Case Study: Hobbycraft achieves 20% sales growth and streamlined, scalable retail operations with LS Retail (LS Nav)

Hobbycraft - Customer Case Study

Hobbycraft, the UK’s largest arts-and-crafts retailer with some 30,000 products, faced a fragmented, ageing IT estate that constrained growth — no core purchasing or replenishment system, store-level ranging and ordering, and a platform that couldn’t scale to support owner Bridgepoint’s expansion plans. The business therefore decided to replace its infrastructure rather than try to patch the old systems.

Hobbycraft selected Microsoft Dynamics NAV and LS Nav delivered by K3, kept the implementation as “vanilla” as possible and ran a 15‑month, phased rollout (finance, warehousing, merchandising, stores). The programme office and seconded staff drove the change; during the project stores grew from 50 to 75 and turnover rose 20% to £120m. After resolving an overnight replenishment performance issue and launching the website in March 2013, the solution was moved to K3’s cloud managed service (no capex), improved inventory visibility and supply‑chain capability (team grew 3→11), and enabled planned multi‑channel features like click & reserve and home delivery.

Hobbycraft

Mike Thomas

IT Director