Sublime Swim & Sunwear is a unique high-end retail store selling swim, beach and resort wear located in St. Albert, Alberta. Established by Lynn Carolei and her daughter a decade ago in March of 2003, Sublime Swim carries swim and sun wear for every age, gender and body type.
Lynn and her daughter hit on a very specialized niche market for swimwear in the greater Edmonton area where many people go somewhere warm for a holiday in the winter and, of course, swimming in lakes, rivers and pools in the summer. But unique challenges presented themselves after nearly a decade of doing business that she needed some help with. Specifically, Sublime Swim was having inventory issues. The store was overstocked, quite heavily in some areas. The point of sale (POS) system they were using didn’t break it down enough to allow us them to track inventory and purchasing properly. As Lynn describes:
“This is where Winning@Retail™ by Management One came along. In frustration and, really, panic, because we were so overstocked that we really didn’t have freshness in our inventory, so I was looking for a solution and I phoned Canadian Retail Solutions. They had just started working with Management One and I talked to Scott. He said, ‘I might have the right solution for you’, and he came in. We’ve been working with Scott now since June or July and we discovered since, using Management One, where we needed to focus our business, spend our dollars, where to pull back, where we needed to clear out, and how much inventory was appropriate for the sales we’ve been doing. It’s been a very valuable tool to our business. It’s actually saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in buying mistakes.”
Lynn chose Canadian Retail Solutions (CRS) to deliver the Management One program because they have been her POS system provider since 2005, and they made sure that Winning@Retail would work with her existing systems for a seamless installation.
Management One Winning@Retail™ To the Rescue
The package that Lynn is referring to is Management One’s Winning@Retail™ system. Winning@Retail™ gives business owners an effective business and inventory management tool, with custom reporting tools that make it highly adaptable to your business. Possibly the best feature of Winning@Retail is a monthly meeting with your Winning@Retail™ consultant, who is certified to deliver the program with Management One. These people aren’t just talking heads, but experienced former retail store managers or people who have been involved with many aspects of retail management for a good portion of their lives. They’ll help you interpret the Winning@Retail™ numbers and work a plan to get your business on the road to long-term success.
Winning@Retail™ Helping Store Owner Sleep at Night
The biggest change that Lynn’s noticed is that she sleeps at night. She’s not anxious because she knows the busy season is coming up or there are big outstanding bills. She knows that she has the right stock on the floor. She sees the stock turning over properly and the resulting return on investment – seeing that jump up has been phenomenal for Lynn. She knows now that the areas she suspected were good, now that she’s focused on them, they’ve become real moneymakers, those categories.
Lynn’s also worked on space allocation in the store and had some big surprises from the program about where the business about should be and should not be spending money. Once Lynn made that shift, she found it amazing how it picked up her business and profitability.
If you want to see the same results in your retail business that Lynn noticed with Sublime Swim, give CRS a call today and ask about Winning@Retail™. Chances are good it will work with your existing systems, even if CRS didn’t install them for you in the first place. We’d love to be posting your success story here a year from now!
