Larry Fossee started his career with a major retail chain out of Memphis, Tennessee. After 22 years in the department store arena, he partnered with his wife Nancy to start their own upscale women’s shoe store. The Fossees have added 2 more stores to their flagship location in Dallas, Texas and employ 25 people. For over 17 years, Fossee’s Designer Shoes has successfully competed with the department store giants such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue through effective marketing and great service.

We asked the Fossees to tell us more about their winning combination.

Nancy: We have shoes, handbags, jewelry, and gift items. Our customers are basically between 30 to 65 years old. Since we carry better merchandise we really relate to customers with higher incomes.

How long have you used Retail Pro ?

Larry: About 3 years.

What did you use prior to Retail Pro for your point of sale?

Larry: A legal pad! We used the whole hand marking system.

Nancy: Three years before we got Retail Pro, we had customers fill out the cards at the desk and then we had just the regular computer that had a database file. But it was so much double work because we’d sell to the customer then put her information in on an entirely different system.

How did you manage your inventory before Retail Pro?

Larry: We did that on legal pad too. When you’re a small independent retailer, nailing down every stock number and tracking everything takes more time than it does to actually run your store. That’s one of the things that Retail Pro has done for us. Retail Pro puts the sales in and takes it out of the inventory. Compared to the national industry average of being off by 3%, we’ve probably got it down to less than 0.5%.

Why did you decide on Retail Pro?

Larry: We knew we wanted a point of sale system. It had gotten to a point where our inventory became strange to us. We looked at 5 different systems and wanted one that was retail-related. By that, I mean a system that took into consideration that this is going to be used at a retail level. Retail Pro is built from the salesperson on the floor on up. It’s more simplified than the other systems we considered.

How has Retail Pro helped you understand your customers?

Larry: We’ve been able to build a clientele list of customers over the past 3 years because of Retail Pro. Everything goes in automatically and the information that we get out of Retail Pro allows us to sell 15% to 20% of certain specialized merchandise or sizes before we ever get them on the floor. Without that feature, we’d sit in front of a little card machine hoping that the sales person could remember the information. We thought we knew our customers. But we’ve learned so much about them since putting in the system. Before Retail Pro, our merchandising was based on feeling. Even though we had figures that we worked with, when a customer walked in and said, ‘I’m the best customer you have,’ we weren’t sure. Now I can find out within 60 seconds, because Retail Pro shows me what she’s bought and if she is, in fact our best customer.

Nancy: Our customers really like our ability to update their store credit on our computers. They don’t need to keep up with it because their information is right there at the register. If she forgets her receipt, we can look it all up on Retail Pro. That’s very convenient, especially for our better customers.

How has Retail Pro assisted in controlling your inventory?

Larry: With Retail Pro, we can learn anything in the world that we want to know about our inventory. What is the selling pattern within each vendor? How many red items have we sold? How many blue ones, how many gray ones? Before Retail Pro finding those things out was so time consuming that I just didn’t do it. It’s amazing the depth that you can go in getting the information. If you want to go all the way to the bottom of your inventory and find out every single facet of it, you can. It’s wonderful to be able to finally see whether you’re making money with a manufacturer or not.

Nancy: It was a real experience using Retail Pro on the jewelry items because the tags were a lot smaller. But it works very well because we’re able to track those items with the line number. Reordering is much easier and we now know what colors we’re selling, even at the out of town stores.

What are your plans for the future?

Larry: From an expansion standpoint, we are going to require a working warehouse. Once we have more than 3 stores we won’t be able to do warehousing within the stores. Texas offers large enough demographics that once we put a store in a city, we can accommodate the whole city. There are other places like Austin and San Antonio, where we could put one of our stores and it would work very well. In the next 2 or 3 years, we look to have 2 or 3 more stores.

How has Retail Pro helped you manage your stores?

Larry: It’s been a total transition because we did everything by hand. All of the sudden we have Retail Pro to do it all. We now have the ability to go out on the floor and make more sales. That’s the main thing we wanted to do: get out of the office and get out on the sales floor!

REPORTS & ANALYSIS

"Everything goes in automatically and the information that we get out of Retail Pro allows us to sell 15% to 20% of certain specialized merchandise or sizes before we ever get them on the floor.”