The Rugged Society is not your everyday menswear brand. Their store is known for its carefully curated selection of heritage style menswear brands and Americana antiques and collectibles. In its early days, the brand was initially an event space where secret gigs and dining experiences were brought to life.
In 2021, The Rugged Society transitioned into retail business and launched both a Shopify website and retail shop with SumUP POS. When managing stock across its online and retail store became too difficult, the brand decided to switch to Shopify POS and run the entire business from Shopify’s powerful back office. Since then, the Rugged Society has enjoyed:
- More efficient inventory management
- 10% higher average order values
- 20% lift in order volume
Challenge: Synchronizing stock across channels
The Rugged Society routinely sells at events, its store, and online. While this increases sales, using two systems for online and in-person selling made managing stock difficult. While selling at a three-day festival, the inventory listed in as available online did not reflect what was being sold at their kiosks.
With SumUp, the brand had to key in order totals in their card reader, then manually mark the item as sold in Shopify to ensure their inventory was accurate. This process was time-consuming, inefficient, and left room for errors.
SumUp POS didn’t integrate with our Shopify site, which created a bit of a mess. Once we saw how well Shopify POS’ payments hardware worked and how seamlessly it synced with our online store, we knew it was time to switch.
Solution: An updated inventory catalog in less time
Since switching from SumUp to Shopify POS, The Rugged Society has a centralized view of inventory, orders, and customers and can run its entire business from Shopify. The team can move quicker without running into roadblocks that require complicated workarounds to solve.
The brand also spends far less time creating and adding products to its sales channels. Much of The Rugged Society’s stock are one-off collectibles and antiques. Now, rather than having to create the same product to their online store and POS system separately, they create one product in Shopify and it’s ready to sell online or at their store instantly. Those time-savings have been exponential and helped increase order volume by 20%.
Having one system of record for managing our inventory has been really helpful. Our inventory syncs across our Shopify site and POS system in real-time, which saves us a lot of time.
Results: Saved time, faster workflows, and international growth
The Rugged Society now serves customers abroad and locally with a mix of online and in-person selling. Customers in New Zealand, South Korea, and the UK can shop via their online store, while local shoppers can use whichever blend of online and in-store shopping they find most convenient. That customer-centric approach has resulted in 10% higher average order values than before.
Since unifying their sales channels with Shopify, making a sale is no longer a multi-step process that requires keying in transactions. Similarly, managing inventory no longer takes more steps than it should–they can add products to their inventory faster, and no longer need to manually reconcile stock whenever they make a sale.
So, what’s next for the brand? The Rugged Society is looking forward to hosting a series of outdoor community events in the Alps this summer and continuing to build its brand and serve more customers globally using a mix of online and physical experiences.
Using Shopify to run our online and physical store makes it easier to reach a wider customer base. We can do everything from a single, reliable system.
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