The problem

Hardy Brothers has been trading since 1853 with its Melbourne store still on Collins Street, where the brand has operated since the years after the Second World War. Today, Hardy Brothers is part of the Wallace Bishop Group, a fourth-generation family-owned jeweller that acquired the business in 1997.

That heritage sat on top of a platform that couldn't keep up with it. Each of the five stores ran its own instance of the old POS, stitched together by backend processes that were supposed to sync everything into one picture. They didn't, reliably. Data dropped out. Updates were slow. Click and collect wasn't possible. Integrated gift cards were out of reach.
None of it was new: the system had been chosen over a decade earlier, when there simply weren't better options for pulling retail data into one place.

The business had already tried to fix it internally, investing real time trying to stabilise and join up the data. It didn't hold. The system was too old for a patch to last.

The gap showed up everywhere. On the floor, staff couldn't always tell if the person in front of them was a loyal customer who'd shopped in another city, which matters when your clientele are used to being recognised. Marketing had no single view of who was buying what, or where. IT was stuck maintaining a system that made every small change hard.