How Kith supports retail staff across 15 stores without a ticket queue
Retail associates do not file tickets. Kith gave its store teams a way to get IT and HR answers on the floor, in the middle of a shift, without leaving the sales floor to find a manager.
- of store questions answered without a manager
- 82%
- median answer time on the sales floor
- 90 sec
- faster seasonal onboarding
- 5x
- stores live in under a month
- 15
At a glance
- Industry
- Fashion retail and lifestyle
- Headquarters
- New York
- Footprint
- Fifteen stores across the US, Europe and Asia, plus ecommerce
- Workforce
- Mostly hourly retail associates, with seasonal peaks
- IT team
- Four, all based in New York
- Harmony agents in use
- ITSM, HR, onboarding and offboarding, access management
Illustrative mockup. This story is sample content created to design and review the customer-story layout. The company is real; the metrics, quotes and people below are invented and must not be published or cited.
The challenge: a workforce that does not sit at a desk
Kith runs fifteen stores and an ecommerce business from a four-person IT team in New York. Almost none of the people that team supports work at a computer. They work a shift, on a floor, with customers in front of them, and the questions they need answered are urgent in a way office questions rarely are: a card reader is offline, a discount will not apply, a new hire cannot clock in.
None of that arrived as a ticket. It arrived as a phone call to a store manager, who either knew the answer or called New York. Managers became a human help desk on top of running a shop floor, and the same twenty questions circulated every week across three time zones.
A manager should be running the floor, not relaying questions to New York.
S. AdeyemiDirector of Retail Operations, Kith (illustrative)
What changed: answers where the work happens
Harmony gave associates a way to ask directly, on the device already in their pocket, without an email account or a ticket form. Policy lookups, scheduling rules, POS troubleshooting and access requests now resolve in about ninety seconds, and roughly 82% never involve a manager at all.
The escalations that remain reach IT with the store, the register, the shift and the steps already tried attached, so the four-person team spends its time on the problems that genuinely need them rather than on establishing what happened.
The questions did not go away. They just stopped going through people who had something else to do.
S. AdeyemiDirector of Retail Operations, Kith (illustrative)
The result: seasonal hiring stopped being a cliff
Retail hiring is seasonal, which meant onboarding arrived in waves that the same four people had to absorb. Running it as a guided conversation took a new associate from days to hours, and made the process identical whether someone started in New York, London or Tokyo. Rolling all fifteen stores onto it took under a month.
