Whenever Lighthouse Immersive launches an exhibition in a new city, they also open a retail store. Since 2020, they have led the craze for immersive art installations, opening shows and stores in over 20 locations across North America. With over 3900 unique SKUs and a staff of up to 40 people at each store, Lighthouse needed a POS that could handle that volume at scale. Crucially, the system needed to be simple to program and set up quickly at each location and intuitive for new employees as it kept gift shop lines moving.

That’s why Wendel Wray, the Global Retail Manager at Lighthouse Immersive, needed to replace the company’s previous POS with a solution that was more customizable and could handle multiple locations. For example, Lighthouse’s previous solution didn’t allow for tiered admin access. “So we had situations where somebody in San Francisco would accidentally be messing with the inventory in Chicago. And then we're dealing with the additional headache and staffing charges of having to have two different businesses now do full scale inventory counts.”

When Wray found Lightspeed, he was surprised to find one system that could do it all. “I honestly was a little bit skeptical with Lightspeed at first because I was like, this sounds too good to be true. It's very different than anything else that I'm seeing on the market right now.”

Once Wray implemented Lightspeed Retail, complete with Lightspeed Payments and Analytics, he could finally control every aspect of Lighthouse Immersive’s multilocation retail business with one platform. “Since we have been using Lightspeed, everything is all in one place for us, which has been great because we're able to get that bird's eye view on our inventory management, our sales, employee performance, everything. Having that detailed view is great because I can't be in 20 places at once, as much as I very much wish I could some days!”

With its advanced reporting tools, Lightspeed Retail gives Lighthouse Immersive the data they need to manage staff and inventory. “We save on staffing, we save on inventory management and loss prevention,” says Wray. “My favorite, favorite, favorite thing with Lightspeed is the event logs. Once you get the hang of it, it is so wonderful because I can always tell if something goes wrong, where we went wrong. I can see [if] this employee’s name is coming up pretty frequently, or I can see that this is an area of opportunity for this store. So then we hop on a call with that location. I am a firm believer that numbers don’t lie.”

Because the system is customizable, it’s also portable. “I can get payment terminals paired, activated, run a test transaction from my office, make sure that the gateway’s set up properly, make sure that everything is looking good,” says Wray. “So that when we get to the venue, all I'm doing is changing the Wi-Fi over and it's ready to go.”

That speed is imperative, because has plenty of exhibits in the works, including , a partnership with Disney Animation, and the company is going international, with exhibits opening soon in Japan, Singapore and Mexico. “We're saving time left, right and center, which I love,” says Wray. “I am all about the efficiencies.”