The Spice & Tea Exchange

The Spice & Tea Exchange began in St. Augustine, Florida in 2005 as a store called Old Spice Traders and is now a growing chain with locations throughout 26 states. The Spice & Tea Exchange offers spices, herbs, salts, blends and teas for every taste. Part of the brand’s appeal is its custom blends where a local store can make its own blend and sell it to customers on its own or in a gift set. if the blends are popular enough, stores are able to share their custom blends with corporate to have it be made available chain-wide. Entrepreneur recently listed The Spice & Tea Exchange on the publication’s list of the Top 200 Food and Restaurant Franchises for 2018. The company is about to celebrate its 10th year of franchising, which it uses Erply to execute overarching and day-to-day processes.

Spice & Tea had no centralized point of sale or inventory system in place — not all stores were on the same software, and some were not even computerized. The company’s impressive growth rate necessitated a better system for managing both a franchisor headquarters and individual franchises.

Spice & Tea needed a POS that would allow them to exert a sufficient level of control over how their franchisees order stock while also offering them the unique freedom to create their own local store blends. Erply’s highly flexible POS caught their attention, as well as the system’s ability to work with individual franchisors to better serve Spice & Tea’s customer-base. The spice store struggled with fragmented inventory and Erly’s comprehensive inventory management tools promised a more streamlined future.

After implementing Erply, The Spice & Tea Exchange grew from 8 stores to 67. The franchise is able to better manage inventory and track sales across the entire chain, while still maintaining a level of freedom that keeps their franchisees satisfied.

Spice and Tea used Erply’s order management system to create a central ordering portal for the entire franchise. From there, individual stores can place their own specific product orders based on their demand.

Spice & Tea uses Erply to push out promotions to all stores while also giving individual locations the ability to build their own unique promos.