LOIS & J2 assist fashion retailer Holeshot go online

Its two stores, Holeshot and HS2 - one selling surf equipment, casual clothing and accessories for men, women and children, the other a unisex young fashion business - have opted for new technology to drive their expansion.

As co-owner and managing director, Marc Maubec explains: “It’s been our long-term ambition to trade online.  We’re well established and even in winter we have a good local following but, given our stock, our trade is largely seasonal. 

"Tourists arrive in great numbers in the summer months especially on cruise ships, which is a growing business for the island. We had the Queen Elizabeth in last week with 3,000 passengers and 90 ships are scheduled to stop here this year!  All this makes for lots of passing trade, which we welcome, but we have no means of keeping in touch and selling again to those customers.”

The investment the business is now making will enable year-long customer contact to be maintained. “In the past ten years we’ve spent money expanding and improving our retail space, at the same time knowing that to move forward an online platform is essential to supplement local trade and keep in contact with seasonal clients when they’re back at home.”

The two stores are not new to EPoS as Marc observes. “Our previous system did the job but was getting dated.  In particular, the hardware was slow and we were concerned about the future.  When we saw the LOIS system, we knew this was the way forward and we opted for a complete software and hardware package.”

The new solution of LOIS EPoS software running on J2 615 touchscreen terminals has now been installed in both stores. The LOIS system is cloud-based with its own online and offline browser, so is exceptionally resilient. The new J2 tills were built by LOIS with data pre-loaded.  Once they were installed, Marc Maubec connected immediately to the cloud and his data came across from the old system with no need to re-barcode stock.

Explains Steve Waller, managing director of LOIS Systems: “99% of the reason that retailers choose LOIS is to dual manage an e-commerce system from their stores; with LOIS, you use only one system to administer stores and online transactions.  Holeshot and HS2 will need to populate their product catalogue once only.  Items will be posted online as soon as they’re available and will disappear from the web site if they sell out instore.” 

Already the team capture customer data at the till point and can attach a label such as ‘holidaymaker’ to it, which makes it easy to do promotional targeting and analysis.  It is now possible to identify someone coming into the shop, see there is a piece they didn’t originally buy with an outfit and tell them that that piece is on sale today.