Intro
One of the most exciting and fastest-growing retail sports brands in the USA, Rally House, use Sitoo and AWS to power their 270 stores - and counting - across the country to help provide customers with the best shopping experience possible while maintaining exceptional service from the moment someone steps into their stores.
Key Results
100% Customer capture at checkout doubled in less than four months
Implemented and rolled out in 200+ stores in four months
Great value - specifically in terms of roll out and implementation
Seamlessly integrated with NetSuite and Adyen
IT support calls from stores dramatically reduced
Secure and robust system built in the cloud
The Background
Rally House is a speciality sports store that prides itself in its ability to offer an expansive selection of apparel, gifts, home decor and other types of merchandise while representing local NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB, NFL and MLS teams. They are the ‘go to’ store for localized sporting goods with an immense range of products and assortments. Their mission is to provide customers with the best shopping experience possible while maintaining exceptional service from the moment someone steps into their stores.
Rally House began life over thirty years ago and was a dream hatched by Tim and Mabel "Peg" Liebert. Originally selling goods from their basement, it wasn’t long before they opened their first Kansas store and began specializing in selling sporting goods from the state’s sporting teams.
Soon one store became three and, eighteen years after they began, they had five stores across Kansas. In 2009, Tim and Peg’s son, Aaron Liebert, joined the company as CEO and it was from here that their expansion and growth picked up significant pace.
Rally House now has over 270 stores - and counting - across the US and is one of the fastest-growing sports retailers in the country.
The Challenge
With the level of growth they’ve seen combined with changing customer behavior and expectations, Rally House had to take a leap and invest in retail tech to help fuel their growth and deliver the kind of experiences they want their customers to have.
Rally House previously had a legacy POS system in place that was difficult to use, frequently didn’t work as it should do (which resulted in countless IT support calls from store associates and managers), didn’t have omnichannel capabilities, and wasn’t integrated with their website or other stores.
In their words; it was very slow and very simple.
Dane Lickteig, Netsuite Architect and Administrator at Rally House, explains: “We have an item database of a million plus SKUs that we know by next year is going to be pushing two and half million.
“When I told the Sitoo team this, they didn’t blink an eye - I almost thought they hadn’t heard what I said - and this was so important because we needed a POS that had the ability to scale up to our entire inventory, handle instantaneous lookups, and be truly in sync with our source of truth which is NetSuite.
They needed to find a solution that would fit with their ambitious growth plans, be able to scale with them, and integrate with the NetSuite.
The Solution
After a lot of research, Rally House found that Sitoo not only had all of the features - and more - that they needed but it was also great value - specifically in terms of rollout and implementation.
Aaron Liebert, Rally House CEO, explained: “Most of the POS solutions we looked at were not out-of-the-box and the implementation fee was more than the subscription fee. We don’t have a team of 25 developers to work on a million dollar implementation over two years. We needed something quick, seamless, and hassle free. With Sitoo basically being 90% out-of-the-box and having all the omnichannel capabilities we were looking for, it was a no brainer.”
As a cloud-native solution using AWS platform, Sitoo provides Rally House with high-performance, secure, and scalable retail technology, that ensures efficient and cost-effective operations.
The Outcome
Alongside a fast, smooth implementation, Liebert says the feedback from the stores has been extremely positive.
“It’s a great product and our store associates love it - which is a big part why we wanted to get it to them quickly. It became clear early on that Sitoo has been built from the ground up to be quick and to serve a very specific purpose rather than being a solution that’s 20 years old that a vendor is attempting to make more modern.
“Another fantastic feature is Sitoo works offline so, if you have internet or power disruption, it continues to work. We’ve had a lot of storms this year and a store lost power for the whole weekend but we were still able to take sales because we had Sitoo.
“It brings all the features of our website to the POS which we didn’t have before. Previously, if we didn’t have an item in stock we’d help the customer find it through their phone but we can now do all of this for them through Sitoo. The customer can buy from any store and have them shipped anywhere they want. Our customer capture rate with Sitoo is more than double what it was with our old POS and getting more people to sign up for our marketing emails is a huge deal.
“The final thing I’d say is the people at Sitoo are great to work with. I was really impressed that they had answers to all our questions when we were going through our RFP. They know exactly what they are talking about and they understand retail.”
A MACH Mindset
As members of the MACH Alliance, we’ve loved seeing how Rally House has fully embraced the MACH Mindset and a best-of-breed approach.
Kristen Liebert, Vice President of Business Transformation and Treasurer at Rally House, explains: “The technology we were using wasn’t growing with us and was really holding us back. We needed products that could scale with us and handle the high volume we were starting to see. We wanted technology that was omnichannel and would take us into the future.
“With our legacy systems - because they were slow and unstable - our associates didn’t even try to get customer capture because it was one more thing that would slow down the transaction but now we’re seeing a 90% customer capture rate in many of our stores because the technology - and the way it integrates - is so seamless.
“Being able to pick exactly the right solution for your business and being able to be agile and adaptable to meet consumer demands as we go into the future is the absolute key to surviving in retail. If you’re behind the times and if you're not able to do the things that your competitor can do it will hold you back, so you need technology that can grow with you - and is responsive - rather than limiting you to proprietary legacy systems. This is what MACH technology does.
“The other awesome thing is, with the MACH philosophy, it’s a partnership with our suppliers like Sitoo because it’s solution focused and centered on the best way to solve the problems that are specific to our business.”
Tips
Have the things your customers want. The number one thing that’s killing retailers is being out of the things their customers want.
You can’t sell something to somebody if you don’t have it in stock.
Invest in technologies and systems that make it easier for your employees to run your stores and help your customers.
Put an IT infrastructure in place that can scale with you.
