Lark Store Case Story
The case story highlights the way in which visionary entrepreneurs got Pragmatic on-board for custom technology solutions. With Pragmatic, they could leverage Odoo’s business and enterprise applications capabilities to drive substantial gains.
The story follows their journey leading to a successful multi-million dollar acquisition by an Australian company.
The story ends with Pragmatic’s continued engagement that helped them to start and scale a new e-commerce business venture successfully.
UK based entrepreneurs Paul Matthews and Allison Jones had relocated from the UK to Daylesford, Victoria (Australia) a decade back. With low employment opportunities in Daylesford, it quickly became apparent that they needed to do something different to sustain and thrive.
This resulted in Lark – an online store that helped them achieve perfect work-life balance, thanks to the capable Odoo technology support from Pragmatic. The leading store that sells design led gifts and homewares was the ideal business launchpad they were looking to propel ahead.
Paul and Allison’s first tryst with Australian technology developers and freelancers wasn’t very fruitful. This is why they brought on-board the diverse skill set and industry experience of Pragmatic, which connected their existing Magento platform to Odoo ERP. Some of the key deliveries made by Pragmatic include –
The technology tie up with Pragmatic proved to be so successful that it grabbed attention of potential business suitors. This resulted in a successful acquisition in 2016. Here too, Pragmatic was actively involved in the below key business areas –
Lark’s online success led to the opening of a brick and mortar store in Ballarat, Australia. Here, customers could touch and feel the product before buying. There was another pop-up shop for the physical presence. Here Pragmatic set up the retail Point of Sale solution at these shops. But the trend showed that its customers were staunch loyalists online, which further boosted online revenues.
Setting up the inventory management and running smooth backend operations led to many challenges that needed immediate remediation.
Undoubtedly the biggest challenge in recent years has been the catching up done by the big department/chain stores to counter the e-commerce business threat—this has had a huge impact on gift and homewares stores and is one of the reasons that Paul and Allison decided to move out of this area.
To compete efficiently Pragmatic helped them to improve the UI/UX and overall shopping experience on their e-commerce website. The Lark site uses Magento for its front-end, and they have worked with web designers to translate their ideas into something that is not only attractive, but works very well for the end user. “There are a lot of online shopping websites out there that look terrific, but don’t function very well, and we’ve tried to get the balance between the two”
Pragmatic also helped bring down the high shipping cost with their Odoo expertise. This was done by integrating the e-commerce site with Australia Post eParcel
“It’s not hard to get sales, but it’s hard to service them,” says Paul. “For their back-end system, we had a custom program written that hooks up with eParcel and connects straight into that” Built for businesses that rely on sending out multiple packages every day, eParcel is an online freight management tool that helps by tracking deliveries and providing delivery notifications – making the shipping process more efficient. “We can run reports on average weights to whichever postcodes we’re servicing.
Being serial entrepreneurs, it was quickly evident that Paul and Allison were raring to go with a new venture after almost a decade with Lark. Being creative people, they loved the start-up phase of business. They had already operated a successful online business in the past with Pragmatic’s technology competencies. When they started with their new venture – Melt Bake and Party, Pragmatic was again the natural choice to provide technology expertise to operate the business and scale it up. Luckily, they were approached by a large Melbourne-based company looking for an established e-commerce brand and Lark was sold to them in 2016, leaving them free to launch Melt.
Australia had a proven track record in the versatility and range of sumptuous cakes and baked goods. Its increasing democratization meant that anyone could try their hand at baking and cake making without going for special courses or certifications. Melt supports this healthy trend and aims to be the premier baking supplies goods provider in Australia.
Again, Pragmatic was approached to strengthen the ongoing successful business relationship. It designed and developed their entire e-commerce website as well as backend delivery system to manage online orders using Magento and Odoo.