With passionate supporters from one half of Glasgow, Rangers FC is among the leading clubs in the UK, and there is no shortage of fans prepared to invest in scarves, replica kits and other merchandise on match days.

“Unlike other retailers, who experience a surge in sales at Christmas, our system had to cope with significant volume sales on a regular basis,” explained Glasgow Rangers’ Retail Director, Gerry Carey. “In other words, our hardware has to be robust enough to withstand intensive use during every home fixture when our stadium superstore could welcome as many as 6,000 fans through the door.”

With this level of demand, it is hardly surprising that Rangers has chosen to expand its merchandising operation. Four new retail outlets have been opened in the last four years and sales turnover has rocketed from £3.5million a few seasons ago to £12million today. Now the club is to begin manufacture, wholesale and retail of ‘Gers’ merchandise, in order to take control of its own distribution and branding.

Supporting this greatly enlarged operation is a complete management solution from Scottish reseller, Central Peripherals, which can be expanded to give Rangers complete control of all its sales channels, including retail, mail order and wholesale distribution to some 20-30 retailers.

The first stage in the project took place a year ago, when Rangers’ nine retail outlets - one at the Ibrox stadium, two in the city centre, one in Edinburgh, three provincial stores and two in Belfast - were equipped with an advanced EPoS solution, running Windows-based Gemini Figure software.

In addition to providing the club with comprehensive management and analysis reports, the easy to use system enables operators to give a faster service, even at peak times. For example, the various club discounts are now calculated automatically; detailed stock information is available at the users’ fingertips; while receipts can be produced almost instantly thanks to Epson TM-T88II thermal printers. Naturally, these have already proved a great success with Gerry Carey: “The Epson printers are much faster than our old dot matrix ones,” he noted, “and more importantly, I can’t recall any maintenance issues.”