Hop Burns & Black uses Lightspeed and Shopify to run award-winning retail
Hop Burns & Black is a craft beer, hot sauce, and vinyl records retailer based in Peckham Rye, South London. Two-time winner of Time Out’s Most Loved Peckham Shop award and London Retailer of the Year at the 2016 Celebrate British Beer Awards. Hop Burns & Black runs two brick and mortar locationand an eCommerce store powered by Shopify.
The Challenge
With thousands of stock items from around the globe and no background in retail, the Hop Burns & Black team needed an intuitive, easy-to-use ePOS system with serious inventory management capabilities.
Jen Ferguson and Glenn Williams wanted to start a shop devoted to what they call their three greatest obsessions: beer, hot sauce, and vinyl records. After settling on the idea and the name for their business (Hop = beer, Burns = hot sauce, Black = vinyl), the Kiwi-born London transplants secured themselves a brick and mortar location in Peckham Rye, South London and subsequently set an opening date of November, 2014.
With craft beer on the rise, Jen and Glenn knew they’d need to maintain a fierce dedication to exceptional quality, selection, and customer service in order to stand out from the competition and to bring the world’s best beers to their local community.
The duo quickly realised that this lofty goal would require a point of sale system capable both of creating a memorable customer experience and smoothly handling thousands of items of inventory.
They began their ePOS search with those customer service and inventory demands at the head of the pack. Other needs on the list?
A system they’d be able to quickly learn in the hectic lead-up to Hop Burns & Black’s grand opening – and one they’d be able to easily operate once business got going.
The Solution
After a long research journey, Jen and Glenn chose Lightspeed for Hop Burns & Black. They knew they could count on our inventory management capabilities and user-friendly interface.
Jen and Glenn did their homework and finally settled on Lightspeed as the ideal solution for their new business venture. They contacted their fellow retailers to find out who used Lightspeed already and then met with those existing Lightspeed customers to see the system in action.
What they didn’t know at the time, though, was that their insistence on an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use ePOS would actually be critical.
“We had a number of delays in the fit-out, which saw us still sweeping up sawdust two hours before we were due to open,” says Jen. “We didn’t even get time to train ourselves on how to use the iPad register until just before the first customer walked through the door! Thankfully it was simple, and within five minutes we had the hang of it.”
Hop Burns & Black got off to a smashing start with Lightspeed, and the shop quickly became a staple in the area.
With business booming and their customer base only continuing to grow, Jen and Glenn decided to expand online. In April 2016, they opened the Hop Burns & Black eCommerce store with Shopify, and they’ve found the Lightspeed-Shopify integration “seamless.”
Jen and Glenn now use Lightspeed on iPad and laptops in the store. In addition to Lightspeed and Shopify, they use Xero (integrated with Lightspeed) for accounting, MailChimp for email marketing, an “invaluable” Socket Mobile Bluetooth scanner for hardware, and Worldpay for payments.
Read the terrific results HERE
If you would like to meet the Lightspeed team, they will be attending THE PEOPLE IN RETAIL AWARDS on the 21 September as well as speaking at THE Retail Conference on the 14th November.
Check out Jackson Versitano, Regional Manager Retail UK & RoEMEA and hear what he had to say at the Digital Transformation Discussion on the 14th June
