Shui Lin & Sam share how their love of gummy bears has brought them to opening their first concept gummy store in Singapore, from handpicking gummies to suit our local taste buds to managing their store. She also shared about how the integrations and ability to accept different types of payment on the Qashier Smart POS System has streamlined their payment process! Visit them and try their top 4 bestselling gummies, the Masterminds, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Sour French Fries, and the Vegetarian Frozen Yogurt, or purchase directly from http://qashiereats.com/bearsfriends
Transcript:
Hi, my name is Shui Lin and this is Sam. We are the sole franchisee of Bears & Friends in Singapore. So come on in we will show you inside!
So Sam and I actually love gummies and in Singapore itself, we can’t find any concept gummy store. We’ve been travelling around the world and we can’t seem to find something that we really like. So we went out into the market, we tried all sorts of brands, we actually shortlisted and we found that Bears & Friends is the best.
So we had to cherry-pick the flavours because the store is actually quite small. And we had to test them and make sure that they are more palatable for the local community. We realised that a lot of locals prefer something that has more flavour and texture rather than the usual gummies that all of us are more used to like it’s just full-on sugary stuff.
The top 4 items would be the Masterminds, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the Sour French Fries and the Vegetarian Frozen Yogurt. So each of them has different taste profiles. For example, the Mastermind has a strawberry jelly inside with a marshmallow bottom. So when you bite into it, the jelly just oozes out. Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the other hand, for us, in two ways. It’s either sabotage gummy or a drinking gummy because it’s actually pretty spicy for a gummy. It’s not something you would expect anyway.
The number one challenge is that because this store is located in Haji Lane, this is the heart of Kampong Glam. So the larger community that usually comes here are predominantly Muslims. So we had to make sure that we have a healthy range of vegan and vegetarian gummies that are tapioca based and does not have any animal by-products or animal products so to speak.
Number two, space. It’s a very small store so we often have space issues and we have the climate as well. So when it gets too hot, and the gummies are very sensitive to heat, so even with the temperature outside, the gummies sometimes do melt a little bit.
The third challenge that we also face is that there is a lot of POS solutions out there that are very big and very bulky. We wanted something that is small. So we google “POS” and Qashier actually popped up.
We decided on Qashier because they have a lot of integration in this tool and it has reporting, inventory management, CRM and they also accept a lot of different payment modes like WeChat, PayWave, PayLah, PayNow, FavePay and GrabPay so on and so forth. This being very portable right, we can actually close the deal by the shelf instead of having people come to the counter to settle the bill. So it’s part of our customer service experience anyways.
The other determining factor for us is also the after-sales support. They have been very efficient as well, whenever we need some help or to have any queries answered.
I’ll definitely recommend Qashier to all of my friends who are keen to open a business. The system is very intuitive, very well integrated and there’s very strong after-sales support. Qashier is also under the PSG programme so you can get government funding that’s very useful.