Lane Eight used Vend’s open API to create workflows tailored to their business.
Fashion
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Single-store
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HK
Hong Kong
Lane Eight is a premium performance footwear brand with a focus on sustainability. Their store and warehouses are located in Hong Kong. They also ship to Macau and Singapore.
Lane Eight was first established in 2018, and they’ve introduced a number of positive changes to the business since then. In late 2019, the team embraced sustainable practices and expanded to the brick-and-mortar sector.
laneeight.hkAt a Glance
Lane Eight used Vend’s open API to create workflows tailored to their business.
With Vend, Lane Eight can now:
The Challenge
When Lane Eight was first established, they were online only and ran their ecommerce store via WooCommerce. It was always a struggle to find a complementary software that would integrate seamlessly with their online store as there were limited options available.
When the Lane Eight team launched their store, they used a POS system that did not have a native integration with WooCommerce. “We had to use a third party to connect a few platforms. It didn't really work the way we wanted it to; it didn't have two-way sync”.
“Orders would come in and be entered into the POS system. When inventory changed on the POS, it was then sent back to WooCommerce and that's all it did.” says Vivek Manglani, CTO at Lane Eight. The system was incapable of handling returns and order changes which very quickly became an administration nightmare for the team in store. “We had a lot of stock inconsistencies,” he adds.
As time went on, the team started to scale and they would have multiple teams assisting with order fulfilment. “All of this started to become a bottleneck which fell onto the tech team to solve these problems.” says Vivek. “Things like damaging inventory and missing inventory were starting to become a bigger issue.”
At that point, they realised that their current system couldn’t handle a lot of their required processes. “We needed something that would take the operations away from the tech team and empower the rest of the team to take charge of the business and run it.
“We’re a growing brand with limited inventory, and we need to be able to sell all that inventory on all our channels simultaneously - without having to oversell. So with our previous system, we always ended up overselling”
“We needed something that would take the operations away from the tech team and empower the rest of the team to take charge of the business and run it.”
Vivek Manglani, CTO, Lane Eight
The Solution
Through Lane Eight's knowledge of tech development, and drive to find the best solution, the team were able to use Vend’s open API to develop custom processes that would be best suited to their business needs.
Lane Eight initially came across Vend through a Google search. Through the free 14 day trial, Vivek and his team were able to immediately jump into the software and take a look around.
“I'm a developer myself, so I love to just get my hands into demos and be able to test things out”, he says. “As soon as I got into the Vend trial, I realised that it was very user friendly, not just for the user, but also for the developer.”
From the get go, Vivek was able to identify a number of features that existed with Vend that they had never used before. “It was very delightful to see all these features that we were missing out on. Vend does a really good job of combining inventory across multiple outlets and publishing it on WooCommerce”
The team at Lane Eight chose to move ahead with a dev account to iron out all the processes before moving completely live with Vend. “We got into rapid development around March to April. That's when we really just went full fledged and solved all the gaps that we found between what we wanted and what Vend could do. We did all of that without reaching out to dev support. From a developer point of view, it was a breeze. We had all these challenges, but Vend really allowed us to solve all of them.
“From a developer point of view, it was a breeze.”
Vivek Manglani, CTO, Lane Eight
Lane Eight brings their solution together with the best in retail
The Results
Making the switch to Vend has Lane Eight excited for the future. They have already seen results in saving time and have access to many features that they didn’t have before.
Switching to Vend has already proven to save so much time for the team at Lane Eight. “I'd say since switching to Vend, easily two to three hours a day has been freed up,” says Vivek. “We’re in a great position, because we don’t have the tech holding us back”.
Their previous system was not intuitive and not configurable with the POS Dashboard. Vend, on the other hand, gives retail managers the ability to go into the back office and switch between users very quickly.
Most recently, the team hired three more staff — and it took them less than an hour to be up to speed with Vend and how to sell. “That was just a game changer for us. In the past, most of our new recruits would always have issues with learning how to use the old system. We really like the fact that Vend is such an easy to use interface and it's very intuitive”.
Some of the features that Lane Eight are particularly fond of are the opening and closing of registers. “It has been a breeze. In the past, we had three separate lenses in each retail store. We would have one for returns, petty cash, and we'd have a cash reserve for the float.” The team also loved the fulfillments panel feature and the ability to sync Register Closures with Xero to have full automation from selling to book-keeping.
Vivek’s favourite feature however, was Vend’s open API. “As a developer, whenever I see an open API — something where developers can go in and just sort of augment the system the way they need to — that for me, hands down, is the best feature,” he says.
“The fact that Vend is using modern architecture, I think that's very important. You often see with other POS companies, they're really not up to date.
There’s a lot of exciting things coming ahead with Vend for us”
“I'd say since switching to Vend, easily two to three hours a day has been freed up.”
Vivek Manglani, CTO, Lane Eight
