JB Hi-Fi continues the handwritten signs tradition while digitising their catalogue ticketing
JB Hi-Fi continues the handwritten signs tradition while digitising their catalogue ticketing
About JB Hi-Fi
JB Hi-Fi is one of Australia’s largest home entertainment retailers offering top products, great quality and value.
Retail Segment: Specialty, Electronics and home appliances
Company size: Mid market
Number of Stores: 196
Location: Australia
Store teams gained hundreds of hours per week to better serve customers
JB Hi-Fi is well known in Australia for their handwritten tickets and signs – it is part of their DNA. But when they run 1-3 catalogue events per week, it has become increasingly clear that the time being spent handwriting hundreds of tickets was not the best use of the store team’s time. JB Hi-Fi were already in the process of digitising their catalogue ticketing process through an internal solution when they came across Last Yard.
Handwriting tickets was taking JB Hi-Fi’s store teams approximately 5 hours per store for each catalogue event. With promotional pricing changing frequently, sometimes one to three times per week, this quickly adds up to 1000 – 2000 hours per week across all stores! Last Yard worked closely with the JB Hi-Fi team to transition them into an automated process, freeing up the store team to focus on more important things.
Today, all catalogue tickets are printed in-store while non-promotional/base prices continue to be handwritten. JB Hi-Fi’s decision to optimise manual, repetitive processes without compromising their brand identity is a smart move that benefits both the company and its customers, creating a win-win situation.
For each catalogue, head office sends through updates to each store based on the product ranges carried in each store, eliminating the need for store teams to sort through irrelevant products. Each store then receives the print-ready tickets in the Last Yard platform grouped by product category. Store teams just have to print, cut and hang – a process that now takes them 30 minutes instead of 5 hours for each catalogue event.
Automating catalogue pricing improves accuracy by minimising human error
Along with saving hundreds of hours handwriting tickets, JB Hi-Fi appreciates that pricing compliance has improved. When handwriting tickets one-by-one, it is inevitable that some tickets may not get updated on time or carry errors (e.g. product SKUs or promotion dates). By printing directly from Last Yard, JB Hi-Fi have peace of mind knowing that their customers are seeing the correct product & promotional information at the shelf edge.
JB Hi-Fi design their own tickets at scale with purpose-built Last Yard Studio
Before using Last Yard, JB Hi-Fi went through a period of using InDesign, a desktop publishing tool, to design ticket templates. This was a solution to stop the need for store staff to hand write hundreds of tickets. This was a step in the right direction, but it involved manual work for the graphic design team.
Designing print–ready tickets with Indesign involved a data merge from a spreadsheet with product data for each catalogue, and then resizing dozens of tickets to allocated space in the template. InDesign can not easily automate sizing, making InDesign a highly manual design tool that is not fit for purpose for retailers.
Last Yard Studio, part of the Last Yard platform, is built specifically for retail design. With the magnitude of variability in product data, retailers are empowered to create dynamic designs that automatically adapt to the data at hand, thus eliminating time spent on manual one-off design.
The graphic design team no longer wastes time uploading spreadsheets and manually correcting design errors in InDesign for each catalogue, and instead launch Last Yard Studio only when a new template design is required.