Linen House was founded 30 years ago, by Gordon and Michelle Duncan, originally starting life as a wholesale business.
After transitioning away from traditional wholesale, Linen House now sells bed linen and homewares to customers across Australia. Over the years, the business has shifted to adapt to the ever-changing retail landscape, with an impressive 23 Linen House outlet stores, a thriving eCommerce presence and a wholesale division.
Through their online store and retail outlets, the Linen House team have clear goals and an ambitious strategy to expand their footprint and product accessibility to reach as many customers as possible.
To help them achieve their goals, the team were looking for the right technology and tools to be able to open new stores and manage them efficiently and quickly.
This is where Lightspeed stepped in.
We spoke with Head of IT at Linen House, Ted Ozman and Store Manager Erin Cleary to understand how Lightspeed has helped the business become more agile and realise their dream of expansion.
Watch the Linen House story
6 ways Lightspeed helps Linen House power 23 stores
- Simplifying the management of 3,500 inventory items
- More efficiency through seamless integrations
- Opening new stores in hours, not days
- Strategic collaboration to drive business success
- Cutting internal tickets by 90% with dedicated support
- Intuitive platform for faster staff training
1. Simplifying the management of 3,500 inventory items
Linen House has a relatively complex business model, selling across three major channels—wholesale, online and through their 23 brick-and-mortar locations—which means their inventory management processes are far from straightforward.
“Lightspeed has been a great tool for us given the complexities of the business… being a wholesale business, having retail stores, having an online presence, does make our operations and inventory management a challenge,” explains Tez.
With over 3,500 different products being sold across multiple channels, the Linen House team needed a sophisticated platform that would easily be able to manage the complexities of their inventory needs.
“Lightspeed assists us in making sure that we’ve got the right stock in all of the different channels,” comments Tez.
“Having a solution that can communicate with all of the other business channels in regards to all of our inventory is super important because 3,500 items are difficult to manage,” says Tez.
“So it’s really important that our point of sale is up to the task of being able to manage such a large number of inventory items… Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to manage all of those other channels in conjunction with everything else going on.”
2. More efficiency through seamless integrations
Due to the complexity of their operations, Linen House also wanted to ensure that Lightspeed seamlessly integrated with their other business platforms to improve efficiency and minimise the risk of operational disruptions.
“We use Lightspeed’s API technology to communicate back to our back office fulfilment and operational systems,” explains Tez.
“Lightspeed definitely needs to fit in with all of our other business systems that we use for all the multichannel things that we do. So it’s a really important part of our integration, using the APIs to communicate between our back office systems and Lightspeed point of sale.”
With the help of Lightspeed’s API, it’s easy for Linen House to connect the POS to NetSuite, which the team use as the source of truth for their stock across all of their channels.
“That API communication to our back office systems is a very important one that allows us to have a real-time view of our inventory and sales, which then obviously helps our management team make decisions,” says Tez.
3. Opening new stores in hours, not days
With their old point of sale system, Linen House often encountered challenges when setting up a new store, making it difficult to open new locations quickly.
“Previously, it would take us approximately two weeks with a whole bunch of consulting hours and training and I.T. support to set up the new locations,” comments Tez.
“That wasn’t going to cut it for us moving forward with the goals of opening stores as quickly as we wanted to, and Lightspeed, the technology being cloud-based and not so tightly coupled to the hardware, enabled us to open stores in hours rather than weeks.”
Tez believes that Lightspeed’s cloud-based platform is the key to their success in being able to quickly and easily open new stores.
“From a technology point of view, moving more towards cloud-based offerings made our life a lot easier in the sense that once we have the systems set up, the ongoing support and hardware maintenance and consulting hours were greatly reduced,” says Tez.
“With Lightspeed, we’re able to be ready before the retail team actually finishes shop fitting and setting up the stores. So it’s been a huge gain in terms of how quickly we can open a store.”
4. Strategic collaboration to drive business success
Another element that Tez loves about Lightspeed is the ability to collaborate on strategy with the Lightspeed team to help achieve their business goals.
“Working with the Lightspeed account management team is a critical part of how we execute on our technology roadmap,” explains Tez. “We’ve got many projects on the go, at the moment and in the past, and working with the Lightspeed team really helps us in being able to deliver the right outcomes as quickly as we can.”
It’s clear that Tez really values the relationship Linen House has with the Lightspeed account management team and how the Lightspeed team strives to always help Linen House achieve their goals.
“It’s important for us to have those regular catch-ups just to talk about where we’re trying to go. We have got a whole bunch of new initiatives that we’re working on currently—one of them being a new loyalty program,” says Tez.
“So, working with the accounts team to understand the best way to integrate that solution with the rest of our multi-channel business is a conversation that we have ongoing.”
“I think it’s really important that we share our goals with the Lightspeed team just so that everything’s in line and we can get some successful outcomes quickly.”
5. Cutting internal tickets by 90% with dedicated support
Lightspeed’s support team has also had huge impact on Linen House’s internal support teams, who now have more time to focus on the business rather than troubleshooting.
“We’ve had a really positive experience with Lightspeed support, whether that’s through the chat or through the phone,” comments Tez.
Ever since Linen House switched to Lightspeed, the team has been impressed with the level of support they’ve received, which takes the pressure off their internal teams.
“As a result of using Lightspeed, there has been approximately a 90% reduction in the support calls that are coming through from our stores. Obviously, that has a huge impact on our internal support staff,” explains Tez.
“We don’t need as many people working on troubleshooting issues. A lot of that responsibility falls back on the Lightspeed support team, which obviously, for us, means that we can focus our efforts in other areas.”
In a growing company that’s focused on expansion, maximising staff focus on growth areas rather than troubleshooting support queries will naturally have a positive impact on productivity and efficiency.
“We constantly have projects on the go, whether that’s to enhance productivity or include new features. Having Lightspeed take ownership of all of the support side of things for our business means that we can run a much leaner team. It also means that the team that we do have, we can focus on new initiatives and rolling out new features, new optimisations and new automations throughout the rest of the business.”
6. Intuitive platform for faster staff training
Another aspect the Linen House team loves about Lightspeed is how user-friendly the platform is, making it quick and easy for the staff to use on a daily basis and to train new starters.
“The feedback from our staff is that it is a very easy system to use, and that was one of the main reasons why we chose Lightspeed,” explains Tez. “Training a new staff member on Lightspeed would take a matter of hours, if that. It’s a very quick process.”
“Because the user interface is very simple to use, the training does not take us very long in terms of onboarding new staff, and when there are new features or functions that we’re looking at implementing, the documentation is there already to assist our staff.”
Erin, who manages the Linen House store in Hastings, echoes this sentiment.
“When I first started using Lightspeed as a platform, it was actually pretty easy. It is one of the easiest POS systems I’ve ever used in my retail career… it’s easy to navigate, it’s easy to teach, and it’s easy to use.”
Erin often has to train new starters on the Lightspeed platform, and thanks to Lightspeed’s user-friendly interface, new staff often pick up the system really quickly.
“My experience with using Lightspeed for training new staff members here at the Hastings store has been a good one,” says Erin. “It’s quite a simple POS system, which means it’s quite easy to then teach the new staff members and current staff members when we have any upgrades in the system.”
A final word from Tez
“I would recommend Lightspeed to all other retailers. Number one, its simplicity and its ease of use; we all believe that it is a very intuitive and simple system to use. From a technical point of view, having the capability to integrate into our wider business is also very important for us to be able to manage everything effectively.”
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