Established in 2006, Tatty's is an Auckland fashion icon. Arguably the city's best loved second-hand designer fashion destinations, Tatty's is committed to providing an alternative mode of consumption with sustainability and individuality at its core.
Tatty's is a consignment based boutique that helps customers buy and sell pre-loved designer clothing. Largely managed through three Auckland stores in prime locations, Tatty's was using a mix of off-the-shelf software and paper based systems which was holding them back.
The pandemic threw another spanner in the works with retail being heavily affected by lockdowns and the stores unable to trade. Their online store only had a very small selection of their total inventory but clearly that needed to change under New Zealand's "new normal".
Building an integrated consignment management solution
The vision was to build an end-to-end technology solution that supported the customer and operational journeys from start to completion. This began with customer's dropping off their items in-store, to curating and preparing goods for sale, synchronising inventory with the online store and POS, and allowing customers to track and arrange payouts for items sold.
Outlining the project deliverables
Early on we realised that we wouldn't be able to capture all of the detail in the project up front. To keep things organised we broke the project up into a set of high level features, and wrote an initial set of user stories that would deliver MVP functionality for each feature.
We understood that more detail was likely to become evident as the project progressed so were careful not to over-engineer the solution to mitigate the risk of needing to make changes.
Aglile development
Prior to the start of each development sprint we reviewed and updated each user story to take into account any change requests or learnings from previous sprints. UX/UI was then updated to address any changes and then the revised user stories and change requests were scheduled for the development team to begin working on.
This approach allowed us to stay flexible, be fully open to changes as required, and ultimately end up with a product that was a tight fit to the Tatty's operational requirements.
Data migration and launch
With close to 100,000 stock units on hand we ran numerous migration tests to not only move inventory but also to map inventory to Tatty's internal sales cycles and synchronise everything with the new online store and POS system.
We soft-launched the solution in a single store to ensure any issues were ironed out before transitioning all stores away from their old systems.
A fully integrated solution
Customers visiting Tatty's are now able to register and complete consignment drop off forms using iPads at the counter. This reduces errors and eliminates the double handling of paper forms that was occurring previously.
Inventory is then processed at the warehouse against each consignment and automatically synchronised with Shopify and Shopify POS. As items are sold the back office system is again updated in real-time.
Customers are able to login to the portal to view consignments and stock, check their account balance and organise payouts. Payout requests are then batch processed daily and uploaded to internet banking in a single file, all in a matter of minutes.
