UK luxury sportswear brand Cole Buxton deploys Cegid Retail mobile POS technology to support global expansion

Retail software vendor, Cegid, announced today that the British luxury sportswear brand, Cole Buxton, has deployed Cegid Retail’s mobile point-of-sale (mPOS) solution in its flagship store in London as part of a drive to grow and expand the business internationally.

Cegid Retail mPOS helps store associates serve customers, check stock and process payments from anywhere in the store, directly using iPhones.

Amar Dehal, Head of Operations at Cole Buxton, says that the “queue busting” technology was essen-tial in reducing waiting times for customers, especially after its experience during lockdown when cus-tomers queued outside the store and staff had to bring out devices to avoid lost sales.

“You can’t keep customers waiting too long,” he says. “You need to be able to check them out then and there. Or, if a product isn’t available, have it delivered to their preferred location, whether it’s at home or a hotel.”

Cole Buxton started out in 2014 with the idea of redefining contemporary sportswear to suit the mod-ern man’s lifestyle. Six years later, following increasing online sales and a growing range of over 300 items, the label decided to open its first physical store in London’s Soho — which opened in 2020 be-tween lockdowns, at a time when global demand for loungewear, tracksuits and comfortable clothing was on the rise.

The store was viewed as the ideal platform to allow the fashion designers and founders Cole Buxton and Jonny Wilson to communicate directly with customers about their values as they grew the business beyond a digital-only model.

Physical store sales now account for around 15 per cent of annual sales. In 2021, 70 per cent of sales were direct-to-consumer (DTC) and the brand wants to keep sales through wholesale partners and de-partment stores down to a minimum.

The retailer projects annual sales of £20m in 2022 amid rising sales abroad - notably 15 per cent in the US and 10 per cent in Germany - with new stores being considered in New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Berlin.

Prior to opening its first physical store, the brand experimented with pop-up stores in 2019 and relied on “a fairly basic” fixed POS system that “wouldn’t have allowed the business to grow internationally, or allow staff to serve customers effectively while on the move.”

Dehal knew that the company needed to invest in an innovative and functionally rich POS solution that could serve its developing retail system requirements abroad, to help them adhere to local compliance regulations and provide a building block to support growth over the next 10 to 15 years.

The company chose Cegid Retail mPOS, which was implemented in just under 12 weeks by Cegid’s UK-based reseller MWC Partners. MWC also developed a wireless payments connector to facilitate integra-tion with Planet, a leading payments provider.

“In a short space of time, store staff had added over a £100k in sales thanks to using Cegid Retail mPOS,” says Steve Watson, Chairman of MWC Partners.

The retail software also integrates with Shopify, which Cole Buxton uses for cataloguing products online, ensuring it has up-to-the-minute, accurate information on customers, stocks and sales.

“Everything is automatically shown up in Cegid Retail mPOS, giving improved visibility across all ware-houses and stores,” adds Alan Holcroft, Country Manager for Cegid. “And mobile and queue busting tools help boost sales and ensure a fluid retail experience.”