FEATURE CUSTOMER

Meet the Quark Group

Albert Krahn, President, and Dave Quark, Chairman of The Quark Group, operate a chain of 13 retail footwear stores in major malls in Canada. These include Quarks, Urban Trail, West Point, and Nats.

They carry an array of popular name brands such as Birkenstock, Timberland, The North Face, and Rockport. They have been improving their business results for over eight years by using Infocorp's retail solutions. Understand Their Choice The Quark Group was looking for a PC-driven retail system that would be user-friendly, dependable, have great inventory control and cash register capabilities, and especially have a strong support system after the installation. They discovered Infocorp at a trade show held in Las Vegas. "We traveled 2500 miles to look for a software provider, only to find a great company that we could have found in our own backyard" joked Albert.

Explore the Solution
Initially, they went live in their office and stores over a period of one month. This was from the time of training and installation to complete installation. These included at least eight locations and since then have added five new locations in the past six years.

According to Albert Krahn, the uniqueness of the installation has been "…the total commitment of Infocorp to make this start-up as seamless as possible. A new system installation can be a real hassle; however ours went very well because of the support we received from the Infocorp staff."

Examine the Benefits
Albert Krahn described the success his chain has realized with Infocorp: "Total automation with Infocorp products allows for quick access to information. With a chain of 13 stores, it is essential to have the information we need at our fingertips. There is no question that the Infocorp system has been a very good investment."

According to Dave Quark, The Quark Group have:

• saved 40% in administration costs;
• consistently increased sales by 10% each year since Softwear/POS was installed; and
• reduced inventory by 15%

A very crucial benefit of the system is that you can "move old inventory out and bring the more current inventory in using the inventory systems tracking feature. Therefore our inventory is always current and we are doing more business with less inventory."