From weeks to hours: Linen House speeds up store openings with Lightspeed
Linen House is in a prime position to continue growing while delivering high-quality home decor solutions to customers around Australia.
After more than 30 years in home decor, Linen House is no stranger to adapting to a hyper-competitive retail space. With a booming national presence, the team realised their legacy point-of-sale (POS) system could no longer support their ambitions.
In 2021, they partnered with Lightspeed, a unified POS and payments platform, to power their growth. Today, Linen House manages 23 stores with ease, saving plenty of time and money along the way. Here’s how Lightspeed transformed the company’s operations.
Opening new stores in record time
Expanding into new retail locations can be a logistical nightmare, even for established operations. This is particularly true when it comes to setting up systems to handle sales and inventory. For Linen House, their previous POS setup caused delays in store openings by weeks and cost them countless sales opportunities. That all changed with Lightspeed.
“With Lightspeed, we’re able to [set up our new POS] in less than an hour,” says Tez Osman, Director, Information Technology at Linen House. “We’re able to be ready before the retail team actually finishes shop-fitting and setting up the stores. It’s been a huge gain in terms of how quickly we can open a store.”
The result? Not only can Linen House capitalise on market opportunities when they arise, but it also reduces the stress of managing new store openings — from weeks to just an hour.
Broad-ranging support to super-charge efficiency
Beyond speeding up store rollouts, Linen House leverages Lightspeed’s ongoing support and collaboration services.
“Working with the Lightspeed account management team is a critical part of how we execute on our technology roadmap,” says Osman. “We’ve got many projects on the go — both at the moment and in the past — and working with the Lightspeed team really helps us in being able to deliver the right outcomes as quickly as we can.”
Not only does the partnership help Linen House remain agile, even as they scale, but Osman says Lightspeed’s support has also lessened the strain on their internal IT team.
“As a result of using Lightspeed, there has been approximately a 90% reduction in the support calls that are coming through from our stores. Obviously, that has a huge impact on our internal support staff,” he says.
“We don’t need as many people working on troubleshooting issues. A lot of that responsibility falls back on the Lightspeed support team, which for us means that we can focus our efforts in other areas.”
A user-friendly platform that staff love
The capabilities of a POS system are only as good as its usability, and Linen House has found Lightspeed to be both intuitive and user-friendly for its employees. Whether training new staff or helping long-time workers adapt, the platform has simplified operations for everyone.
“It’s easy to navigate, it’s easy to teach and it’s easy to use,” Osman says, adding that Linen House store managers have had incredibly positive experiences with Lightspeed since the transition.”
The end result of a user-friendly platform is that staff can spend more of their time on delivering exceptional customer service instead of grappling with complicated software. The system also provides helpful prompts and clear instructions to streamline daily operations in the business.
Cost savings that drive real growth
Integrating Lightspeed across all their locations wasn’t just about functionality and uniformity, according to Osman. It was also a smart financial decision.
“The switch to Lightspeed works out very well from a cost perspective,” he says. “We’ve saved tens of thousands of dollars in POS hardware, maintenance and consultancy fees – even though we’ve increased our retail locations five-fold.”
These savings are now being funnelled into other areas of the business for reinvestment, which Osman says is helping to fuel growth and innovation efforts. With 23 stores and counting, Linen House is in a prime position to continue growing while delivering high-quality home decor solutions to customers around Australia.
