CASE STUDY: Retail Directions
In 1993, Melbourne company Retail Directions began as a consulting firm to provide advice to retailers, but with backgrounds in retail technology, the principals soon found themselves fielding questions about which system to use. Recognising that existing systems weren’t meeting customer needs, they decided to build their own.
“We started to work with a few larger retailers saying ‘if that’s what you need, if you provide the funding, we will construct it’,” recalls Andrew Gorecki, managing director. “Then worked with Jeanswest and built them a national management logistics system.”
Jeanswest took Retail Directions national and into New Zealand. The software company then packaged it for market. After successfully installing a point-of-sale system for The Body Shop Australia, operations in other countries were keen to follow suit, which saw export via Australian subsidiaries of international brands.
Early contact with New Zealand taught them valuable lessons on how other tax systems worked. The Body Shop throughout Europe showed them how to support multiple currencies and foreign languages.
However, the USA had a few additional complexities. “They have four layers of tax, very complex. Then we discovered the dates are different [month first] and the printers are different [US letter size] so we had to fix that too,” explains Gorecki. “Systems need to be localised as we go from market to market.”
He nominates the hardest part of exporting as installation—around 1,000 hours of engineering—which means plenty of travel. But afterwards it’s managed remotely, so the distance isn’t prohibitive, he says. “From day one we were forced to manage things remotely. We already have the long distance business paradigm.”
Retail Directions now provides retail solutions to about 70 retail brands, around 6,500 cash registers globally. And not all of their clients took them overseas; some were secured through international tenders. “There are newsletters, web pages, consultants that have that information. By knowing the industry, it helps us hear about tenders,” says Gorecki.
He suggests software businesses wishing to export should find an entry point, either through existing customers or by hiring someone in-country: “In England we needed a business development manager who was local, already connected, had a reputation and could open doors to save you two years of effort. You need someone who is 100 percent committed to you—not a partner or agent—you need to hire them. The key is to understand the local market.”
