Success Stories : Home Furnishings - Athena

Athena choose the MR

With its combination of film posters, limited edition prints, original works, cards and objets d’art, Athena provides the perfect solution for anyone looking for the finishing touches to their home decorating project. The brand has been rejuvenated, following a troubled spell in the 1990s, and there are now 32 Athena stores across the country, run on a franchise basis.

According to Simon Coates, a director of 18 Athena franchises, one of the major challenges is how to respond quickly to constantly changing customer tastes, in an environment where best-selling lines are frequently changing. Athena has no central warehouse and the distribution chain is quite complex as the company buys from a number of different suppliers from all parts of the world. To ensure stock reflects store customer profile, the franchise-holders need to have accurate sales and stock information at its fingertips.

With this objective in mind, 14 franchises within Simon Coates’ group have now invested in FuturaERS retail management software from Box business partner Futura, the Berkshire-based solution provider.

The solution runs on the Epson MR-800 terminals supplied by Box Technologies and is based on a powerful Intel processor to ensure fast transaction processing. The system’s modular and open design also allows Athena complete flexibility in how they configure the Point of Sale, maximising the available counter space.

Simon Coates commented: “It’s been a huge bonus to have accurate sales data provided by the FuturaERS solution and this has proved enormously helpful when making buying decisions. Overall, the MR-800s have been easy to use and look good but the key as far as we were concerned has been reliability – since installing the systems, we have experienced next to no downtime. We now plan to extend the rollout to the other four Athena stores within my group.”

Box Technologies are the only UK distributor for Epson systems products. Please use the following link for more information on this range of Epson products: all Epson products