Customers

Case Study - One Small Step One Giant Leap

One Small Step One Giant Leap is the UK’s premium children’s shoe retailer, stocking a comprehensive range of kids shoes and accessories, selling school shoes from Start-rite, Ricosta & Ecco; trendy trainers from Converse, Nike, Adidas & Puma; boys shoes from Timberland, Birkenstock, Geox and Naturino; girls shoes from Aster, Lelli Kelly and Pom D'Api and a selection of baby shoes, pre-walkers and first shoes.

They currently have 12 outlets with stores in Bath, Sheen,  Notting Hill,  Clapham,  Putney, Ealing,  Islington, Teddington, and  concessions in Harrods, House of Fraser (Chelsea, Dublin) Bentalls (Kingston)and Daniel (Windsor).

Their 1000 sq feet concession opened in Harrods in 2007, carries all the top designer brands including Prada, Armani D&G and Cavalli as well as an extensive range of sport, school and leisure shoes.

Starting up with PrimaNet®

The business was formed in 2002 by managing director Nick Schwefel , with their first store opened in Bath in May 2003.  From the outset, the objective was to have the systems in place to help manage the business efficiently and cope with future business growth.

Nick Schwefel explains, “We knew we needed a system that could cope with the demands of our business from the very start. From previous experience, we also knew that we did not want a system that had to be heavily modified to suit our business, giving us potential problems with support and upgrades.”

PrimaNet proved to be the off-the-shelf solution they were looking for, but still with all the system functionality required for a specialist footwear retailer – particularly in children’s footwear which deals with both size and width.

“PrimaNet has ticked all the boxes for us in terms of functionality, reliability, ease of use and scalability,”continues Nick. “We have introduced a whole raft of new product lines and the system just takes it in its stride.”

The Business Growth Challenge

Unusually for a small footwear retailer, One Small Step One Giant Leap, get their stock delivered to stores via a central warehouse rather than directly to stores from suppliers. This enables them to make their stock work more efficiently.

Utilising merchandising functionality within PrimaNet, they have implemented a very successful advanced replenishment approach – where intelligent software takes recent sales and trend information and creates a replenishment model.

“In addition to helping run our business more efficiently, PrimaNet has also become a ‘selling point’ for us as a company, particularly with large retail concessions like Harrods and House of Fraser”,adds Nick. “It gives them the confidence that we have the systems in place to manage efficient store replenishment and also sales growth. PrimaNet also generates very good business management reporting which, inturn,provides good buying information.”

The Prima Difference

Prima Solutions handle all of the IT for One Small Step One Giant Leap. All hardware maintenance, software maintenance, training of new starters, software upgrades, development plans, support, and any other day to day activity is managed by the team at Prima.

“In running our business, we like to keep things as simple as possible.  With Prima Solutions, we have found an IT supplier that we can rely on to manage our evolving business systems requirements, leaving us to focus on what we do best - managing and developing our retail business”, comments Nick. “Prima Solutions really understand our business and have always been extremely helpful compared to other suppliers I have worked with”.

The Future

One Small Step One Giant Leap are now developing their own brand of children’s footwear, ‘Max & May’.  Working with Prima means that they can continue to expand the business and not worry about the capability of their IT systems.

Nick concludes, “Prima offers a service that effectively sees them acting as our IT department and we know that they will keep us on track with the systems and technology to best support our specialist retail business”.