Former Olympic cyclist racing for gold with Cin7

Dunedin cyclist Kashi Leuchs competed in three Olympic games, placing 17th as a personal best, before quitting to start up his own company.

Owner of local cycling gear companies Black Seal and Bike Otago, Kashi says entering this market was easy due to his history in the sport.

But easy isn’t how he’d describe finding a software solution that catered for wholesale distribution, and retail and online stores. Kashi tried various systems but kept coming to deadends. “Cin7 managed to solve those dead-ends,” Kashi says.

Switching to Cin7 software six months ago, Kashi can now efficiently manage multiple outlets with the centralized system.

A Race to the Retail Forefront

Black Seal is a wholesale distribution outlet, soon to become a retail store too; while Bike Otago only has retail and online stores. Kashi imports stock from other countries, such as US brand Yeti Cycles.

Kashi was previously using Unleashed for Inventory and Vend for POS. But Unleashed didn’t offer a POS solution, which was fine for pure wholesale, except Kashi does retail too. Whereas, Cin7 was able to manage Kashi’s multiple entities, making it the best alternative.

Kashi also needed a system that integrated with Shopify, Xero and global companies he imports from. “If you use Unleashed, Vend and Shopify together, it doesn’t work.”

Past products led to double-handling

The nature of Kashi’s trade meant he required separate reports for the retail and wholesale stores “and that’s what Cin7 did really well.” With past software products, selling imported goods involved “double-selling”, which means staff had to first sell the product from one system to another, then from the latter system to the public. “It’s much less double-handling [with Cin7].”

Cin7’s ability to track products by Serial Number was crucial, because Black Seal and Bike Otago categorise and sell each bike based on its unique number. This was something the companies couldn’t do with Unleashed. “There was a list of about 100 things we needed to operate, it was just ticking boxes.”