Making Space for What Matters: The Village Goldsmith Story

Running a studio that spans bespoke client work, in-house manufacturing, international collaborations and award-winning innovation means every part of the business must move as one. Village Goldsmith needed a system intuitive enough for their team, while remaining flexible enough to support both craft and scale.

Lightspeed became the backbone.

We sat down with Village Goldsmith Director Chris Benham, and Marketing Manager Louise Chapman to talk about how Lightspeed helps bring clarity, efficiency and modern simplicity to a business built on creativity.

A common theme with businesses looking to upgrade their tech is that this desire is born out of their previous tech not being able to handle the basics—the day-to-day stuff that separates a good system which works with your team, from a bad system which works against you.

“The previous point of sale solution was incredibly painful to use on lots of levels. Not intuitive, not easy to adapt. So I wanted to firstly make sure that it was just really, really easy for our team.”

In Lightspeed, Chris and his team found their solution and it helped them realign their focus to what’s important: their products and their clients.

“And that was one of the things, when we first implemented Lightspeed, was just how intuitive and how easy the onboarding process was for our jewellery design consultants that were with our clients.”

Being located where we are, it can sometimes feel as though the right fit is something that is so close, yet so far away.

“A lot of the other point of sale solutions and the ones dedicated specifically to jewellery and jewellery manufacturers, they're predominantly all US based and they don't actually play well in New Zealand, once you get down to the day to day practical things.”

Having a product and a team informed by real, local insights and needs isn’t something that comes along every day. Chris and his team found themselves a product that felt truly native.

“So, obviously having (Lightspeed), that we know is tried and tested in New Zealand, that works really well, that gives us the ability to have local New Zealand teams that we can contact if we've got any issues.”

Growth is a hard thing to come by, and when you achieve it, the last thing you want is to be held back by tech that can’t match your ambitions.

“I knew that we needed something that was going to take us to the next level and enable us to scale both domestically and globally.”

In Lightspeed, Chris and his team found a partner whose ambitions to grow and evolve matched their own.

“One of the nice things with cloud based solutions that you have is that they're constantly improving, and changing and evolving…you want to make sure that that experience matches the quality of the jewellery that we're crafting.”

To make bold decisions, you need good data, and you need tech good enough to be able to call upon it at a moment’s notice to keep the ball rolling.

“The ability to access information really quickly, especially when you've got clients coming in that want you to find the specifics of what we purchased or the history…that has totally transformed the way we interact with clients.”

But having easily-accessible information is only half the story. If you can work with a team’s appreciation for good aesthetics in service of better thinking and creativity, then you can create something truly special, together.

“Just visually, I think when software is designed in a really beautiful way, and looks good, it just makes the team feel better. Being in a business that's about crafting beautiful items for our clients, we want to align with companies that care about those sorts of things too.”

“The continual improvements that are happening in terms of constantly looking at new ways to update and make it better. You know the team's listening to what we're asking for.”

We know that a good product is a product that serves the needs of those using it, and a key part of ensuring that this value remains as true today as it will be tomorrow, is listening to people like Chris and his team when they tell us which improvements they would like to see.

“Just to know that the team is actually listening, and taking those ideas on board and thinking about how that's incorporated into the solution, which ultimately helps us be more successful.”

In an industry as creative as jewellery design, it can be hard to keep your creative edge when you’re constantly having to address and worry about the boring parts of your business.

“I distinctly remember our jewellery consultants sitting there trying to reconcile transactions, and spend and trying to work out different payments and where things were going.”

With Lightspeed’s integrated Payments, Chris and his team are free to let their creativity blossom without the need for worrying about reconciliations, variations or bookkeeping.

“I literally cannot remember the last time they got to the end of the day, and things didn't perfectly reconcile because the payments were pushing through directly into (Lightspeed) as it was being processed, which then gets pushed automatically through into Xero for our accounting.”