Hyde and Seek
Award-winning gift shop Hyde and Seek has been in business for 7 years. Founder Justine Hyde, with a background in Corporate Management training, wanted a complete change in career. She opened her first shop in Paris Street, Exeter, before moving to the Harlequin Shopping centre in 2017. Balancing Hyde and Seek bricks and mortar sales with a planned online expansion has been key to their success. They are a long-time Vend customer and use Magento 2.
The Problem
Previously Vend and Magento were linked using an on-premise software solution. Keeping products, stock and sales synchronised across the systems was only achieved with considerable effort and investment of Hyde and Seek staff time. For, instance stock levels had to be manually uploaded to the Magento Website.
This investment in time and effort impacted on the Hyde Seek business as follows:
- Stock control was incredibly difficult, because of waiting up to a week for stock levels and never having a clear control on what stock was available. This seriously affected their customer service and fulfilment.
- Time consuming amendments to product formats were needed to enable the system to input new products on the website.
- Existing platform didn’t integrate with many 3rd party platforms which hindered expansion.
Their supplier then went out of business and Hyde and Seek needed an immediate solution and Vend recommended TIDE.
Implementation
As a cloud system with prebuilt connections TIDEConnects was able to deploy immediately, connecting Vend and Magento2 in a matter of minutes. Processes were implemented that automated Product Management, Inventory Synchronisation and the processing of Sales Orders and Returns.
TIDEConnects has provided Hyde and Seek with:
- Seamless stock entry saving large amounts of time.
- Realtime stock control to enable continued first-rate customer service.
- Confidence in their new website so it can be central to their business expansion.
- Automated listing of products with variants like size and colour.
- The option to become Multichannel – both the shop and their online offering are integrated, and they can now look to using 3rd party platforms to further expand their businesses.
The Result
COVID has had an obvious impact. In July when they re-opened their bricks & mortar shop, although Hyde and Seek were 40% down on sales, their website sales were up 127%. They couldn’t concentrate on both effectively. Since August they have used TIDEConnects and in two months TIDEConnects has automatically processed over 5,000 inventory updates and created or updated over 3,000 products. Without TIDEConnects these would have had to been done manually.
‘Working with the people at TIDEConnects has been refreshing. They think about my business holistically, keep me in the loop and are proactive; identifying problems and providing a solution before I’ve even discovered them myself. TIDEConnects is seamless, proactive and solve problems, I’m very happy indeed. The only thing I’d change is I wish I’d used them sooner!” Justine Hyde, Owner Hyde and Seek.