Cameron's Fine Jewellery, a family based retail store needed a way to streamline operations, improve customer relations and drive it's store in a more flexible, responsive and profitable way.  Cameron's staff included several older staff who were unfamiliar with computers.

Concerns before implementation were the time it would take to convert from their existing system, bringing information across, training of staff (particularly the older staff), downtime (in terms of the time taken away from staff performing their normal job to learn the new system), and gaining a significant return on investment.

Cameron's started Swim in November 2005 with two point of sale terminals and two back office terminals.

After starting Swim, Cameron's Fine Jewellery store owner, Judy Cameron commented "We knew our systems were old and needed to be improved. We just needed to find the right solution (and company) that we could entrust our business with.

Since implementing Swim, it has enhanced our business both through the marketing and stock reports which has considerably improved our profit.

Swim has profoundly changed the way we buy and sell our stock, the way we control our workshop and repairs, right through to our monthly promotions through direct mail.  It has also kept up with the changing of technology that assists our business. For example, text messaging clients when repairs are ready for collection and taking a microscopic picture of repair work at point of sale. 

They are innovative and totally supportive, and Swim has really, truly increased our profit.

We are a manufacturing retail jewelry store in the picturesque city of Chichester. Over the last few years our business has grown in every way - we have had many extra additions to our sales team and work shop team, we now cast platinum, gold and silver onsite. As things got busier, our old stock and repair database began to buckle under the pressure - it was simply not designed to handle the traffic that was being put through it! We also had to hand write every invoice for each sale and stock items would be manually taken out of stock!

It was clear something needed to be done, and I spent a great deal of time investigating suitable solutions. After viewing systems by jewelry software providers, I was left feeling like there was not any software available that would do what we needed it to - easily managing repairs and commissions, handling sales and stock.

As luck would have it, we visited trade show and bumped into a smart looking stand for a system called Swim, by TJS. Problem solved.

Delivery was prompt and as promised, they converted our original data so we could be up and running without having to manually re-enter all of our stock. The Swim box slotted into our existing network with great ease and we were ready to go. Staff quickly picked up the basics - the interface is really quite intuitive.

Swim is fantastic in that no additional software is required to run it on any platform (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows) - just a web browser - Firefox.

We can now send SMS Text messages to customers when their jobs are ready - something that is popular with customers and staff alike - no more long winded answer phone messages.

Booking repairs and commissions to different goldsmiths, designers and craftsmen is a breeze with the Job Tracking feature.

Sales figures can be easily viewed and interpreted from the many reports Swim can generate.

Best of all - I can login to Swim from home and see how the sales are going on my day off!

I feel the support team definitely deserve a mention here, they are always on hand to answer any questions, and listen to our suggestions - actively listening to customers thoughts and ideas really is something of a rare gem when it comes to software!

We have recorded over 5000 individual sales over our first December/Christmas period using Swim.

There are still features that we are just discovering - The calendar is great for recording appointments with customers and sales reps, and staff holidays.

Since using swim - it has freed up a great deal of time, not just for myself, but for colleagues as well, to concentrate on other areas of the business that were not getting the time they deserved.

I would summarize Swim as being the software equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife. All the tools you need to manage your stock, sales and workshop in one software package. Highly recommended.

Timothy Roe Fine Jewelry. 
Dan Roe - Store Manager.