As consumer demands and expectations change, the retail sales environment is also changing, and Teamwork Retail is at the forefront of that transformation. The company provides businesses of all sizes with cloud-based retail point-of-sale (POS) and business management solutions that change the way retailers interact with their customers and manage their businesses.

Using Teamwork Retail, businesses can perform mobile and integrated POS transactions while also managing back-of-the-house activities such as inventory levels, sales analytics, and human resource functions like employee timecards and scheduling. In addition, Teamwork Retail offers its clients omnichannel servicing for their customers, seamlessly providing customer data and information regardless of how customers interact with the retailers. Teamwork Retail’s clients have come to rely on its technological solutions.

With a population of nearly 1.5 billion and a swiftly expanding consumer base, China is irresistible to retailers. In fact, A.T. Kearney again ranked China number one in its 2016 Global Retail Development Index, which rates developing countries by retail attractiveness, risk, and other parameters. In today’s retail environment, global organizations seek opportunities in China. Many of Teamwork Retail’s clients were either already operating in or planning to expand to China.

The challenge Teamwork Retail faced was that its solution is cloud-based and was built on Google App Engine. Google App Engine can only be used on Google Cloud Platform, which cannot be used in China because of government regulatory controls. Teamwork Retail tried connecting through Taiwan, but the arrangement did not work well.

To better serve its clients and offer its services to retailers operating in China, Teamwork Retail engaged AppScale, a Microsoft ISV, to help. AppScale is the only software that allows for the portability from Google App Engine to Microsoft Azure without any code modifications. It is also the world’s leading open-source, rapid development model for building scalable web and mobile applications. Teaming with AppScale, Teamwork Retail seamlessly moved its applications from Google App Engine to Microsoft Azure, running them on AppScale and operating in Azure’s datacenter.

When the cloud solutions were evaluated, Microsoft Azure was chosen for deployment to ensure optimal application performance and the required ability to scale as needed. Latency needed to be extremely low, and performance and reliability levels needed to be high—and Azure’s Beijing datacenter satisfied those requirements. In addition to its global capability, Azure provided the local support and service model that Teamwork Retail needed and the ability to create a hybrid environment to integrate with its current infrastructure.

“Microsoft provides a white-glove level of service with Azure that enabled Teamwork Retail to make the most efficient use of cloud services,” AppScale CEO Woody Rollins said about the migration.

After the migration, Teamwork Retail was better able to offer its products and services to Chinese retailers and other global retailers operating in China. It has also gained new business and, as a result, significantly expanded its client base.

Taking full advantage of AppScale’s and Azure’s benefits expands business

Now that Teamwork Retail is operating in China through AppScale in Azure, the company is taking full advantage of the expanded services and capabilities. Teamwork Retail now offers its clients functionality they didn’t have before the migration. This includes the ability to offer loyalty programs or notifications to customers about retail events to engage with and build their customer base—while at the same time giving them that omnichannel view of their customer base.

“The whole value is built around the performance,” said Michael Mauerer, CEO of Teamwork Retail. “We need to meet this extremely high online performance across any channel, and this technology just really lends itself to that. So, that’s the secret sauce, and AppScale made that possible by migrating to Azure.”

Prior to the migration to Azure, Teamwork Retail’s offering was strictly POS and did not have the real-time interactive component that now distinguishes the company as a leader in the retail technology space.

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The New Stand is in the business of improving your day. A newsstand for the social media age, it calls itself part bodega, part blog. Originating in the New York City subway in 2015, the small locations are now all over New York streets, office buildings and even ferries. New Stand also has a location at Los Angeles International Airport and plans to keep expanding.

Powering the sales of snacks, drinks, interesting items, cool new gadgets, phone chargers (and very few newspapers) at these small stands is Teamwork Commerce, which provides point-of-sale devices and a cloud-based backend system to support The New Stand’s ever-changing product line. New Stand employees run Teamwork on iPads that provide full-featured customer checkout capabilities.

Teamwork also works with The New Stand’s app, which allows customers to receive loyalty points and special discounts alongside a daily digest of interesting news articles.

“Teamwork has enabled us to build a business in multiple formats from Day 1,” Kendall says of the various configurations of New Stand locations.

Kendall also credits Teamwork with supporting some of their more innovative ideas. “Things like self-checkout built into our member app were only possible with Teamwork,” he says. “We had to figure out how to make the wallet in our app sync with our stores and Teamwork enabled that. There’s a whole host of things going on in the background that you don’t see, but that you obviously need a really strong tech partner to be able to execute.” The New Stand also offers an innovative “swap charge” device that provides a phone charger that customers can borrow like a library book for 72 hours for free.

