Innovative NYC Apparel Retailer Leverages Retail Pro to Add, then Aggressively Scale New Luxury Spinoff Brand
NEW YORK – In a hyper-competitive New York City apparel market, retailer OMG Jeans has been a mainstay along the Manhattan Broadway district utilizing Retail Pro as their retail management solution across three decades to grow from a single store in 1998 to a local mid-sized retail chain today. After opening dozens of stores, OMG Jeans has found Retail Pro’s flexible deployment options invaluable, particularly the thin-client capabilities delivered with Retail Pro 9. Attracted by Prism’s ultra-flexible and fast deployment options and its cross-platform capabilities, OMG Jeans became one of Prism’s earliest adopters, finding themselves impressed with the new platform’s stability, ease of implementation, lightweight design and intuitive user interface.
In 2012, OMG Jeans shifted their retail strategy to portfolio diversification and market expansion by introducing a luxury sunglass kiosk within their stores. The new offering turned out to be very successful across multiple locations. The market for luxury sunglasses is a surprisingly uncompetitive niche, and after evaluating the market, OMG Jeans’ leadership decided to craft a standalone brand, Specs, to capture market share along the East Coast sector. Specs further secured its position by finalizing a deal to become an authorized reseller of Luxottica designer brands, which gave them access to over 20 of the world’s most recognizable luxury eyewear brands, such as Ray-Ban, Coach, DKNY and Giorgio Armani.
The first Specs store opened in January 2014 to an encouraging market response, but with a few additional challenges as well. Although Specs’ leadership team was very familiar with Retail Pro, miscommunication with a business partner led them to believe to that another retail management system, Lightspeed, was required for use by all Luxottica resellers. As Specs’ relationship with Luxottica comprised a core value offering for their business, upon launching, the new brand aimed to maintain symbiosis with its primary reseller by implementing Lightspeed.
Not long after implementation, Specs soon encountered issues with Lightspeed’s inability to be flexible and adapt to their business workflows. After learning that the perceived stipulation was indeed a misunderstanding, Specs quickly transitioned back to Retail Pro, implementing combinations of Retail Pro 9 and Retail Pro Prism, realizing that several of the platform’s key attributes, in addition to the store operators’ familiarity with the software, positioned them to scale the brand rapidly.
Retail Pro’s choice of database and cross-platform capabilities shined especially in this regard. Retail Pro’s flexible database options let Specs configure instances of MySQL and Oracle databases in various combinations, allowing them to tailor future implementations to a new store’s individual hardware requirements and preferences. Retail Pro Prism’s cross-platform capabilities also gave Specs the freedom to deploy Retail Pro smoothly across all-in-one desktops, as well as iPad & Android tablets with no loss in functionality or change in workflow. The glaring, untapped market space in the luxury eyewear market, combined with the ability to stabilize Specs’ operations and workflows using Retail Pro, gave Specs the confidence to capitalize on a unique opportunity to scale its new brand aggressively. Between January and October 2014, Specs opened an impressive 7 new stores in 3 regions along the East Coast: New York, Maryland, and Washington DC.
“After returning to Retail Pro, we were truly able to appreciate the value of being able to easily tailor a workflow to your needs,” explained Joe Bahar, Head of IT at Specs. “Just as well, Retail Pro has always been easy to train new associates on, but now with Prism, the interface is even more intuitive and works across platforms, so that now we can train new employees on multiple devices in a really short time. Basically this gives us the freedom to add employees or devices at whatever rate we choose, which is critical at our stage of buisness. Retail Pro has always been easy for us to install and implement, but now being able to rely on it to scale Specs exactly the way we want to is both extremely promising and very refreshing.”
