The Perfume Shop

The Perfume Shop first opened its doors in 1992, with just 3 stores. Beginning with a simple idea – making luxury perfume brands accessible to everyone - the brand has now grown into the UK’s largest specialist fragrance retailer. The Perfume Shop, now part of global health and beauty leader, A.S Watson, boasts over 220 stores and 2000 staff in UKI, and is a fragrant fixture of the high street.

With it’s this expertise in fragrance and its pocket friendly prices, the brand saw rapid expansion in its store footprint.

But, with rapid expansion, comes growing pains, particularly in the areas of staff scheduling and time and attendance (T&A). The business was using paper rotas and an in-house time and attendance system that was almost totally manual, and saw shifts unfilled with a total lack of visibility for the head office team to be able to solve for it.

“We had no control over budget versus our spend, and no central view of our staffing,” says Hardik Dave, Lead Project Manager at The Perfume Shop. “For our employees, it wasn’t easy to apply for holidays, it definitely wasn’t simple to see their shifts in advance or apply for gap shifts.”

So after a successful pilot in 2016, Rotageek were selected for the wider rollout across all locations. 

Ditching paper-based processes in favour of digitised and automated systems, gone were bulky file imports and lengthy manual rota creations. Automated and optimised work patterns saved time and stress across the growing perfume store universe. By 2018 Rotageek provided one intuitive solution for optimised staff scheduling and simple, one-click timesheets, whilst giving head office a central view of staffing across the business. Integrating into their payroll solution also meant The Perfume Shop was accurate and compliant with their wage calculations, supporting employee contractual obligations and overtime payments. 

When Covid-19 hit, the Rotageek solution was integral in managing shift-swaps and filling gaps to support an isolating workforce, providing the tools to extend available shifts into other stores and regions. This helped them keep stores open, the business afloat and support their people when they needed to the most. 

This paved the way for The Perfume shop to provide a flexible working environment in a post-covid climate that called for more work-life balance, amidst a talent retention crisis in the retail sector and compounded by cost of living concerns.

In order to do this, The Perfume Shop team worked with Rotageek to develop functionality that would truly help them be an industry leader and competitive in the fight for talent. From cross store scheduling to redesigning the tablet UI , the two teams work together to develop and refine a solution not just for The Perfume Shop, but the entire retail sector. 

With their ambition to digitise and automate their systems across their store universe, Rotageek’s smart scheduling provided an intuitive solution for both scheduling and timesheets.

The head office team had a central view of staffing across the business, using custom dashboards for deeper, more insightful, reporting. With these powerful metrics, The Perfume Shop has the data they need to support their talent acquisition, talent retention, HR and operational strategy objectives. The dashboard is now an integral system their head office can access and see relevant and real-time information they need. 

Store managers now save at least 3 hours a week usually taken up with scheduling, plus don’t have the hassle of finding cover with the process of filling gap shifts now a breeze.

And their employees? They’ve got a world-class scheduling app in their Perfume Shop-branded pockets, giving them flexibility and visibility.

Rotageek helped The Perfume Shop to be a forward-thinking employer of choice by providing fair, flexible rotas that their workforce have control over, whilst meeting fluctuating customer demand.