Nestled in the trendy Village of Shirlington in Arlington, VA, The Curious Grape is a modern wine retailer with a different approach to peddling its delicious vintages. While many wine sellers continue to shroud connoisseurship in mystery, The Curious Grape is bringing wine knowledge to a greater portion of the population. This retailer hosts frequent wine tastings to help educate the members of its community on one of the world's favorite beverages. They also feature new wines every week, and have a growing array of gift ideas for customers. Suzanne McGrath, owner of The Curious Grape, talked with us about how she uses Catapult to manage her store operations.

ECRS : Tell us about your business and the customers you serve.

McGrath : We do anywhere from 100 to 200 transactions a day, depending on the day of the week. Since we're a wine store, Thursday nights, Fridays, and Saturdays are our busiest times. We have a great clientele. We're located in a very quaint, somewhat upscale shopping area with a lot of mid-level contemporary restaurants for neighbors. There are a lot of apartments and townhouses nearby.

Our customers are mostly in the 25-45 age range. They are typically well-educated professionals who don't necessarily know very much about wine, but who are eager to learn. They love the modern feel of our store, which is certainly enhanced by Catapult. The POS efficiency, the ability to track customers, and the label and sign-printing interface all play an important role in giving the Curious Grape it's modern charm.

ECRS : How has Catapult made things easier for you as a store owner?

McGrath : We love the touchscreen. It is absolutely the way to go. It definitely makes employee training easier. We can have new cashiers trained and running a register in about 10 minutes. The best part is that it's a very intuitive system. Even though we weren't familiar with all of Catapult's features in the beginning, we had no trouble teaching ourselves the different dimensions of the system.

It's also easy to change the POS buttons, which we do frequently for gift basket menus. The touchscreen system makes checkout very quick. It's also nice that it prints a receipt on which the customer can see the details of their transaction. Catapult's ability to return merchandise and sell new merchandise on the same ticket has been very valuable for us. This not only saves time, it also saves credit card processing fees, because we don't have to do a return on a charge card, and then do another credit card transaction for the items the customer is buying.

ECRS : What Catapult reports do you run on a regular basis?

McGrath : Catapult's reports are great. We use the Hourly Sales Summary throughout the day to see how we're doing. We use the Activity Summary to balance the drawer at the end of the day. I also order by studying a Cost On-Hand Detail by Supplier so I can see what we're low on. The reports make it very easy to see which products are doing well and which are doing poorly for purposes of formulating a buying strategy.

For example, beer is a secondary item for us. Some brands have done well while others have done poorly. I periodically consult a Sales Report for the beer department and am able to quickly go through and highlight the "dogs" and marginal performers. We eliminate the "dogs" altogether, and lower the price on the marginal performers to move them out. Of course, we then restock the best performers. Catapult's powerful reporting puts all the complex information into a consolidated and easy-to-understand format, which in turn helps me make informed buying decisions.

ECRS : How has Catapult met your expectations of what it would mean to automate your store?

McGrath : We had never been in business before, so we did a lot of research about retail automation before we started looking at POS systems. Our expectations were very high because we had formulated a very clear strategy about marketing and store management. Catapult was the system we found that would allow us to implement that strategy. I imagine that retailers who are using antiquated methods for managing their business processes would be blown away by how much easier and efficient Catapult can make things for them.

ECRS : Are you using Catapult's label interface?

McGrath : Constantly. We are printing custom labels and barcodes in-house with our barcode printer, which is just fantastic. I can't imagine having to write pricetags for everything. It's a great comfort to know that each item is removed from inventory as soon as it gets scanned at the register and the transaction is complete. It's amazing how easy it is to make custom barcodes.

What other aspects of your industry does Catapult handle particularly well?

McGrath : One thing that's important in the wine business is having good flexibility with calculating discounts at the register. We have all kinds of discounts built into the discount menu, as well as a number of discounts applied to the records of our best customers. Catapult handles our discount strategy extremely well. 

Can you comment on the level of support you've received from ECRS?

McGrath : Technical support has been prompt and excellent, knowledgeable and friendly. The ECRS Support team has been particularly helpful and has been able to work through our issues as they arose.

Would you recommend Catapult to other beverage retailers?

McGrath : Absolutely. Catapult has really simplified our operations at The Curious Grape.