In the last six years, Smarty Schoolwear has transformed its business, achieving over £1.5m in turnover. They adopted innovative, cloud-based software to manage growth, coupled with a significant upgrade to a powerful, integrated EPOS system. Their decisions to modernise and advance have expanded their store footprint, reduced stock-holding costs by 30% and unlocked time to focus on key projects to deliver continued growth.
About Smarty Schoolwear
Smarty Schoolwear, originally founded as Smarty Childrenswear by Ash and Naina in 1986, started as a Mothercare-style shop in Hatfield Town Centre. It evolved from selling a wide range of baby products to focusing on school uniforms. Rebranded in 2002, the business is still family-run and has expanded to three retail stores, supplying uniforms to over one hundred schools in Hertfordshire.
Known for its personal and professional customer service, Smarty Schoolwear is trusted by schools and parents alike. The company is dedicated to community involvement and is recognised as the Runner Up in the National Schoolwear Association Awards for Best Community Partner 2019. They regularly donate to local schools and international charities, contributing 5% of their turnover annually to these causes.
Smarty Schoolwear and Swan Retail partnership
With an established partnership with Swan starting in 2012, Smarty Schoolwear upgraded their retail system to TRIMS in 2017 and more recently upgraded their EPOS system to Cygnus with SwanPay in April 2024.
We sat down with Paras, Managing Director of Smarty Schoolwear, to understand how implementation of Swan’s solutions have positively impacted business growth. Paras and his team have transformed the business, expanding from 1 to 3 stores, and opened a new warehouse since 2018 in addition to modernising and enhancing the online and in-store shopping experience.
The challenge for Smarty Schoolwear
After taking over the family business in 2018, the leadership team knew they needed to modernise the business operations before scaling up. Many existing business processes were manual, exposing them to errors and increased risk. Smarty Schoolwear consulted with Josh from Swan to understand the most suitable solutions to drive desired growth and implemented TRIMS retail system with Cygnus EPOS and SwanPay alongside integrating their ecommerce website.
What made you choose TRIMS and Cygnus?
“We had an established relationship with Swan, but when we started looking at solution options, we were specifically recommended TRIMS by an industry contact.”
“Over time, we have used more and more of the key features for barcoding, stock control and stock transfer. The ability for customers to reserve stock from any store or warehouse has hugely enhanced customer experience.”
“The system has brought huge increases in efficiency, automation, and accuracy. Manual stock intake processes that would previously have taken 3-4 days can now be achieved in a matter of hours.”
“Features like TRIMS Pickstation enable us to treat our stores like an online warehouse, we can access every piece of stock for a customer, and this has helped reduce stock holdings by around 30%, which is a significant efficiency and increases customer satisfaction which is key to growth.”
“The new systems have been amazing; we have reduced our overheads hugely and it is down to the software enabling us to make these changes to achieve growth.”
How was your experience moving to the new systems?
“The impact of our account manager, Holly, has been huge; we have a partnership where she advises and guides us on suitable products and updates, and drives us to use the products to their full potential. We also attend customer webinars to learn about new features and can give feedback on which features development are critical for our business.”
What impact has TRIMS and Cygnus had on Smarty Schoolwear?
“Our retail staff love the new systems; they are very user-friendly and easy to use.”
“Through implementation we have found many efficiencies, we now have store cards where we can preload value, versus our previous manual systems. It enables improvements in so many different directions, increases automation and reduces risk.”
“TRIMS is critical to our business because we can do so much of the work remotely which saves time and cost.”
“With Cygnus EPOS reporting, we can run reports easily, saving time for our accounting team and freeing up their time to focus on other growth areas.”
What have Swan’s solutions meant for Smarty Schoolwear’s customers?
“The new systems mean faster retrieval of customer information and order data all resulting in better customer service. TRIMS enables our customers to access any piece of stock in a store or in the warehouse, which is a big evolution to the way we operated previously.”
“The systems allow us to deliver a personal service, we have all the information we need at our fingertips. We know when products are ordered and deliveries arrive, this allows us to hit a next-day service to our customers.”
How do you feel about the future of the partnership?
“Very positive – with Cygnus EPOS and TRIMS, our ability to scale up is established. We know, if we acquire another shop tomorrow, it is easy for us to implement the same great foundation in a new location.”
“Our reputation now opens the door for us with other schools, who proactively approach us about supplying their schoolwear, and this is down to the powerful feedback we get from parents and customers about their experience with Smarty Schoolwear.”
“We have recommended Swan to many other businesses in the industry, due to the ease of automation, reporting capabilities, and increase in efficiency it has brought to the business.”
We look forward to a continued partnership with Smarty Schoolwear, working together to enhance and transform their customer experience and business operations.
Click the links to find out more about TRIMS, Cygnus EPOS, and SwanPay used by Smarty Schoolwear.
To discover more about Smarty Schoolwear and its quality uniform solutions, take a look at its website and Facebook pages.
