Good taste runs in the family for Elisabeth Emory. Her parents, Bob and Nita Emory, created BLACKLION Home Decor — a prominent home decor and furniture center in Charlotte, NC — back in 1996 with a vision to bring a variety of home decor vendors together under one roof.
“My family started the business to give small business owners an opportunity to have a chance to play on a retail scale, where maybe they wouldn’t have necessarily been able to afford the overhead otherwise,” the Elisabeth said. It’s a win-win for retailers and consumers.
By the time Elisabeth moved to Chicago to study art and design at The Art Institute of Chicago, her parents were itching for retirement. Meanwhile, Elisabeth and her husband came across the ideal new location for BLACKLION Home Decor in Chicago. “So we just decided, let’s bring BLACKLION Home Decor to Chicago and give them a little taste of what we’ve been able to give the south all of these years, in an area that really needs investment from small businesses,” Elisabeth said.
Ultimately, Nita and Bob jumped at the opportunity to sell the family business in Charlotte — and with that, the next chapter of BLACKLION Home Decor began in the Midwest. Elisabeth took the heart of BLACKLION Home Decor with her to Chicago while modernizing it with the help of Square.
Managing thousands of SKUs with only a few employees
Chicago’s BLACKLION Home Decor boasts over 10,000 SKUs with only a few employees to manage it. The business needed an affordable and effective way to track and manage its inventory without having to hire more employees.
The most valuable thing that we’ve done in moving our business to Chicago has been developing a relationship with Square. The reason that I chose Square was specifically for the inventory management aspect of it.”
Elisabeth Emory → Owner of BLACKLION Home Decor
The original Charlotte business had fewer SKUs, and everything was done manually. Bob and Nita even had a proprietary consignment POS system built specifically for their stores. But Elisabeth was looking for an easier way to run her entire business on a cloud and app based POS system. She chose Square because of the inventory management capabilities she was looking for, including barcode scanning to speed up checkout and get items on the floor faster, and an intuitive interface that’s easy for her employees of all technical abilities to learn and use.
“I wanted to be able to bring the same scale of brands and product offerings in different categories as the store in Charlotte, but we would have to have multiple full-time people managing this many SKUs if we were doing it manually. That’s why I chose Square,” Elisabeth said.
Running the 10,000 square foot store with her lean team of only two full-time and a couple of part-time employees is no small feat — and Elisabeth says she couldn’t do it as easily without Square.
Making checkout a breeze for customers and employees
Elisabeth wanted to run a profitable business while only staying open just three days a week. Streamlining heavy foot traffic and having a smooth checkout process during her store’s open days are key.
The solution? BLACKLION Home Decor uses two Square Registers to quickly check out customers. They’re able to forecast sales volume and the subsequent required staff needed for their open days using Square Analytics.
Their customers and employees both love the ease of use when it comes to payment options. “Everybody’s able to use whatever type of payment they need, which has been amazing for us,” Elisabeth said. “The fact that consumers can walk up in just one tap or one touch, or they click their Apple Watch or whatever they’re checking out with, and they can be in and out in a few minutes — it’s game-changing. It certainly keeps us from having a line in a smaller space where we really just don’t have the room to do that.”
A one-stop-shop to streamline operations and administrative tasks
Maintaining a lean team has been instrumental to BLACKLION Home Decor’s success. The unique business not only needed a technology solution that would simplify complex inventory management, but one that could also manage her employees within the same platform.
I manage payroll through Square now, which I absolutely love. It basically gives me a one-stop shop to be able to take away a lot of the headache of the day-to-day administrative tasks.”
Elisabeth Emory → Owner of BLACKLION Home Decor
The original BLACKLION Home Decor needed more employees without the help of an integrated technology partner. With the help of one other employee, Elisabeth is able to manage all of the inventory and administrative tasks from one platform — and she’s seen dramatic cost savings in doing so.
It’s been easy to get employees of all technological abilities up to speed on the POS system too. “Square is intuitive. People understand it. It’s as simple as using a smartphone, whether you use an Apple or an Android, it’s got the kind of interface that pretty much anybody can figure out how to do,” Elisabeth said.
Insights that inform smarter business decisions
While the retail environment has been challenging for many businesses during the last couple of years, BLACKLION Home Decor has been able to grow its customer base and sales despite a tough economy. Elisabeth uses sales and inventory data to understand what products are selling, to track inventory levels so she doesn’t over- or under-stock , and to plan what’s next for her business.
“One of the most exciting things that we didn’t have before but that Square has been able to give us is higher-level reporting: which categories are selling and where our inventory levels are, whether it’s day-over-day, week-over-week, month-over-month, or year-over-year.” she says.
Having historical and realtime insights available at their fingertips, the BLACKLION Home Decor team is able to make smarter decisions around product pricing, promotions, and re-stocking to avoid missing out on sales.
Filling a void the community craves
In a time when everyone yearns for next-level shopping experiences, Elisabeth wants to breathe new life into experiential retail. “In the gift and home furnishing space, there’s still a desire for consumers to be able to see, sit on the furniture, go into an interesting store and see all of the ideas for display of how you might do things in your own home,” she said. “We wanted to bring the magic of that back to our neighborhood. I think it’s something we’re really missing here.”
Looking forward, BLACKLION Home Decor has big plans for the future in continuing its family legacy. The business will continue growing beyond its home and decor offerings while honoring Chicago’s rich roots, including an upstairs museum that’s an ode to Chicago’s iconic brands and design history. “There’s lots of fun things, entrepreneurial things happening in this building,” Elisabeth said. “We’re excited to bring Square along for the ride.”
