Fishboy PZ: The Retail Rebels Making a Splash with Lightspeed

Trading Menus for Mannequins

No one can prepare you for running your first business. Sometimes, you just need to take the plunge. And, that’s exactly what Izzy and Mat did with Fishboy PZ in 2015. Izzy had been managing various bars and restaurants, and Mat had been working for the previous owners one day a week, designing for Fishboy PZ’s brand, too, until Izzy thought “running a restaurant can't be that dissimilar from a shop. Let’s give it a go.” Not long after, they bought Fishboy PZ and haven't looked back since.

Solving the Retail Riddle. Enter Lightspeed.

Shortly after acquiring Fishboy PZ, Izzy quickly ran into a problem. “Everything, all receipts, were handwritten which I then had to translate into a spreadsheet to put onto our accounting software. It was just too much.”

After some research, looking into point-of-sale systems with other companies, and a few demos later, Izzy found the majority of the market “just too complicated”. Not Lightspeed, though. “Lightspeed was the most intuitive. It just made the most sense. It could do everything we needed to do without the time the other ones seemed to be taking. It was a game changer,” Izzy said.

“Can’t Imagine How Much Time It’s Saved Us”

Since partnering with Lightspeed, Fishboy PZ have grown, on average, by 13% year-over-year. When looking at why this might be, Lightspeed’s Advanced Reporting features have stood out from the crowd. “Lightspeed’s helped with what we call ‘money mapping’ the shop,” Izzy says. “If we move something to a new fixture on a certain date and let it run for a month, I can then see how it's performing on that fixture versus the old fixture in terms of sales,” Izzy continued. “I can look at which brands are selling better, and which ones people like. I use a lot of comparisons of year on year and month on month, which is really helpful for me to see when I buy new stock, too.”

When asked how much time Lightspeed has saved Fishboy PZ in running their store, her answer was simple: “I can't imagine how much time it’s saved us in our day to day. But, it’s probably saving me a couple of hours per week.”

Fishboy PZ has been enjoying the simplicity of integrating Lightspeed Payments, too. “We were using iZettle before. I just love the integration, and not having to deal with any other party. Lightspeed even matched our rate that we were given from iZettle as well and offered us £20 off a month off our subscription. So, it just brought everything down. It made it a no brainer.”

Sustainable Stock Management with Lightspeed Capital

Fishboy PZ tries to do things a little differently to your regular high-street stores. “We try to focus on sustainability and moving away from the fast fashion, high street style of shopping so, with everything that we sell, we order up to nine months in advance.” Committing to half-a-year’s worth of stock nine months in advance without knowing how sales will be in that nine month period, however, can have some drawbacks, mainly with paying off bits like VAT. That’s where Lightspeed Capital stepped in.

“We had quite a lot of money going out within a very short space of time so we took out the funding to help with cash flow management,” Izzy said. “We chose Capital because the fixed fee was really helpful in case we had a little quiet patch. It meant that we weren't accruing extra interest if we weren't able to pay off in a certain time frame,” Izzy continued.

“The amount is just a certain percentage of our sales. That's really, really nice knowing that we haven't got a fixed sum going out each month. It’s way more manageable for cash flow, which is the reason we took it out in the first place. You don’t have the worry of having to then find another source if you can't afford to repay.”