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Putra Muskita · · 5 min readCan Sociolla become the AWS for smart retail?
When Indonesian beauty retailer Sociolla opened its first offline store in 2019, one major frustration for the firm had to do with price tags.
Updating an online product’s price takes just a few keystrokes on a computer. But that is clearly not the case for brick-and-mortar stores. In places like Indonesia, most retailers still print price tags and stick them on shelves manually.
A Sociolla store in Jakarta / Photo credit: Tech in Asia
But that issue was just the tip of the iceberg for Sociolla. An end-to-end, integrated system – one that captures everything from warehousing to monitoring online and in-store sales – did not exist.
“Most point-of-sale systems for offline retail do not even synchronize between one store to another, much less with an online platform,” Christopher Madiam, the co-founder and president of Sociolla parent firm Social Bella, tells Tech in Asia in a recent interview.
(From left) Social Bella founders John Rasjid, Chrisanti Indiana, and Christopher Madiam / Photo credit: Social Bella
So the team decided to build their own customized back-end tech, which has become crucial to Sociolla’s rapid overseas growth in recent years. As a result, the company now uses IoT-powered digital price tags, which can be updated across all offline stores in real time. Its system also handles warehousing, finance, customer relationship management, and other integrations.
The company’s 70-member tech and product team built the system in house over two years amid the Covid-19 pandemic. While it is currently for internal use, some may compare this strategy to how Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), which for years has become the ecommerce giant’s most aggressive growth driver.
Complex operations
For customers, their Sociolla journey starts at the entrance of every store.
A screen asks them to check in on Soco, Social Bella’s beauty community app that features more than 4 million product reviews. Then, while browsing items, they can scan any product barcode and immediately find user reviews (personalized based on their traits like skin condition) listed in the Soco app.
If a customer prefers having a more human touch to their experience, they can talk to a beauty advisor, who will already know which products they will be most interested in based on their Soco data.
A Soco check-in screen / Photo credit: Tech in Asia
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