How Sunrise Integration’s Shopify POS app enabled Quay Australia to pivot from in-store to virtual during COVID-19

First Glance

Quay Australia is a popular eyewear brand that offers young trendsetters affordable and fashionable sunglasses online and in stores. With colorful branding and endorsements by celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and Jennifer Lopez, they’ve carved out a lasting place for themselves in the marketplace.

Realizing a large opportunity for affordable prescription eyewear with the Gen Z market segment, Quay Australia embarked on a trial launch of a new prescription product line to younger customers in early 2020.

In order to deliver the exceptional customer experience expected by a younger generation embedded in the culture of Digitally Native Vertical Brands (DNVB), Quay decided to launch retail kiosks in several malls across the US. The Quay team knew that executing this required a highly strategic approach to omni-channel and technology, with careful planning and flawless technical implementation. Developing these seamless omni-channel experiences and automations was paramount to success–which is why they approached Sunrise Integration for help.

We took the time to understand their business goals and developed solutions for every stage of the journey. Our team did more than just build solutions; we became a part of their team and embedded ourselves in the entire process to maximize results amidst a global pandemic.

The Challenge

In Q1 2020, Quay set up brick and mortar retail showrooms to allow customers to order prescription eyewear. Our team built a sophisticated custom app on Shopify POS to be used as an in-store kiosk for the launch of their new optical prescription line.

In addition, Quay would be producing prescriptions on-demand and fulfilling from a manufacturing facility in Asia in conjunction with their fulfillment partner, Performance Team. The automation solutions between these partners required close technical collaboration with international manufacturing and supply chain teams.

Before delivering the final product, we engaged in a thorough process of “minimum viable product” (MVP) discovery to meet Quay’s business requirements:

• Business requirements analysis

• Ideation and defining the app’s user experience

• Supply chain workflow automation and collaboration with logistics and international manufacturing partners

• Planning new systems & infrastructure

• Integration with Dell Boomi iPaas

• Advising and testing prescription workflows

• Developing a long-range roadmap to support direct-to-consumer in collaboration with Quay’s design agency partner, Pattern

Unfortunately, COVID-19 forced a plethora of businesses, including malls, to shut down. As a result, Quay’s retail showrooms had to close as well, putting a stop to the rollout after two weeks.

But Quay wasn’t going to let this obstacle keep them from moving forward with their plans.

The Solution

We helped position Quay for success despite the unexpected and unprecedented global shift in business. Thanks to our agile sprint-based collaboration with Quay, our team was able to help them quickly change their workflow to continue operations and ensured that the transition from in-store to virtual went smoothly. 

Because we built the kiosk app in Shopify POS, sales reps were able to use it remotely from their home on an iPad and screen share it with customers over Zoom. For customers, the transactional process was similar to the in-store experience.

We rapidly adapted the kiosk app so that it allowed customers to:

• pre-fill in carts

• take a picture of the prescription and send it to a sales rep ahead of time

• send their prescription before the virtual meeting (the in-store kiosks only allowed cart entry in real-time)

• to pre-fill information and save a cart transaction in-progress

• clear their carts and start over if they needed to

Our app allowed Quay’s sales reps to prepare, save and access carts for a specific customer in advance of a Zoom appointment.

Scaling To Meet Demand with AWS

As traffic and services expanded the Quay backend infrastructure needed to scale to match the national rollout. The Sunrise Integration devops team was able to jump in and design a highly available, multi-region AWS infrastructure that supports Quay's growing online and in-store retail POS demands. Using the power of AWS, Sunrise Integration developed enterprise-class features to Quay business including:

• Multi-regional servers to handle nation-wide traffic with the lowest latency

• Highly available API and servers that handle 10,000+ calls per second

• Automatically scaling servers to meet demand

• Direct API integration with international vendors to support retail manufacturing

• Multi-node code containers to handle web traffic

The Outcome

In building Quay’s kiosk app solution and working to adapt it to virtual consultations, we successfully helped their team roll out the new prescription optical line via Zoom during stay-at-home orders. They continued using the solution as they reopened three of their retail locations, with plans to expand to at least 10 stores in the USA.

Furthermore, in preparation for an upcoming global direct-to-consumer launch, which would need to operate at a peak of 10,000 orders per day, we helped Quay assess and create new workflow rules, document their processes and add software safeguards to prevent errors and security gaps in their system.   

Looking to the Future

By applying the lessons our team learned from building the Shopify POS Kiosk Point of Sale app, pivoting during COVID-19, and iterating rapidly with our agile workflow, we were able to accurately plan long-term features and a roadmap for their products in advance of their direct-to-consumer launch.

Using discoveries and infrastructure from this software, the Sunrise Integration team is leveraging the Shopify Plus platform as well as a new administration tool, “Rx Portal”. Quay customer service agents will transcribe and manage customer Rx prescriptions from the Rx Portal created by the Sunrise Integration team.

In addition, we are also facilitating the collaboration with Quay's fulfillment partner and Sunrise Integration client, Performance Team to enhance their infrastructure to support the jaw-dropping demand for Quay's designer optical line.

We're excited to continue building a direct-to-consumer experience on the Shopify Plus platform as well as these new administration and workflow automation tools for Quay as we join them on a journey of explosive growth in a global, omni-channel Gen Z fashion and lifestyle market.