In September 2012, a cloud-based customer, sales and inventory management tool for small retailers was launched in a public beta. Its creators, one of whom was once a small fashion retailer himself, had set their sights on developing a backend systems that would be cost-effective for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
Built for SMEs that want to move off spreadsheets but can't afford enterprise solutions, the Trade Geckoplatform was spotted by investors at the JFDI-Innov8 2012 Bootcamp Asia four months earlier. By December of that year, investors include WaveMaker Labs, Golden Gate Ventures, and the Singapore National Research Foundation.
"Running my clothing label was exciting and I enjoyed it a lot. But we grew very fast and the amount of administration quickly overwhelmed us," said Carl Thompson, who founded the company with brothers Cameron and Bradley Priest. "I couldn't find a solution to pull it all together. Spreadsheets and manual data processing turned into an absolute nightmare."
Taking this business lesson to heart, the trio built a system that aims to take away the pain points of business administration - from invoicing to inventory to sales management to customer analytics - and make it more user friendly in a social and engaging way.
"Today, because of the iPhone, people are used to having things that are fun to work. Software has made life easier," Cameron Priest, now CEO of the company, told a forum for SMEs organized by New Leaf Ventures in Manila.
The nightmare that Thompson experienced managing a fashion label has been put to good use to create a solution that has since helped many retailers in Singapore and New Zealand evade the same nightmare.
Naturally, Philippine retailers were drawn to the idea of eventually moving off from using spreadsheets to a more high-tech way of managing a business, minus the cost of a full-scale enterprise solution.