Specs

Leveraging their success in NYC’s competitive retail space, OMG Jeans expanded their retail strategy to optimize brand growth by introducing luxury sunglass stores intended to diversify the portfolio and expand their market reach. This addition was powered exclusively by Retail Pro Prism. The luxury sunglass market, is a niche with surprisingly little competition, and upon evaluating its market potential, OMG Jeans’ leadership decided to craft a standalone brand, Specs, committed to capturing market share within the sector along the East Coast. Specs bolstered its position by finalizing a deal to become an authorized reseller of Luxottica, Safilo and independent brands (Dita, Maui Jim ), which touts a portfolio of 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, contractual obligations necessitated the new location were to be launched with Lightspeed as the retail management system. Not long after implementation, Specs encountered issues with Lightspeed’s inability to adapt to their business workflows. The decisions was made to transition the Specs locations to OMG’s proven retail management platform, Retail Pro. The change, leveraging 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. Flexible database options let Specs configure instances of MySQL and Oracle databases in various combinations, allowing them to tailor 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 iPads and iMacs 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 our needs”, explained Joe B., Head of IT at Specs and OMG Jeans. “Just as well, Retail Pro has always been easy to train new associates on, but now with Retail Pro 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 business. 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.”