Loserkids is on a mission to rule the action sports set. And its management team has little interest in messing around with IT issues.
That’s why the California-based retailer of brands such as Macbeth, Innes, Element and Volcom recently deployed a Software-as-a-Service solution.

Loserkids general manager Tadd Crayton says CORESenseIE (for Integrated Enterprise) from Saratoga Springs, N.Y.-based CORESense has helped the retailer address two major needs. The company was looking for something that could quickly and easily fill in missing pieces when Loserkids.com cut URL ties with ARTISTdirect, and it wanted a solution that would help foster brand consistency as Loserkids — previously an online-only retailer — ventures into the realm of physical stores.

“We obviously didn’t want to employ an IT staff,” Crayton says. “We wanted to focus on what is going to grow our business quickly — and that is the merchandising and the marketing.”

Both have been key for Loserkids since the company was founded in 1999 by former Blink-182 bandmates Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus. (DeLonge remains a co-owner of Loserkids.)

When the former bandmates were young, they’d lament that “there was never anyplace cool for them to shop,” Crayton says. “So they essentially started an online skate shop [that] has morphed into what it is today. It was kind of fun and games at the beginning … but it has become a much larger project.”

The first Loserkids store, in San Marcos, Calif., held a grand opening bash in December, complete with a performance by DeLonge’s current band, Angels and Airwaves. Loserkids might open another store or two in California this year, most likely in the third quarter, Crayton says, and could follow with another five to seven stores in 2009 “if it makes sense.”

Keeping things consistent
Consistency across channels is a common goal of the CORESense customer, says Chris Martin, the company’s director of marketing. The solution “is all centrally managed, so whether you’re putting something on an affiliate website, or if it’s eBay or Amazon, it’s all consistent.” And merchandisers don’t have to recreate the wheel for every channel – a daunting task for small and mid-size retailers.

“One of the big things we hear from those who come to us for help [moving] from bricks-and-mortar to online is ‘Help me do this and not mess up what I’ve worked so hard to build,’ “ Martin says. In that sense, Loserkids is different from many CoreSense customers in that online came first and is now serving as a model for stores. “We wanted the look and feel of the store to be like Loserkids.com,” Crayton says. “We have built a very clean site, I like to think. And our store is very much the same way.”

Loserkids seeks to offer a simplified shopping experience and the largest and most competitively-priced selection of relevant action sports and music-influenced brands. The typical customer is “pretty frugal,” Crayton says, so the company someday hopes to be able to offer free shipping on every order.

In the sweet spot
The retailer fits well into CORESense’s “sweet spot” of fast-growing companies that don’t have the IT resources larger companies can call upon. “They get a fully integrated tool,” Martin says. “If they tried to do the integration themselves it would be out of their price range.”

Crayton says CORESense was appealing, in part, because it “had a lot of out-of-the-box customization and it wasn’t going to require web servers that would need to be maintained.” Instead, internal attention continues to be focused on keeping the messages and assortments relevant and fresh — even to the point of changing the Loserkids tagline every few weeks (recent examples include “Hitting on Your Mom and Being Smooth About It” and “Making the Cool Kids Look Stupid”).

A commitment to keeping customers from growing bored, or feeling like they’re being marketed to by someone who doesn’t actually understand them, separates Loserkids from some of its competitors, Crayton says.
“We speak in the same tone that our customer uses — minus the cuss words.”