Home to millions of sheep, incredible wine, and stunning landscapes , New Zealand is also home to Outside Sports, an adventure retailer that’s slaying the competition, thanks to its passion for the great outdoors and its decision to tap Cin7 as its inventory management system.
In 1995, outdoor enthusiasts John and Judy Knight founded Outside Sports in Queenstown, New Zealand, with their business partner, Craig Wanty. What started out as a single brick-and-mortar store morphed into four physical stores in New Zealand and a thriving online presence that reaches customers in Australia and around the world.
Like a double black diamond ski run, Outdoor Sport’s 30-year history has a few twists and turns, including multiple relocations of its flagship store, several ownership changes, new mergers, and an expanding e-commerce presence. During that time, Outside Sports has been successfully selling and renting world-class outdoor adventure gear and apparel for skiing, snowboarding, biking, hiking, camping, mountaineering, fishing, and water sports. It also offers repair and maintenance services and freely shares expert advice and insights.
According to Co-Owner and General Manager Darren Grimmett, it’s been a recipe for success since day one.
“There’s always been steady growth, though we had a setback in COVID when tourism stopped. Now that the world is moving again, we’ve been rapidly growing.”
It’s a success story for the books, but one challenge was stopping Outside Sports from doing a complete victory lap: its inventory management technology.
For Outside Sports, the crux of its climb to success was its inventory and POS system, Lightspeed. Darren says, “It wasn’t enough in terms of inventory management for us. There were some big holes in it.”
The team struggled with stock write offs and permissions, which, according to Darren, Lightspeed had (and still has) no intention of fixing. So, the Outside Sports team decided to fix it themselves by replacing Lightspeed with a new inventory management solution.
Their choice? Cin7.
“We knew about Cin7 from suppliers that were using it in New Zealand. We first tried Cin7 Core, but we quickly found out that we needed to switch to Cin7 Omni. That’s been a game changer for us.”
With the help of CNZ Consultant, an Auckland-based firm that assists businesses in implementing cloud-based inventory management systems, and consultant Chris Saju, Outside Sports transitioned from Cin7 Core to Cin7 Omni in March 2025. Chris consulted with the Outside Sports team, helped onboard their stock, coached them on the settings, and trained the team to use the system using videos he created.
His hard work paid off, turning what could have been a marathon implementation into a three to four week process. “Chris understood from a user perspective rather than from an IT perspective what we needed. Now, if there’s an issue, we contact him or the CNZ team, and they get back to us usually within 24 hours. It’s been a good fit.”
Making the change from Lightspeed to Cin7 Omni was an epic adventure, and Outside Sports reaped more than a few benefits from it. Cin7 makes it possible for the sports outfitter to integrate with its much-needed third-party applications (e.g., HubTiger to run their workshop, Bike Rental Manager (BRM) for their rentals, and Shopify, which they use for their online store) all in one solution.
They can also easily integrate with Xero for their critical accounting needs.
“Integrating with Xero through Cin7 has been another game changer for us. We were previously making assumptions, but now, we’re much more accurate.”
But the benefits don’t stop there. With Cin7, Outside Sports can now put their purchase orders into the system, which they couldn’t do before. Benji Knight, the buyer for Outside Sports, says, “It all works a lot easier for us on our end than the old system, where we just didn’t really have access to the tools to make purchase orders work smoothly.”
For Giovanni Bertoloni, Systems and Operations Manager, having improved visibility into their inventory and intuitive reporting is helping their forecasting be as smooth as a freshly groomed ski run.
“Having all this stock information and reporting in front of us, like Cin7’s sell-through report, that we can create different layouts with and customize, is making a lot of difference,” he says. “It’s helping us forecast and plan for the future. We can very easily see the quantities coming from now until the next 12 months.”
Benji adds, “Being able to see all of our inventory at a glance basically just lets us have so much more control over the future and knowing that the plans we’re making are actually correct because everything is correct in the system. No guesswork involved!”
Cin7’s sportiness is also seen in its POS system, which Outside Sports is using to simplify its financial reporting, and with Cin7’s WMS system, which is streamlining Outside Sports’ inventory management processes. Darren has been able to cut down on staffing requirements in each store, letting the business do more with fewer people, including receiving the right items in the right quantities.
Those access concerns they had with Lightspeed? They don’t exist with Cin7.
“We can manage how the stock has been received and what codes the staff are using while making sure the prices are correct, because some products can be discounted and some may be to a wholesale customer, so there’s a lot of variables we can now manage accurately,” says Darren.
And Barbara Cisternino, Commerce and Marketing Manager, points to one more benefit that Cin7 delivers: the ability to work with multiple currencies. “Now we are using New Zealand dollars and Australian dollars on our sales orders, and it’s really helpful for us. We couldn’t do it before.”
Before Cin7 Omni, Darren says life was miserable, but after?
“We’re all smiling now because it’s totally different. Omni is giving us the tools to grow.”
One of those tools is Cin7’s automation bots. They empower the team to auto-transfer stock between their larger and smaller stores if stock is needed without having to ship directly from the supplier.
With these amazing, sky-is-the-limit benefits, Darren says he would definitely recommend Cin7 to other product businesses. In fact, he’s planning to lean on Cin7 to help make his future growth plans, like opening a brick-and-mortar store in the Land Down Under, growing their existing stores over the next 12 months, and taking advantage of Cin7’s APIs to dropship for other businesses, come to fruition.
“With Cin7, there’s a lot of reports we didn’t have before, and we’re hopefully adding ForesightAI in the future. Cin7 works with all our systems, is flexible, and provides good data, so it will help us grow moving forward.”