Learn how a neighborhood party supply business uses Epicor Propello to manage inventory and streamline processes, from Halloween all the way to graduation day.
When was the last time you visited a party supplies store? Probably to pick up some festive balloons for a birthday bash, or holiday decorations for a gathering at your house, or maybe some themed cups and plates for a fun celebration at work?
Did you ever stop and think about keeping track of every one of those colorful plates and streamers, pricing each one, and overseeing helpful staff during the seasonal crush? For Simon Kuonen, owner of Party Bazaar in Dallas, TX, all of those things are essential and—thanks to Epicor Propello—much more doable in his bustling, family-owned party supplies business.
“I’m the third family to own it,” Kuonen says. “I purchased it from the previous owners in 2015, although I’ve actually worked here since 1999.”
Prior to taking ownership, the shop had “always been pen and paper,” he explains. “We deal with about 500 different companies and have somewhere north of 20,000 SKUs. So it’s a significant amount of products.
After the 2015 purchase, Kuonen began his quest for the right point-of-sale software solution to make the daunting task of inventory easier. At the time, this proved challenging.
“I couldn't find something that was the Goldilock of what I wanted. It was either way too expensive because it was enterprise-level software or it was something that was too basic to track the inventory in the way I needed,” he shares. The existing software seemed more geared toward restaurants or boutiques with small numbers of SKUs.
He recalls being told by one company, after discussing his large inventory numbers, “‘Oh well, for each 10,000 SKUs after you go past 10,000, it's an extra half second of query time.’ So potentially we could scan something, and you could be waiting one second for that item to pop up on screen, which didn't seem like a long time. But when you really think about when you're ringing out a customer, one second between scans is sizable.”
After pausing his search for the right POS program for Party Bazaar for a while, Kuonen was ready to try again in 2023. A chance inquiry about the POS systems in place at the nursery down the street brought up the Epicor name (they were using Eagle) and led Kuonen to reach out to Epicor. When he learned that Propello was popular among Ace Hardware owners, he saw the connection immediately. “It really fits well with what we do because we have lots of seasonal products. We have lots of small items, like party favors, that don't have barcodes. So, we need those sub-menus where we can have individual things that you can quickly locate by picture or description.”
To make it easy for employees to quickly find and scan those SKUs using Propello, Party Bazaar set up quick-find menus in the POS, divided into appropriate categories with the accompanying pictures. “Many of those other programs that we had looked at either didn’t have that capability or were laid out in a way that was more oriented toward food service,” Kuonen adds.
Another feature that works especially well for Party Bazaar is the ability to generate specific, in-depth sales reports, according to Kuonen. “The back end of Propello really has what we need to run reports that show me not only how many did I sell this year, but how many did I sell each month, or during this season? It lets me break it down in a way that that allows me to gauge for seasonal buying—and then the system itself allows for seasonal purchasing, which is something that other programs didn't really have.”
As a business that sees large bumps in buying activity around specific holidays, Kuonen really appreciates this capability. “For instance, green napkins are an everyday item, but I need extra green napkins for Mardi Gras and St. Patrick’s Day. And during Christmas, Propello allows me to put seasonal inventory into the picture, which is useful.”
Propello also helped Party Bazaar readjust when one of their long-time industry suppliers shut down after a long decline. “That left us with almost 5000 products that we needed to find replacements for,” Kuonen says. “I had some of those things already in the system, but the Epicor program itself allows me to search alternate vendors and compile things a lot more easily.”
Had he not had the system in place, Kuonen would have had to go through all of his file cabinets and manually determine which items were available from each supplier, one by one. Instead, he can simply put in the specs for the products he is seeking (something like “purple and white balloons”), immediately find available vendors, and run cost comparisons.
Propello has also saved the company valuable time during the post-holiday inventory process, according to Kuonen. “We've been using Propello for a little longer than a year, but up until that point, when we just did rolling inventories, we were inventorying something every day from a different company. The larger companies would be inventoried more frequently, but everything would be inventoried by hand every four to six weeks.”
Holidays were even more daunting. “When the holiday was over, literally, we would stay that night to take inventory and put it all away.” He recalls past Halloweens where employees would go home to hand out candy, only to rush back to the store to do inventory later that night.
This activity was essential, Kuonen says, because “you can't start merchandising the next holiday until you've done inventory for the current one. With Propello, we still do a hard count in the days leading up just to verify that our inventory is correct, because there's always some kind of shift: someone rings up something wrong, there's shrinkage, something breaks, someone steals something.
The ability of the system to help me do what I needed to do, especially in the party industry, as well as the tireless back-end support. You’re talking to an actual person, and it’s often the same people who fix my problems.
There's not a lot, but we want it to be as accurate as possible.” The big difference, he emphasizes, is that “now we can do that two or three days in advance. My numbers are going to be 99% correct, and then on Halloween, after we close, all I do is throw it in a box, and I'm ready to put Christmas out the next day.”
Looking ahead, Kuonen sees Propello and the excellent support team he works with (he cites the benefits of being able to consult with Merideth Dedecker, Professional Services Project Manager, Sr. at Epicor, to fully understand any process or capability in the system) as key selling points for the business.
Although not ready to retire yet, Kuonen and his wife are planning ahead for a future that includes plenty of travel to spend time with family members living in Europe—something that the small business life does not always allow for. “I've been doing this for 25 years and I haven't had more than five consecutive days off during that entire time,” he admits, adding that the only slow times for Party Bazaar are July and August, when many people head out of town.
You can't start merchandising the next holiday until you've done inventory for the current one. With Propello, we still do a hard count in the days leading up just to verify that our inventory is correct, because there's always some kind of shift.
When the day comes to find a new buyer, Kuonen believes that “Having this Epicor system, with everything in a cohesive, relatively easily teachable format, makes the business as a whole very sellable.” Although he has no immediate plans, Kuonen states that within their very close neighborhood of local shops and residents (he points to only a few chain businesses in their Miracle Mile location), “someone that lives locally told me that they want to own a family business,” so they plan to keep in touch and see what the future holds.
Either way, Kuonen will continue to advocate for Propello, citing “the ability of the system to help me do what I needed to do, especially in the party industry,” as well as the tireless back end support. “You’re talking to an actual person, and it’s often the same people who fix my problems” whenever he calls in, Kuonen notes. “It’s usually pretty quickly, and in doing so, they show me how to correct it or not break it in the future. In my opinion, that’s one of the greatest benefits to what I’ve purchased from Epicor.”
