Heartland Retail Customer - Mox Boarding House

Take one look at Mox Boarding House and you’ll quickly realize that while it is a staple of its neighborhood, it’s so much more than your neighborhood game store.

With three locations (and a fourth on the way), the Pacific Northwest-based game retailer is a paragon not only in its surrounding communities, but the game community as a whole. In addition to its large selection of games for purchase—everything from Magic: The Gathering to Monopoly—each location houses a full-service restaurant, game library and private event space, making them a force to be reckoned with, and raising the bar for so many other game retailers of the like.

A quick swipe through its Instagram shows countless “I wish you had a location in my city” and “Can’t wait for you to reopen!” comments after the stores were closed for several months during the coronavirus pandemic. All while navigating their own shutdown, they hosted a virtual fundraiser that provided 50,000 meals to neighboring families in need. That’s on top of the $650,000 they’ve already raised for local nonprofits since the inception of their ENGAGE philanthropy.

Mox radiates community, and it’s obvious that this is a people first, profit second-kind of business.

Challenge: By the very nature of its product offerings and clientbase, a retailer like Mox Boarding House has to be modern—in the experience it offers its customers and the way it operates its business. And with over 300 employees, coming from all degrees of technology comfort, they need a system that's easy to learn, easy to use and quick to start. Plus, with multiple locations, management needs to be able to access sales and business data from anywhere, be it back office, next state over or out of the country.

After 20 years in business, they were feeling the weight of their bulky, on-premise POS system. "There was nothing intuitive about it," said Jorel Miller, Director of Mox. "It had a steep learning curve for new users." The more Mox grew, the more archaic their previous system felt, weighing them down with expensive and slow upgrades, no access to real-time reporting and tedious workarounds for seemingly simple operations, like allowing more than one user to be active at a single location.
Solution: From the PNW to NYC the team traveled, in search of a new point of sale to manage the business's retail operations. They met their match in Heartland Retail, a perfect complement to the tablet-based restaurant POS they had recently adopted in the cafe side of Mox. A SaaS, cloud-based product, its instant updates and real-time data equip the management team to do business from anywhere, like 1,500 miles away in Arizona where they're busy opening their fourth location. "Being able to jump on my smartphone and fix an issue is a game changer," says Miller.

Mox's reporting pain points are also solved in Heartland Retail's ability to pull custom ad hoc reports on the fly, so they're able to see everything from transfers to cost of goods sold, all the way down to various tracking reports for individual products. Unlimited custom fields allow them to collect and report on the information most relevant to their unique product offerings.
Results: Going live with the software right at the start of COVID-19 has made for an unexpected, yet positive, onboarding and initial experience. With their physical locations closed for three months, Mox Boarding House's team was forced to get creative in selling techniques and engaging their legacy customers. They're still finding themselves having to alter purchasing as supply chain issues continue to arise. With conditions, consumer spending habits and vendor availability changing by the day, keeping up with real-time sales, inventory and customer reports has been critical. Says Miller, "Being able to easily analyze data during a truly unprecedented time is key to our future success."

While the country's health and retail's future remain murky, the business finds comfort in the consistency of Heartland Retail's performance, already seeing improved ease of use all around, from front of house selling to back of house administrative operations.
"This was an interesting time to make a major change to our retail operating system," says Miller. "Being able to bring team members into an intuitive system made the transition much easier. This along with the support provided by our onboarding and implementation manager was fantastic."

"Being able to easily analyze data during a truly unprecedented time is key to our future success."

- Jorel Miller, Director, Mox Boarding House –

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Mox Boarding House

Take one look at Mox Boarding House and you’ll quickly realize that while it is a staple of its neighborhood, it’s so much more than your neighborhood game store.

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