“We had to figure out how to be able checkout a swap charge and have that payment integration. Teamwork allowed for that,” Kendall says. “Teamwork’s been an amazing partner to keep up with us and allow us extensibility inside our platform. It allows us to add features, other partners and to evolve constantly.” Kendall credits the flexibility of the system — which uses off-the-shelf iOS hardware — as a key component of current and future expansion plans.

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The iconic FAO Schwarz toy store opened its new flagship Rockefeller Center store in 2018 with the support of Teamwork Commerce and their integration partners that made its new retail sale ecosystem possible.

With its well-known toy soldiers and piano you can walk on in place, the new store captures the imagination of children and adults. It moves beyond retail into a full experience for many people.

Teamwork’s iPad-based mobile point-of-sale (POS) system and Cloud HQ backend form the main interface for associate checkout in the store.Mobile POS supports a quick and easy checkout system for the large crowds they see. But Teamwork’s real power is inside the system, where it seamlessly integrates with services and products provided by others. Teamwork’s many features have allowed FAO to customize their technology to be as creative and outside of the box as their store is.

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Chicago’s trendy women’s clothing store, Akira, started in 2002 by four visionaries. Offering brands such as Adidas, Champion, I.AM.GIA, and more, Akira has gone from one store and grown to 36+ stores throughout the United States and a website serving customers around the world.

While Akira is known for their clothing and inspiring fashionistas, it’s their customers that keep the trends coming. The best way to provide a customer with an unparalleled experience is through retail technology. Akira wanted to take their retail management system to the next level, so they chose Teamwork Commerce to handle their daily operations.

Akira’s implementation of Teamwork was omnichannel focused. This implementation included an integration to Magento to run their eCommerce website. Through this eCommerce integration, Akira unlocked new capabilities for their business. They can now centrally manage web orders to support buy online, pick up in-store and ship [from] or return in-store, offering a new convenience to their shoppers.

Also included in the omnichannel approach, Akira can now house customer and inventory data across their website, stores, and warehouse. Customer data includes customer loyalty information, shopping history, gift cards, and more. In addition to these features, Akira has access to endless reports customized to their needs.

Akira is focused on ensuring that customers are styled by experts who know fashion. Now style doesn’t have to stop with their clothing. Akira’s creative employees utilize Apple’s iOS devices to perform their in-store duties enabling flexibilty and style at the point of sale.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Asics takes full advantage of Teamwork technology to boost its sales, during the 36th edition of the Father’s Day race, serving its customers from anywhere within the store, with its innovative system that works on iPads, which Asics sales associates used to close sales in 3 clicks. Providing management with sales information in real time.

CHALLENGES

As a sponsor of the Race and with a pavilion with thousands of its products, Asics had the challenge to sell as much as possible with speed and customer care, to a potential universe of 13,000 runners who participated in the 36th Edition of the Father’s Day Race.

• Provide sales assistance to thousands of customers on a busy Father’s Day Race
• To do this, sales associates needed to go to where the customers were
• They needed a real-time system that would allow them to report sales in real time
• Deliver a great customer experience
• Asics’ true race is with itself.

TESTIMONIALS OF A FRESH AND EFFECTIVE SOLUTION

Thanks to its partnership with Teamwork, Asics was able to face and overcome the challenges presented in the 36th Edition of the Father’s Day Race, managing to be crowned a sales champion in this important event, outperforming itself with Teamwork. 

“Teamwork helps us to ensure that our customers enjoy the ASICS experience within our stores, it is something super simple with basically three clicks, our sellers have more than enough to have a closed sale.” – José Carlos Tirado, ASICS Mexico Operations Director.

“Teamwork is very interactive. Customers have told us that it allows them to interact with the system, and that’s something the outlets I knew didn’t allow it. The iPad shows a fresh image.” Montse Uribe, Asics Store Manager

“With the dashboard application, from the cell phone, you can see the sales, with a click and you have the schedules, the top 10 sales peaks, how the sales by associates are going, see the sales of the outlet, it is very easy to be up to date with the sales of our stores.” José Carlos Tirado, Director of ASICS Mexico Operations.

WHAT CUSTOMERS SAY

“The experience was wonderful, it was a fairly quick and simple process, I did not have to go through any line, the sales associate came to me, where I was and I was able to pay on the spot, so I left very happy with my new purchase.” – A happy customer / Runner in the 36th Edition of the Father’s Day Race.

BE THE WINNER IN YOUR OWN RACE, GOING WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE

Go to teamworkcommerce.com and schedule a demo to learn how you can exceed your own goals, serving your customers with speed and agility wherever they are in your store, reporting information in real time to make better decisions.