s research turned up Lightspeed ePOS, an Apple-centric inventory, POS and eCommerce solution that “had many more features than I’d expected from a system” and would allow the team to move from overcomplicated touch interfaces to user-friendly Macs.

"I really enjoyed working with Jigsaw24. They’re really friendly and respond to email and phone queries really quickly. I’d be emailing them at ten o clock at night to plot and scheme for the next day, and that’s amazing tech support to have."

Finding an IT partner with all the right answers

“Because we’d had such a bad system before, I literally had 2000 questions [about Lightspeed],” Anna told us. “Paddy from Jigsaw24 was amazing. I went in there and threw questions at him, and of the 2000 there were about three he didn’t know immediately, and he found an answer for those in 15 minutes. Compared to the previous system, where often it’d take months and the answer wouldn’t even be real.”

“I really enjoyed working with Jigsaw24,” agreed Bex Workman, who manages So High Soho’s Lightspeed database. “They’re really friendly and respond to email and phone queries really quickly. I’d be emailing them at ten o’clock at night to plot and scheme for the next day, and that’s amazing tech support to have. It definitely felt like we were hand held through the process, which we needed.”

Making the move to Mac

In order to move to Lightspeed, So High Soho had to swap out their touchscreen ePOS system for iMacs. “A lot of our staff were very comfortable with [the Apple system] and used Mac at home,” said Anna. “That was one of the reasons I preferred it. And I felt an Apple-based system would mean that there wouldn’t be any bugs or fixes I’d have to deal with, so I found that encouraging.”

As OS X and iOS are widely known and exceptionally user friendly, moving to a Mac-based system meant that Anna and the rest of the staff could avoid expensive, time-consuming training. As the system expands, they’re also able to incorporate readily available hardware like iMac, MacBook Pros and iPad into their setup, rather than relying on costly proprietary touchscreen technology that many staff would be unfamiliar with.

The easy integration between Apple devices also means it’s now simpler to check up on progress out of hours, and the hardware can always be integrated with back end Windows systems, or use virtualisation to run Windows-only apps for things like accounting.

“Life is much easier with Lightspeed.”

“Life is much easier with Lightspeed,” Bex said. “It’s very user friendly, and if it ever doesn’t work you can figure out what you need to do. But the number one benefit is that it’s given us an overall handle on what’s going in and out of the shop.

“We’ve got 30,000 products in it and it’s growing every day. When you’ve got that many products it’s important to be able to look things up and find out where it came from, who made it, whether we can order it again. Just to have an actual concentrated database where you can find out what’s going on is amazing for a shop like this – the fact that you can really quickly look things up makes my life easier. The fact that you can attach a photo [to an inventory entry] really easily. The fact that you can edit the sell price on the fly. I could go on and on...”

Coupled with their new, more reliable hardware and the simpler user experience offered by OS X, Lightspeed gives the staff at So High Soho everything they need to track and manage their stock and deliver excellent customer service. As Anna told us, “Lightspeed has been able to do our stock system and our sales system, and it encourages people to go and make [new entries] and do it properly – the only reason I wouldn’t recommend it is that I’d like to keep it for myself.”

Download the full case study here. If you want to know more, give us a call on 03332 409 306 or email sales@Jigsaw24.com. For all the latest news, follow @WeAreJigsaw24 on Twitter, or ‘Like’ us on Facebook.