In 2005, Glass Onion Vintage was born and soon emerged as a game-changer in the vintage clothing industry. What began as a modest venture selling vintage clothing out of his grandmother’s coal shed in Barnsley has since evolved into a leading force in sustainable fashion.

Glass Onion's dedication to sustainability has not gone unnoticed, too, with the company winning awards for their efforts along the way. “We opened our first Sheffield store back in 2019, which has since won Best Indie Retailer in Sheffield and Best Vintage Retailer in Sheffield at a local Exposed Magazine award. And, now we've got a chain of three stores. We've also had accreditations from the British Fashion Council's winning their Change Makers Environmental Award, which is for the people that are trying to change the face of fashion with sustainability as the main focus,” John said.

“We recycle damaged and unwanted clothes and any offcuts. We transform them into something new that can be worn again. It's a new garment, but made from second hand clothing”, John continued. In 2023 alone, Glass Onion was able to save 8,000,000 litres of water by encouraging customers to choose second-hand clothing over new and also manufactured over 100,000 products in their remade factory and processed over 1.1 million garments, saving them from landfill.

When Glass Onion opened its first Sheffield store in November 2019, the business was still in its early stages of growing as a retail brand. The small store quickly became a local favourite, and the need for a more robust ePOS system became evident as customer demand increased. Lightspeed's cloud-based ePOS system provided the perfect solution, offering Glass Onion the tools necessary to allow them to grow and succeed at scale.

“Moving to Lightspeed was an obvious decision for Glass Onion to make. We'd stopped selling so much via eCommerce, and we were concentrating more on our brick and mortar operations. Lightspeed is leaps and bounds ahead of the system that we were using. It is very easy to set up, it is very easy to maintain and it's very easy to troubleshoot in the unlikely event anything were to go wrong,” John said. “It became very clear that Lightspeed was a much better fit for a brick and mortar retail operation than a bolt on to an online operation.”

One of the standout features for Glass Onion has been the ease with which they can access sales data at a moment's notice. “It's a really open framework, but the core of it is so simple and fantastic. I can find any information I need, whether I've got to leverage the API, or whether I can do it just from the built in reports, all that information is there and I can find it all. It’s an absolutely phenomenal product," John shared.

In an industry where trends and customer preferences can shift quickly, having access to detailed, real-time data is invaluable. Glass Onion’s shop managers at their three retail stores have found the built-in reports particularly useful. “Our shop managers at the three retail stores love it, too,” John continued. “They can see bestsellers per day, bestsellers per week, bestsellers last winter - they can find all the information that they need, and very quickly, too.”

Flexibility is crucial in any business. Which is why Lightspeed’s open API has proven to be an invaluable tool, enabling the team to integrate and customise their systems to meet their specific needs. "We've got three retail stores, but we also have an outlet for our events as well, which means we have around 18 registers, so our API thresholds are phenomenally high. But I've just never run into the rate limit on the API. And for me, that's especially great for developing purposes.” This robust API support has allowed Glass Onion to push the boundaries of what their ePOS system can do, facilitating everything from seamless event transactions to detailed inventory management across multiple locations.

With scalability front of mind, Glass Onion needed a system that would allow them to set-up quickly and onboard staff without a hassle. Luckily, Lightspeed was pretty simple to get started with.

“We went from one retail store to three retail stores. In December 2023, we only had one retail store. It's now July and we've got three. And, scaling it up, with Lightspeed, was incredibly easy. All our ePOS systems run off iPads so we connect the barcode scanner and barcode reader with Bluetooth,” John added.

"When we're opening a new store, I get all my hardware—card readers, barcode scanners—I just pack it all into my car, install it, and it literally takes one person about a day to set up an entire ePOS system for a store. It is astounding to me that it can just be done by one person so quickly,” John continued. This simplicity and efficiency have been critical as Glass Onion has expanded to multiple locations. Whether setting up in their Sheffield flagship or preparing for a new pop-up event, the ability to quickly and easily install and configure their ePOS has allowed the team to focus on what they do best: bringing unique, sustainable fashion to their customers.

“Lightspeed, as an out of the box product, is incredibly simple to use. It's phenomenal in its simplicity. It's just amazing at providing support to my users, I've got the tools necessary in Lightspeed to do that. And, it just works. It's a very simple system to use,” John concluded.