Case Study: Tracking Tropical Luxury from PO to POS

SoHa Living was founded in 2002 by sisters Brooke Watson and Shyrah Maurer, who saw an opportunity to bring to market unique home and gift items they discovered in their travels through Hawai’i. They wanted their products to embody a lifestyle of leisure, vacation, discovery, coastal chic and tropical luxury.

Fifteen years later, SoHa Living is going strong. The company has grown with more than 90 employees working in their warehouse and their eight retail locations across Hawai’i.

Watson and Maurer’s goal from the start was to make their stores places where customers would feel happy and relaxed, where they would enjoy spending time discovering new and unique products.

“We strive to find and manufacture beautiful and fun products that help preserve memories, special moments, and good times,” says Brooke Watson.

While the company wholesales to a limited number of retail partners—boutiques and hotel gift shops—SoHa Living’s focus continues to be retail and adding an online sales channel to expand its customer base through Shopify in 2017.

To sustain SoHa Living’s growth, they needed a comprehensive software system that would not only manage inventory in a POS and integrate their retail stores but would also track manufacturing at their warehouse and B2B fulfillment while integrating with their accounting program.

The company started out with Lightspeed Online, which worked well enough until SoHa decided to expand to more locations and increase manufacturing of their own products.

“We essentially outgrew Lightspeed and needed software that allowed us to monitor FIFO inventory, manufacturing and more. It was too simple for us,” says Alexandra Lynch, SoHa Living’s Operations Manager. “We were introduced to Cin7 by someone who was familiar with its robust capabilities and suggested it to us as a hand-in-hand product that would track what we needed, integrate directly with our accounting software and give us a production component. We checked it out and found out that Cin7 integrates very well with Xero, so we decided to move to that from Quickbooks Online.”

SoHa found out that Cin7 had even more to offer, with a B2B platform and integration with Shopify.

POS, Accounting and Beyond

SoHa Living began using Cin7 in June, 2016.

“We use the reporting features for end-of-day sales tracking,” Lynch says. “That’s a big feature for us. Cin7’s reports are really inclusive. It has everything we need.”

The company found that Cin7’s integration with Xero reduced the labor required when they were using Lightspeed with Quickbooks Online.

“Our accounting team has more time now to focus on other things,” Lynch says. “They don’t have to do as much data entry because Cin7 pushes all that data to Xero. It cut the data entry time in half.”

Cin7 further reduced SoHa Living’s data entry requirements because purchase orders link directly to the inventory system, automatically adjusting stock levels, and allowing that data to be pushed directly to its Xero account.

“We didn’t have that level of realtime information before,” Lynch says.

Finally, the company is gearing up to use Cin7’s built-in eCommerce portal to track online inventory in its omnichannel strategy

“The advantages of Cin7 have been the seamless front-end POS that connects directly to the backend and our Xero software. That’s been really good,” says Lynch. “And the very detailed inventory tracking, comprehensive reporting on a lot of stuff: POS, end-of-day, inventory levels, Customer Data. That’s all been good.”

“The coolest thing that I’ve found is that [Cin7] is constantly working on improving and adding new features,” Lynch adds.

Lynch says that after switching to Cin7, SoHa Living still needed to integrate its credit card payment service with Cin7’s POS system. Cin7’s development team responded by adding that integration in early 2017.

“That was our biggest struggle, not having that integrated credit card processing, and now it sounds like the system is going in the right direction,” says Lynch.

See how other companies have used Cin7.