New Year & 6 Month Wrap Up

A new year, new clients, changes in the market, events to attend, parties to hold… it has been an exciting 6 months here at Moustache Republic. So, we thought it was time to share what we have been up to in our usual 6 month wrap up. Here are the highlights on what we have been up to and what the team has accomplished over the last 6 months… The shift to SaaS based eCommerce solutions We have continued our journey of shifting from self-hosted eCommerce platforms (e.g. Magento) to SaaS based solutions like Shopify and BigCommerce. So far we have been pleased to see a reduction in build costs and a shorter turnaround time in getting sites to market when using these SaaS platforms. There is also a reduced cost of ownership and improved usability for the clients who have chosen to migrate to an SaaS platform. But our websites are not just any SaaS template sites. In true Moustache Republic style, we have been pushing the boundaries of these platforms and have been building private apps to extend them in a way we never thought possible. We are definitely finding the platforms to be more flexible and extendable than ever before. They are finally ready for Enterprise level businesses. We are extremely proud of the two fashion sites that we recently built using SaaS platforms. One was created using BigCommerce and the other with Shopify. Both sites were designed and built from scratch, and we’ve been able to 100% achieve our desired custom design with no compromises on either of the platforms. Take a look at what we have created… https://www.coastnewzealand.com/ – BigCommerce https://www.nicholasjermyn.co.nz/ – Shopify Public Speaking – Tony and Christo We don’t just do websites at Moustache Republic. We also love to take the chance to share our knowledge with like minded business professionals. So we were excited to speak at several events in 2017. I had the pleasure of speaking at E-Commerce 121 together with my friend Jason Greenwood in July. It was a great opportunity to share our respective journeys on achieving a true omni-channel experience for retailers through modern technology. Christo, our marketing director, also had the opportunity to speak at the Digital Marketing Innovation Summit in November. He shared his passion and knowledge around social media marketing and how that would impact brands in 2018. It has been a great experience for us to speak these events and to meet people in the industry. We are definitely looking forward to do more public speaking in the near future. noissue Tissue noissue.co is an online tissue business that allows retail SME’s to customise and purchase wrapping tissues directly online. It’s a collaboration project between our friend Josh, Auguste, and the team at Moustache Republic. We have successfully launched V2 of the site in January, which allows customers to upload logos in any format and be converted to SVG automatically for colouring and resizing. The site is now fully responsive and we are full steam ahead on the marketing of the business. Here’s a quick video to explain what the site does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdwn0GaiHE4 MR Suite We had the pleasure of working with HealtPost late last year to streamline their omni-channel commerce operation via integration. We’ve built a new product called MR Suite to connect the ERP, POS, website, loyalty programme, and WMS all together. MR Suite is built with Laravel 5 and has a comprehensive queueing system to handle the amount of requests from multiple systems. We are looking to improve MR Suite further in 2018 to help more of our clients achieve the true omni-channel retail solution. The Epic Moustache Xmas Party We definitely had some things to celebrate this year. As well as the client work and speaking successes during the year, in December we welcomed our 14th member, Alexandra to the team. So our annual epic Christmas party was a great way to mark those achievements. We have had the same Moustache Christmas tradition for 4 years now. We go away for 2 days and 2 nights and enjoy nothing but each other’s company. There is always a lot of alcohol, fun and activities involved. Stay tuned for the video of the Moustache team sliding down sand dunes! In conclusion As usual the last 6 months has been an amazing journey and we are certainly looking forward to the next 6 months to come. We’ll be making more noise and doing some damage, so watch this space.