Retail Solutions making it big abroad

Tuam in Co Galway is more readily associated with being the birthplace of the band, The Saw Doctors than anything else. But this small town in the west is also the home of Retail Solutions, a long-established company that has a growing customer base in the United Kingdom and Australia.

The company, which provides electronic point of sale (EPOS) systems, primarily to convenience stores and forecourts, has not let location deter it from making it big overseas. In fact, Seamus Quinn, who co-founded the firm with Chris O'Neill in 1995, thinks that its base may even have helped the company.

“I don’t think that being based where we are has even hindered us and cannot think of one instance where we’d have been more likely to have landed a deal if we’d been in Dublin than in Tuam,” said Mr Quinn. “There are plenty of plus points to being outside a big city, such as lower staffing costs, a better commute and so on. Technology means we can remotely connect into any system anywhere at the world at any time so it really doesn’t matter where the company’s headquarters is.”

Retail Solutions began as a regular point-of-sale provider. Over the years, however, the firm has expanded to the point where it now offers tailor-made retail systems covering a wide number of front and back office functions, including cash control, stock, security, loyalty cards and self-scanning checkouts.

“Chris and I were both on the IT side of the EPOS industry for a number of years before we went out on our own.

“We noticed a shift in the market in terms of the technology being used, as up till then most businesses were still using cash registers with perhaps a scanner on them. The technology began to improve with the cost of hardware coming down to a price point where it could compete with registers,” said Mr Quinn. “At the same time retailers’ requirements began to increase so that just scanning an item to bring up the price wasn’t enough.

“Stores wanted to be able to offer more complex deals such as ‘buy two, get one free’ offers and so on and the new technology that we started selling was able to help them do just that and more,” he said.

The company’s customer base in Ireland now covers more than 850 sites with clients such as Londis, Shaws, Insomnia, BWG and the Barry Group all using the firm’s products.

Retail Solutions has also expanded rapidly overseas in recent years in both the UK and Australia. In 2014, it won two particularly significant contracts with the retail group CJ Lang & Sons – the master franchise holder for Spar in Scotland – and European Food Brokers, a Walsall-based cash and carry and wholesale drinks distributor best known for buying 37 Oddbins outlets from administrators in 2011.

The deals saw the company installing its systems at more than 300 sites in the UK. The company followed this up early last year with a €2 million contract to supply Appleby-Westward’s 151 UK Spar stores.

“We’ve found that companies in Britain aren’t really that hung up about who they are dealing with whereas in Ireland dealing with local firms is more important.

“For that reason we play the local card here but when we’re trying to win new business elsewhere we’ve come to realise that no one really cares that we’re based in a small town in the west of Ireland: it’s all about the quality of our products and services above everything else,” said Mr Quinn.

“We’re doing great business overseas at the moment and have growth significantly in the UK in particular over the last 12 months. Australia is also going really well for us after just ticking along for a while. We have also been looking at moving into the South African market but haven’t done so yet as the value of the rand is an issue right now,” he said.

Given that many Irish companies set their sights on continental Europe before tackling far-away markets such as Australia, it might seem surprising to some that Retail Solutions ended up there. However, as Mr Quinn points out, the recession was key to the move.

“There was a guy who worked with us who left and moved to Australia and through him we got into the market there but at a low level. However, the downturn happened here and at the same time we felt we were reaching market saturation in Ireland. At that point, we were mainly with convenience stores and forecourts and were already in many of them so we started casting our net wider.

“We did look at diverging into other industry sectors but ultimately felt that convenience was what we did best so that led us to step up our efforts in both Australia and also the UK,” said Mr Quinn.

Retail Solutions, which employs 37 people, wasn’t as badly hit by the recession as some companies but it still had to cut back and revise some of its processes.

“When the downturn came, it was like someone just turned off the tap on new business. Luckily, we were well established, with a big customer base and a regular income from maintenance contracts. With that and the addition of a few outside contracts, we were able to weather the storm,” he said.

“It’s all change now and we’re back to where we were in 2007 in terms of the business in Ireland. But the Australian market is really where the big opportunity is for us right now. There are a lot of exciting prospects for us there and so that’s where we’ll be mainly focusing our attention over the next few years,” Mr Quinn said.