By Baby is an Australian fine jewellery brand selling online and from its boutique on James Street in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. The boutique is where the considered end of the category happens – trying pieces on, sizing conversations, bespoke consultations, piercing appointments, collecting a one-off that has just come off the bench in the workshop behind the counter. Years of trading history sit behind it. The business has plans for further boutiques, which makes what the retail systems can carry a growth question rather than an operational one.
By Baby wanted better retail operations, and had a specific complaint underneath that. Retail Express cost too much to run, and the systems around it weren't robust enough for where the business is heading.
Then there was the growth plan. More boutiques means the retail stack has to be something you open a store on, not something you negotiate with each time. They also wanted a single view of a customer across online and in store, which two separate systems were never going to give them.
A POS migration is straightforward right up until you look at the data.
Years of trading sat inside Retail Express: customers, products, inventory, historical sales, gift cards, store credit, supplier and purchase order records. Getting it out is one problem. Deciding what should come across is the bigger one, and it isn't a decision an agency can make on its own – what's still accurate, what's duplicated, what needs consolidating, what gets deliberately left behind. That work happened with the By Baby team, record type by record type.
With one boutique there was no second site to rehearse on. Whatever went live had to work at the till on day one.
We treated it as a data project with a launch date attached.
Our Unified Commerce team worked through the migration decisions with By Baby before configuring anything – what moves, what gets consolidated, what stays behind – then ran dry runs against the real records rather than a sample.
We also decided what not to build. Multi-store stock visibility is the reflex configuration on a POS rollout, and By Baby has one boutique, so we left it out. Custom till tiles mattered more. The point of sale has to be fast for staff who are selling, not administering.
Our Unified Commerce team migrated By Baby from Retail Express to Shopify POS in two months, planning to launch. Customers, products, inventory, historical sales, gift cards, store credit, and supplier and purchase order data all came across intact.
Click and collect, returns and exchanges across channels, and staff discounting carried over. Custom POS tiles were built around the way the boutique actually sells. Stockie sits on top of Shopify POS for purchase ordering and inventory reporting. Launch day was run alongside the team in store, and staff adoption followed quickly.
The unified part is the point. An in-store customer now lands in the same lifecycle as an online one, and Customer Hub surfaces both. At the till, staff can see what someone has bought online, talk about the pieces they've saved, and pick up a conversation that started somewhere else. The manual keying of products and inventory that Retail Express demanded is gone with it. By Baby's own measure of the change isn't a number – their team is more empowered to be selling than managing systems.
