We have new friends…
…and they are one of the most exciting and fastest-growing retail sports brands in the USA.
Rally House has chosen Sitoo to power their 200 stores - and counting - across the country.
Rally House is a specialty sports store that prides itself in its ability to offer an expansive selection of apparel, gifts, home decor and other types of merchandise while representing local NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB, NFL and MLS teams. They are the ‘go to’ store for localized sporting goods with an immense range of products and assortments. Their mission is to provide customers with the best shopping experience possible while maintaining exceptional service from the moment someone steps into their stores.
Rally House began life over thirty years ago and was a dream hatched by Tim and Mabel "Peg" Liebert. Originally selling goods from their basement, it wasn’t long before they opened their first Kansas store and began specializing in selling sporting goods from the state’s sporting teams.
Soon one store became three and, eighteen years after they began, they had five stores across Kansas. In 2009, Tim and Peg’s son, Aaron Liebert, joined the company as CEO and it was from here that their expansion and growth picked up significant pace.
“We knew there was nothing unique about Kansas sports compared to say Texas sports or Philadelphia stores,” says Aaron Liebert. “So, after I joined the company, we began expanding. We started with Texas - because Texans love Texas and they love their sport - then we opened up in Philadelphia and we’ve been at it ever since. I still tell my friends I sell t-shirts but by the end of this year we’ll have 200 stores and we want to delight every single customer that comes into any one of these stores.”
As an independent, family-run business Rally House have always been particular about how and where they spend their money. Without any investment capital or large coffers to draw on, spending for the sake of spending has never been an option.
Yet, with the level of growth they’ve seen combined with changing customer behavior and expectations, Rally House had to take a leap and invest in retail tech to help fuel their growth and deliver the kind of experiences they want their customers to have.
Aaron Liebert explains: “We had a legacy POS system in place that wasn’t omnichannel and wasn’t integrated with our website or with our other stores. It was a simple and slow POS. We attempted to upgrade to a solution that was more modern and iOS based but still very affordable. But that didn’t work either. So we knew we needed to take a leap and invest in a sophisticated, bells and whistles, POS solution.
“After a lot of research, we found Sitoo not only had all of the features - and more - that we needed but it was also great value - specifically in terms of rollout and implementation. Most of the POS solutions we looked at were not out-of-the-box and the implementation fee was more than the subscription fee. We don’t have a team of 25 developers to work on a million dollar implementation over two years. We needed something quick, seamless, and hassle free.
“With Sitoo basically being 90% out-of-the-box and having all the omnichannel capabilities we were looking for, it was a no brainer. And once we decided we moved quickly, The Sitoo team flew over to see us for a week in Kansas, we signed the contract in March and we’ll be live in all our stores by the end of August. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a company with over 100 stores that would be able to roll out the solution as quickly as we did.”
Alongside a fast, smooth implementation, Liebert says the feedback from the stores already up and running has been extremely positive.
“Firstly, the technical team that is installing it haven’t had to contact Sitoo support once,” he says. “Secondly, it’s a great product and our store associates love it - which is a big part why we wanted to get it to them quickly. It became clear early on that Sitoo has been built from the ground up to be quick and to serve a very specific purpose rather than being a solution that’s 20 years old that a vendor is attempting to make more modern.
“Another fantastic feature is Sitoo works offline so, if you have internet or power disruption, it continues to work. We’ve had a lot of storms this year and a store lost power for the whole weekend but we were still able to take sales because we had Sitoo.
“It brings all the features of our website to the POS which we didn’t have before. Previously, if we didn’t have an item in stock we’d help the customer find it through their phone but we can now do all of this for them through Sitoo. The customer can buy from any store and have them shipped anywhere they want. Our customer capture rate with Sitoo is more than double what it was with our old POS and getting more people to sign up for our marketing emails is a huge deal.
“The final thing I’d say is the people at Sitoo are great to work with. I was really impressed that they had answers to all our questions when we were going through our RFP. They know exactly what they were talking about and they understand retail. We’re delighted to be their first US customer and if they take the approach they’ve taken with us, there’s going to be a lot of very, very happy people out there.”
Jens Levin, Sitoo co-founder and CEO, believes this heralds the start of even bigger things for both companies.
“The success and growth Rally House has seen in the past decade has been nothing short of incredible,” he says. “For our first US customer, we couldn’t have hoped to work with a better business. Like us, they are ‘go getters’ and they make great things happen. It feels like a perfect fit and we are over the moon to be part of the Rally House story - the momentum behind them is becoming a force of nature and they have a huge future in front of them.”
