Our Business:

WoodWinters are purveyors of fine wines and spirits with a mission to help customers drink better wine and connect with like-minded wine drinkers. We offer retail wine as well as investments in bonded wine, to sell or enjoy at a later date; doing all we can to make our service friendly and personal, encouraging fun and adventure in enjoying wine.

Challenges Faced:

Our system had a clear lack of functionality. It was a package someone said could be adapted, but these things never work like they should. We have very specific industry needs, including stock movements and duty payments, classifications of wine and such. It wasn’t bespoke enough to manage customer sales data, or search product styles, origins, trends and habits, or other key factors. We were bending to a poorly designed system.

Why Cloud Street:

We were eager to find a better solution for the particular intricacies of what we do, but we had found the available off-the-shelf solutions were not up to it. Cloud Street were capable of creating exactly what we needed in a way that didn’t seem to exist in the market yet.

Working with Cloud Street:

We went on a journey together. They learned our processes, things we wanted the system to do and how we needed them done. There was a feeling we were all on the same team. We’re really happy with what we have now, and we’re still working together to develop the system more for the future.

Challenge Resolution:

It’s a very in-depth system, able to report on a lot of areas which our last system was not. Most shop software runs with a point of sale focus with stock lying behind it, but we needed the opposite. We move stock internationally, store stock in multiple locations, calculate duty, manage duty paid retail stock and untaxed bond investment stock, all in the same system. Our focus is on complex stock handling, with point of sale as a secondary focus. This is something we have only managed to find in our own bespoke system. It has given us complete control over our reporting, our stock, our sales, everything.

Business Impact:

Stock information is now shared so we can collaborate and save time. It also allows us to report quickly and accurately, and to order and direct resources more effectively. We can be objective now, on a fairly subjective product; seeing what customers like in what they actually buy. On the investment side, we can track all wine held in bond and easily ‘redeem’ this wine later as the system can calculate tax exactly as the government does.

Added Client Value:

Full stock control along with easy, accurate reporting, ensures the products our customers want are always in stock in great enough quantity. At the point of sale, the new system is able to handle such a weight of data that we can store and automatically send tasting notes to customers as soon as they buy a wine, along with their invoice. In fact, the data we put into the system automatically becomes the content for our retail website, so we only have to enter it once. This way our online customers can be as informed and confident as those who visit the store. It’s a very smart end of sale process.

Cloud Street in a Nanobyte:

Thorough, patient and helpful.