- Margaret Chase, Retail Manager
Fort Pierce, FL, USA
June 2021
1 Store
Navy SEAL Museum Retail Manager, Margaret Chase, shares how the Museum and Gift Shop are bolstering their retail operations on Retail Pro Prism.
Tell us about Navy SEAL Museum.
The Navy SEAL Museum opened on Veterans Day, 1985. Officially known as The National Navy UDT-SEAL Museum, it is a not-for-profit museum in Fort Pierce, Florida. It houses exhibits to honor veterans and inform and educate people about the role of Navy SEALs and their forerunners since World War II. Once the site of a museum for pirate treasure, the Navy SEAL Museum resides on the original training grounds of the first Frogmen. Today, the Museum displays vehicles, vessels, tactical equipment, and weaponry from the earliest days of Naval Special Warfare to today’s multifaceted global operators and headline conflicts.
The Museum admits more than 70,000 visitors per year that, along with the specialty retail Museum Store, are all completely managed by the Retail Pro Prism POS Software. In the Museum Store, guests can shop novelties, jewelry, apparel, toys, books, outdoor gear, games and more for everyone. New merchandise arrives weekly and there is no admission required to enter the Museum Gift Shop.
The Museum has been going through a period of accelerated growth. The recent expansion and acquisition of dramatic new displays has all been complimented by the new investment in Retail Pro Prism inventory control and POS software.
Has your Retail Pro Prism been specially configured or customized for your business needs? What challenges or needs were these customizations designed to address?
We have several advantages and customizations that were developed for our specific industry type. One example is the customer-facing Genius device that asks the customer if they would like to round up their change for the Museum. This one feature alone should pay for the POS investment in the first year.
Configuring the donation round-up tool was essential to our operations for helping with the Trident House Charity Program donations.
The Navy SEAL Museum also has a very loyal and select customer base of distinguished veterans, families of veterans, and patriotic clients who have a deep love and interest in the Navy SEALs. Retail Pro Prism helps us track their purchases, automate discounts, and sell and manage the Navy SEAL Museum Membership program, and facilitates fast touch screen admissions as well.
What are some specific features of Retail Pro Prism that won you over, or challenges Retail Pro Prism is helping your business solve?
We use Retail Pro Prism for front desk admissions, gift shop, inventory, purchase orders and receiving inventory, and reporting.
We needed very simple screens for the volunteers on both the Admissions side and for the Museum POS. Retail Pro Prism allows us to create buttons with pictures, colors and words of our choosing for the quick admissions screens. The screens in all areas of Retail Pro Prism are completely designable by using HTML, like with a web page, which we especially appreciate at the POS. That flexibility along with the simplicity made Retail Pro Prism the best choice for the Navy SEAL Museum store.
Another reason we chose Retail Pro Prism was because of the amazing integration with Big Commerce for our web store. The Big Commerce web integration is a very elegant bi-directional push and pull of data between the web store and the brick-and-mortar retail operation.
The need for 24/7 support was another important need and our Retail Pro Business Partner, Big Hairy Dog, meets that requirement. Big Hairy Dog did a great job of training.
These are a couple of the problems that Retail Pro Prism POS helps to solve.