Background
The Greensleeves Music shop was started by Peta Margetts over 20 years ago in small premises in Northallerton, North Yorkshire. 10 years later they moved into a much larger double-fronted shop in the Central Arcade in Northallerton. Peta is a qualified music teacher and a Fellow of Trinity Music College and decided to open a shop specialising in sheet music, key boards, wind and brass instruments and accessories. Her shop now carries 20,000 different pieces of music and keeping track of all this can be very difficult.
In 1992, Peta’s son Iain, established himself (after gaining his experience in Greensleeves) in his own music shop, The Rock Box, just four doors down in the same arcade. Iain’s shop specialises in the larger musical instruments including guitars, drumkits, lighting, amplifiers and keyboards. In fact, the full range of “Group Gear”. Rock Box also carries out its own on-site repairs on brass, woodwind, guitars, violins and handles off-site electrical repairs for amplifiers, keyboards and lights etc.
A third general music shop was opened in nearby Guisborough 18 years ago.
Solution
As can be appreciated, running a group of three shops covering every aspect of the music industry presents its own challenges. A computerised till seemed to be the way forward. After reviewing all the available systems, Iain and Peta installed what appeared to be the best of the bunch in October 2001.
Unfortunately the chosen system simply did not meet their expectations and after many increasingly frustrating months they lost trust in the system and accepted that they needed to look for something else. It was not an easy decision to write off their substantial capital investment, to say nothing of the time and effort they'd spent getting the system up and running.
After seeing MI-Store at the 2002 BMF they decided to set up a meeting with the company. Within 48 hours of their request, they were looking at (to use Ian’s words) “a well sorted system”. It was very simple and intuitive to use. After a second visit they placed an order for a complete MI-Store Retail Management System.
"It made things 10 times easier"
Result
“The system does what they said it would and any problems that did arise were always fixed within 24 hours” said Iain.
They found the system straightforward to run and as Iain says, “It made things 10 times easier. Operating the VAT Margin Scheme is so easy and the special order system is excellent. MI-Store has many features the other EPOS systems just don’t have.”
Having had the MI-Store system operating in Rock Box since November 2002, Peta and Iain have proved to themselves that the system meets their requirements to such an extent that they have now installed a system for Geensleeves and a third system for their Guisborough store.
