The Conran Shop has a special place in the affections of style gurus, everywhere. Combining inspirational design with practical innovation, it’s the perfect place to find a distinctive vase, armchair or fabric to provide that elusive finishing touch to any room.

While Terence Conran, who opened the first Conran Shop in Fulham Road in 1973, is generally regarded as a British success story, the business he founded has since expanded into Europe, North America and Asia and has a total of nine stores, as well as a growing contracts business. Inevitably, this level of growth posed significant operational challenges to the company, which sought to enhance its control by investing in a new business management system from Futura, for its European stores.

The Futura solution is a fully integrated Windows-based system, which gives control of the business from EPoS through all the buying and merchandising functions to accounting. It includes range and branch planning, sales, stock and intake management, initial allocations, replenishments and transfers, price and margin control, data warehousing, customer relationship management and user-defined performance reporting.

At the point of sale, the system uses fast Epson TM-T88II thermal receipt printers to further enhance the speed and efficiency of each sales transaction, helping each Conran Store to provide consistently high standards of service. In addition, the system is capable of handling multiple currencies and is available in six languages, enabling each store to offer the same level of service, no matter where it is located on the Continent.

Now live in all six European Conran Shops, the Futura solution has been warmly welcomed by IT Manager, Lewis Graham: “When we sought a new system, we recognised that a number of strategic issues had to be addressed,” he reflected. “The solution had to cover all our business processes, plus it had to offer complete uniformity across different countries.

“As a comparatively small company we needed a stand-alone system with a large installed base, continual development and an established support infrastructure” he continued. “The Futura European Retail System fulfils all our current business needs and will support our future aspirations, utilising the appropriate language in each country and providing local, native speaker support for our staff.”