OMNIS Retail at Material Things

Here's the transcript of the interview

Why did you choose Iconography?

We had an integration with a website which was very lacking. In fact, it was literally your name that was out in the furniture world, who mentioned, "Oh, I'm told that Iconography make the best websites."

Our website now, we get so many compliments on how it looks. The amount of times where I've said, "Well, actually, I've designed that part." And they go, "Really? You're not a web designer?" I go, "No, I'm far from it, but I managed to put this content in and I can do all those things despite not knowing anything about web design."

I think it would be very hard to go backwards now and to return to where we were. You've got such a fantastic team behind you that are happy to just get on the phone or jump on a video call at any time.

Enterprise eCommerce

You make your own sofas, you do the made-to-measure curtains, you do reupholstery. None of which is standard e-commerce. How's that experience on the website?

People can look at the website, see the beginnings of what we do, and then we can expand on it. The key thing about the website is to get people in here. And once they're in here, we can then talk to them about all the options we do.

EPoS

When a customer comes into the store, what does that journey look like for them?

So, we generally sit down with the customer first and foremost and build up a relationship with them. We grab a laptop. We tend to put them to one side until we get to pricing and building the product and making sure it's the right product for that customer.

They can come up to an item and say, "I like this colour. I like this fabric. I like these swatches," and then they can see it on the system in front of them when you're actually building that order.

Absolutely. As you're probably seeing with this ticket here, there's a QR code on it. So people can scan that. Anything with a QR code in the shop would take you straight to the product page on our website. We don’t have to preset them or anything like that because there's hundreds of them.

One of the great things that we've got now, is we have on every single product line custom options at the end of everything. Especially when you're doing something like reupholstery, “I need to free type something here." And that's something we can do so easily. Just that one tiny thing has worked wonders.

The fantastic thing about this is because I've got loads of different fabrics, I can then search that if I wanted to. So if I just wanted to see burgundy, it's coming up with both colours of burgundy there, light and dark, so I'm going to click one of those.

CRM

So once you’ve taken the orders, how are you managing the customer service process?

We've really converted from using emails, to using the task system. So being able to then see a history of how people have interacted with that order, is fantastic. It's horrible getting a customer phone up and say, “somebody said they’d call me back and they haven't done”. Having the knowledge from when somebody calls you up to be able to actually give somebody an answer straight there and then. I love that aspect of it.

Sounds like the staff have really brought into it as well.

It was actually the staff that came forward and said, we really like this, can we use it more? They wanted that information to hand.

Purchase Ordering

Is OMNIS equipped to handle the changing nature of these bespoke, complex products? Especially when ordering the components and fabrics in?

Absolutely. You send a purchase order, customer phones up the next day and goes, I actually don't like that color. A colleague would phone up the manufacturer and change that color. And then it's not represented in the system. But now we can manipulate that. And even capturing emails from the supplier to say, yes, we've changed that.

What are the repercussions of a purchase order not being acknowledged and then in fact, not reaching the supplier? What knock on effect does that have?

Well, if it's missed, then it's never been ordered. And then it's waiting effectively on the customer to chase that order. And that normally ends in the customer cancelling, which is costing you a horrific amount of money. That's a good thing about the system because it will ping you to say, you haven't had this acknowledgement in this amount of time. Oh, it's gone to junk on their side. And so then you can follow that up.

PIM

How important is it that the stock is all handled in a central system and you haven't got to go hunting for where it might live?

It's been huge. One of the things that's such a simple thing, is labelling. We use a label that nobody can miss, which is on every single box down there, that has the customer's name and that has the product on there and where it is in the building. So that the guys, when they're delivering things, can look at it and go, "I've definitely got the right package here”.

How has that been going with stock take?

It's never been more accurate, which is so refreshing. I mean, if you look at our stock take even just over five years ago, we were manually going around and counting everything, and then putting that into a spreadsheet and hoping for the best. Now everything's accounted for. All of those things are brilliant and very transparent.

And hopefully that rescues again, a few more sales potentially that might not have been able to get off the ground before because someone doesn't wanna wait around to see if you've got it in the warehouse or not.

Yeah, or we've promised something to somebody. If we've said, yeah, yeah, we've definitely got more of those and then we can't find them, we've then lost that customer because we don't look like what we know what we're doing.

Logistics

So what happens when goods arrive at the warehouse?

So all of that is logged as it comes in and then straight away put into the system to see where it is. We can make sure we get the right thing at the right time so that then customers aren't waiting. Although it's not a massive warehouse, that's always a thing. "Where is it? What part of the building? Is it in the showroom? Is it down there? Where is it?" And that's a really good thing about being able to set up unique areas in there.

How do you find using things like the scheduler, the journey planner?

Before there was no prompt for it to go out. With the journey planner, it's every day we can then set up what the journey is, what vehicle it's on, whether it's morning or afternoon or even a set timeframe. We can then mark that as delivered.

RMS

And so the rest of the reporting suite then and the dashboard, how impactful is that to be able to see snapshots of revenue data, sales data, customers, best sellers?

It's been invaluable. So we've got modules on there showing what salespeople are doing on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis. And so we can look at things and if we say, wow, this department is totally different from what we were doing this time last year, we can then see what we were doing at that point last year.

How do you access this data?

Although my wife curses me for this, I'll be out and about and logging onto the system to see what we've done during the day. You can drill down into the data, you can get as detailed as you want with it, but just a clear overview of things and being able to see that data in a simple way is great. And that's on my phone, on my iPad, on my laptop.

Yeah, so unfortunately for your wife, if there's wifi, there's reporting.

There is, yeah. I've been on my laptop on holiday before and she's been like, oh my God, what is wrong with you?

So overall, was OMNIS worth the investment?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It was well and truly worth the money, especially when you look back now to the way we were doing things to the way we're doing things now. It's night and day. It really is.

Posted by Georgia Caird
26th March 2026