The brand has grown considerably over the past years, and today Love Stories runs stores in Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, London, and Berlin, plus franchise stores in more countries. Besides the brand stores, customers can also shop Love Stories products in 450 major department stores and boutiques.
Business case
Love Stories’ plan was to become an international player from the start. At the start, they simply sold their products to a network of wholesalers. Today they are selling through three different channels: physical stores, eCommerce, and B2B wholesale.
Love Stories originally purchased an ERP solution to manage their B2B sales, with the retail stores being integrated later. The problems started when they opened new stores in Copenhagen and London: that’s when Love Stories realized that their POS solution could not handle foreign currency. “In order to be able to expand quickly with our own stores abroad, we purchased a second ERP package,” explains Bert Tragter, Financial Director at Love Stories.
With more systems to manage came more complications. “The two systems did not communicate which started causing more problems, including financial differences and too many manual and time-consuming processes,” says Tragter. The systems also soon became outdated.
The company couldn’t be stuck with legacy software that couldn’t synchronize and which threatened the smooth running of the business. So Love Stories started looking for a single system to handle its whole business, from POS and store sales, to back office, to inventory.
Love Stories believed that a cloud-based software would enhance their capabilities and generate new business opportunities. “I believe in a future in which everything happens in the cloud,” Tragter says. When the contracts of the two legacy software packages expired, Love Stories started implementing a full cloud strategy.
The solution
The company worked with IT company TCOG, an LS Retail partner with high expertise on both LS Retail solutions and the fashion industry. The company compiled a clear list of requirements, the two primary ones being flexibility and scalability.
TCOG recommended LS Central SaaS, a single software solution that extends Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP with retail functionality and which unites in a platform sales, POS, inventory, vendors, customer information, and more.
Love Stories are very satisfied with the support they got from TCOG. “It is very refreshing to take a critical look at the day-to-day running of your organization with an external party,” says Tragter. “Then you find out that many ingrained processes can be done better or more efficiently.”
Benefits
With LS Central, Love Stories can reap the benefits of a unified commerce platform running in the cloud. All the company’s data is collected within one database, in a consistent manner. Love Stories can now:
- Stay up to date, automatically. “The great advantage of a cloud solution is that it is available anytime and anywhere,” says Tragter. “Updates are performed automatically. Previously this was impossible as we had a lot of customization.”
- Access their business data anywhere, anytime and make informed, data-driven decisions. “The new system gives us much more reliable figures and insights into our company data, such as inventory,” says Tragter.
- Easily expand the functionalities and integrate to more solutions.
- Increase collaboration in the workplace, as all employees are using the same online applications and data. “That is something that has certainly proven useful during the Covid-19 pandemic," says Tragter.
With the support of LS Retail and TCOG, Love Stories can manage all their current and future locations conveniently, and continue to offer the flawless and superior service they are known for.
