A Real Store

Its kind of weird that even though Josh and I have dedicated every waking minute of the last six years to Tigertree, it still comes as a shock to us when we realize what our little retail baby has become.  It seems like out of nowhere we became a two story, 3,000 square foot shop with departments ranging from stationery to apothecary to vintage industrial furniture.  All of the sudden, a lot of our "aw shucks" methods of business running just aren't cutting it.  No more closing the store in the middle of the day so we can ride bikes downtown to eat lunch.  No more shoving important paperwork into boxes and not looking at it again for years.  And most recently, no more having the worst inventory accounting system possible with barcodes that don't scan and a single register that leaves customers waiting in line when there is a rush.  


This week, we switched the store over to a new Point of Sale system and did a physical inventory of the store.  We also relabeled every.  single.  item.  

(Don't let that teenager Facebook picture face fool you, Brittany loved the tagging!)

What this means for our in-store customers:


-Faster check out times
Our new tag printer is awesome and slanted/cut off bar codes are a thing of the past.  With the old system, we had a habit of just writing out the SKU on tags instead of printing bar codes since they so rarely worked.   Now everything in the store has a barcode that WORKS which means you don't have to hear us mumble "sorry...  I'm just trying to find this in the system.."  Another exciting thing about the new system is that since it is cloud based, we can check customers out from any computer or tablet.  During peak season, we will be able to have multiple registers open throughout the store.  Yeah, just like the Apple Store.  Pretty fancy.


-Receipt Options
This may not sound that exciting, but I think you will be happy to know that if you would like us to create an account for you to store your receipts in our system rather than losing them in the car when you need to make a return, we will be able to do that.  Also, we now have the option of emailing receipts!


What this means for our online customers:


-Real Time Inventory Updates
Our new system links our inventory directly to our website, so the availability of items online will always be an accurate reflection of what we have in the store.  We used to have to update all of the inventory manually which resulted in us sending out a lot of emails apologizing to online customers about how we were sold out of the item they purchased.  I am so glad to be done with that!  Now as soon as an item is sold in the store, the website inventory for that item will be updated. 

I realize that all of this may not sound like that big of a deal, but I promise that it will make the shopping experience for both our Columbus and worldwide online customers a much smoother one.  


Thanks so much for dealing with our growing pains over the past few years as we move ever closer to becoming what we have been often (and excitedly) referring to lately as a "real store."