To Home From London’s Tightly Integrated Retail System Keeps Multiple Outlets Running Smoothly

Meet To Home From London, a multi-outlet retailer that’s redefining souvenirs through fresh and original designs. Founded by Nacho Martinez and Bianca Timotheo, the business started as a one-day-a-week stall at a local market in 2015. Today, To Home from London has a flagship store in Camden Market, several stalls at London’s most popular markets, and an ecommerce site. 

It all began when Nacho gifted Bianca an art kit for her birthday. Bianca used the materials to craft interesting artwork, which they started applying to coasters — the company’s first product. 

Nacho and Bianca got a stall in their local market to start selling the coasters, and found that people loved them. The funny thing was that shoppers perceived the items not just as coasters, but as souvenirs. This prompted the duo to look into the souvenir industry in London, and they realized that most of the products were mass-produced and were low quality.

This was when they decided to move forward in the souvenirs industry, and started producing colourful gifts that represented British culture.

Read on to learn more about To Home From London and discover the tools that Nacho and Bianca are using to efficiently run their business. 

iZettle merchants from day 1

Nacho and Bianca had a modern retail mindset from the get-go. When they started To Home From London, they knew they wanted to accept credit cards right away, which is why they chose iZettle. 

“We were iZettle users since day one we were very happy with it,” says Nacho. “We really like how the system works for processing transactions. The card machine works perfectly well and the Bluetooth integration with the mobile phone is great. Plus, the speed of connection is excellent.”

Finding a solution to keep up with the business’ growth

Things went well with To Home From London, but as the business grew, Nacho and Bianca knew that they needed a retail solution that offered more functionality, particularly when it came to generating reports and integrating with their other solutions. 

“As we started to grow and set up our first permanent shop, we started looking for point of sale solutions,” recalls Nacho.

Their initial EPOS system was a legacy system, and while the solution worked for a few months, Nacho and Bianca started seeing some limitations from the software. 

“The first limitation was the interface; it wasn’t very quick and it had a few bugs. Also, the workflows of the system just weren’t intuitive.”

Another limitation was that the legacy system they were using didn’t integrate with Xero, To Home From London’s accounting software.

“We had iZettle for transactions, we had Xero for accounting, and then we had this legacy POS solution. But things were not talking to each other very well,” he explains.

So, Nacho and Bianca went on to find a better point of sale system, which led them to Vend. 

The magical missing piece that brought everything together

Vend, according to Nacho, was the “magical missing piece” that tied together all their retail solutions — including payments, accounting, and ecommerce.

“Vend all of a sudden connected everything together. It integrated with our online store and seamlessly connected with iZettle and Xero, so everything was working together. That was the magic of Vend for us,” he shares.

Integrating Vend and iZettle with the business’ accounting software and ecommerce platform was a breeze. According to Nacho, the entire onboarding process took 48 hours and zero stress. 

“It was incredibly good, suspiciously good actually, I would say.”

He continues, “It was really just a few clicks. Laura from the onboarding team helped us, and she was amazing. She was like, ‘Okay, now press here and then that’s it.’ I was like, ‘Really? Where’s the catch?’ It’s actually very, very, easy.”

Putting more hours back in their day

One of the best things about integrating Vend with iZettle and other software is that it allowed Nacho to automate tedious admin work for To Home From London. 

According to him, tasks like data entry and reporting, which took hours using the old system, now take him just a few minutes. 

“Before the integration, I was the one connecting everything so I was literally pulling data from iZettle, pulling data from this legacy POS, and then inputting everything manually into Xero. It was a bit of a nightmare,” Nacho explains.

“But now, I don’t do any of that anymore. All of the manual inputs into the system are gone, so all I have to do is read the reports.”

“I would say that for me, Vend was this missing bit in my network of systems that really helped me pull everything together and that’s a great value that I see from the system,” he concludes.