Switching to Vend point of sale helped Australian eco retailer Biome open new stores and sell their products all over the world.
Home & Gifts
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Multi-store
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AU
Australia
Biome is Australia’s leading eco store. Founded by Tracey Bailey in 2003, Biome is helping their customers minimise their impact on the environment. Today Biome has six physical stores and an online store that serves customers all over the world.
Six stores using Vend integrated with Xero, Afterpay, CommBank Albert and e-Commerce website.
biome.com.au/At a Glance
Biome is able to grow in Australia and the World!
With Vend, Biome can now:
The Challenge
Tracey Bailey wanted to share her passion for the environment with the world! With Vend, Tracey can manage her six stores across vast geographic boundaries from anywhere.
Tracey wanted to grow her business, but felt that her current POS couldn’t keep up with the fast pace at which she was moving.
“After many years of using our old POS, we looked to move systems because it was just restricting our ability to grow as quickly as we wanted to. It was fine when we just had one store. As soon as we opened more stores those stores were getting busier, therefore needing more registers, our old system was too cumbersome to set it up on new computers.”
As Biome expanded from one store to six Tracey and her team required a point of sale software that would be hosted in the cloud. “One of the pain points with our previous software is that it wasn’t in the cloud.” says Tracey. She needed something that would allow her to run her business from afar, whilst still having access to accurate enough information from the one data source.
“One of the pain points with our previous software is that it wasn’t in the cloud.”
Tracey Bailey, Founder
The Solution
Tracey moved into the cloud with Vend and very quickly had a better overview of her stores performance from afar.
“One of the best advantages of Vend for me as a manager is the oversight it gives me of the performance of all of our stores - and our online store - from the head office. As much as I love going out to the stores and seeing what’s going on, I can’t always do that. On a daily basis with Vend, I can check in on how everyone’s going, pick up on anything that needs to be improved upon and of course celebrate the successes!” says Tracey.
The ability to keep an eye on things from afar became especially important when Tracey decided to open her first stores outside of her hometown, Brisbane. “For the first time we’ve stepped out of Brisbane and opened a new store on the Gold Coast; and a new store in Melbourne.”
Vend has also enabled Tracey to use other world-leading retail tools.
“We have several integrations with Vend that enables us to be efficient with our processes. Of course there’s our integration with Xero, our accounting programme. We also use CommBank Albert, so that the EFTPOS is integrated with our point of sale. We have our integration with our eCommerce website, for which we have to develop our own integration with Vend’s open APIs.”
Tracey is also able to run reports within Vend to get a greater understanding of her stock in store. “In terms of products, Vend also gives us great data on which products are best selling and how fast they’re selling. We can work out where we’re overstocked, understocked and help with our inventory planning.”
“Now with Vend we have great flexibility. Even if we’re just doing a pop up store, we can just quickly switch on new registers specifically for that event.”
Tracey Bailey, Founder
Biome brings their solution together with the best in retail
The Results
Managing her business from the cloud with Vend, has allowed Tracey and her staff to focus on their passion - selling goods that don’t harm the world.
Tracey has a wonderful team that has helped get Biome to where it is today. “Today, Biome is a team of 80 people now across different facets of the business. Our success is really about these people, who come to work everyday with a passion for making a difference in the world and giving our customers exceptional service. Really that is the key thing that I love about Biome and my job - our team.”
This team has helped build the foundation for their online tribe and loyal customer base. “Building a loyal community or tribe online is of course one of the most vital parts of success in business today. So we invest a great amount of energy, passion and time into making a success of our social media.”
Vend allows Tracey to have a greater visibility of her community. “Because it’s so important to have one customer view across your business, to be able to personalise your digital marketing that allows us to see which customers are buying which products and then be able to target our marketing again.”
“There’s a great feature in Vend where we can see what our customers are buying, the kinds of products they may be interested in, when they may need refills for those products…” says Tracey.
“When we’re opening a new store, to be honest Vend is one of the simplest parts of making that happen. What I particularly loved about it was that we could set up the outlet a couple weeks before the store opened and get all of our stock entered into the system. Then right at the last minute, all we had to do was to switch on the registers and we could start taking sales. It was so simple.”
Tracey Bailey, Founder
