City Gear, based in Memphis, TN, is a specialty retailer of footwear
and lifestyle apparel. City Gear operates 124 stores in 15 states. The
company is over 32 years old with a rich history of customer service
throughout the Southern and Midwestern US. The City Gear brand
was launched in 2000 as a reaction to the changing market place,
and has flourished over the last 15 years. City Gear strives to be
not only the destination store in regional malls, but the customers’
neighborhood store. This familiarity helps establish a deep loyalty at
an early age and has been key to the company’s continued success.
City Gear is once again poised to double in size over the next few
years, reaching levels they were previously unprepared for, in part
thanks to a more robust and sophisticated point of sale system.
Retail Information Systems
Helps Apparel Retailer Gear Up
For Growth
CASE STUDY
For more information, visit www.ris.com or call 800-347-3020
Customer: City Gear
Industry: Specialty Retail and
Lifestyle Footwear
Solution: Retail Pro Version 9
and HP RP5800 Retail Systems
In 2012, City Gear acquired a 14 store chain using Version 8 of Retail Pro retail management software from Retail
Pro International. “At the time, 71 of our own stores had another company’s retail software, and 14 stores had Retail
Pro Version 8,” explains Chris Flynn, City Gear’s CIO. “We needed to have all of our stores on a single system, and
to be on the latest version of the software so as to be ‘future-proof’ and ready to scale.”
Flynn and his colleagues compared Retail Pro Version 8 to an entirely different retail software offering, deciding that
the former was a better option despite the fact that it was not as feature-rich as the new Retail Pro Version 9. City
Gear’s management initially chose a small solutions partner to handle the project, but subsequently discovered
that the company could not support an enterprise IT implementation. More importantly, the team found that the
CASE STUDY
For more information, visit www.ris.com or call 800-347-3020
solutions provider would be unable to handle an
upgrade to Retail Pro Version 9, which had been
deemed necessary in order to support future growth.
Enter Retail Information Systems (RIS), a Houston,
Texas-based provider of point of sale software
and hardware consulting/implementation;
custom programming; project management; and
e-commerce, design, and integration services to
specialty retailers of all sizes and in all verticals.
When City Gear approached RIS, its systems were
not integrated. No connection to a home-grown
warehouse management system (WMS) existed,
and there was limited, if any, visibility of inventory
and point of sale information across the enterprise.
Moreover, Retail Pro Version 9 had only been
implemented in about 20 stores.
“It was a mess,” Flynn says. “Inventory was off.
Polling was off. Security hadn’t been set up. And
most stores were still on the other system—not
Retail Pro—when RIS took over.”
RIS began the engagement with a Primary Back
Office (PBO) project that included eliminating
impediments to the functionality of Retail Pro
Version 9 in those stores in which it had already
been installed. A replacement of the original UNIX
retail management solution with Retail Pro Version
9 with an embedded Oracle database was then
undertaken, along with a replacement of all existing
hardware with HP RP5800 Retail System hardware.
This process was “quick and successful,” Flynn
states, taking six to eight months from start to finish
(including a transition of inventory data from the
old system to the new one). With the transition now
complete, all inventory management can be handled
via the retail management software, which offers
such benefits as real-time views of inventory levels,
stock balancing, support for inter-store merchandise
transfers, in-transit inventory monitoring, automatic
inventory transfer recommendation (to jibe with in-
store merchandise levels), efficient physical inventory
counting, lot/serial number tracking, and item/style
performance tracking.
“Everything is now fully integrated,”
Flynn observes.
RIS has since been instrumental in enabling City
Gear to add other components to its technology
toolbox, thereby sharpening its competitive edge,
streamlining operations, and affording management
a tighter rein over business as a whole. For example,
a custom integration enables daily store operations
metrics to “flow” into Retail Pro Version 9, in turn
generating actionable automated reports each day.
A “Vendor Connect” connection with Nike creates
“endless aisles,” yielding customers access to five
million SKUs available from that vendor, even if they
are not on the shelves. This connection also supports
an extensive product offering in-store and online.
From services, to support, to training, our
experience with RIS has been a highly positive
one,” concludes Michael Longo, City Gear’s
owner and CEO. “With this partner and everything
they bring to the table, we’re poised to grow with
few or no obstacles.
