Case Study: Broad River
Customer Story · Ashley HomeStore Licensee
How Broad River Retail Scales to 40+ Stores with STORIS
Broad River Retail runs on STORIS’s cloud-based NextGen point of sale, business intelligence, and data warehouse to open new markets fast, keep every store on one system, and turn 12 annual decision points into 365.
Read the story
40+Stores on one system
~90%NextGen adoption
01 · Company Overview
From regional to 40 stores
Broad River Retail, an Ashley HomeStore licensee, has grown from a regional Carolinas company into a 40-store, multi-state operation.
Store 39, Store 40, and CountingA Disciplined Growth Blueprint
Summer 2021, Broad River Retail was a regional company concentrated in the Southeast, in the Carolinas. Today the company just announced store 39 in Statesville, North Carolina, and store 40 in Orangeburg, South Carolina — with a flagship greenfield location in South Portland, Maine, the first Ashley HomeStore the region has seen in over fifteen years.
CEO Charlie Malouf credits a blueprint the company has stayed disciplined about for years: look inward and drive continuous improvement first, replicate the KPIs of top-performing stores across the fleet, and only then earn the right to pursue greenfield sites or acquisitions. “If we continue to execute diligently on growth strategy one, two, and three,” he says, “then I think we’ve earned the right to look at greenfield or acquisitions.” Maine is that reward.
We don’t call it crazy growth. We call it controlled growth — executing our 20 mile marches, every day, at a really high level.
02 · Key Takeaways
What changed, in four points
The short version, before the full story.
Controlled growth
Broad River passed 40 stores by replicating top-store KPIs before pursuing greenfield sites and acquisitions.
One system, every store
Since 2015, every location trains, sells, and reports on the same STORIS platform.
Faster on the floor
NextGen adoption is near 90%, and transactions close faster at the end of every sale.
Daily decisions
A centralized data warehouse turned 12 annual decision points into 365.
03 · The Challenge
Scaling without losing control
Scaling past 40 stores without losing control, visibility, or the guest experience.
Growth at Broad River was never the hard part. Staying consistent was. Past 40 stores across the Southeast and Northeast, leadership could no longer walk every floor, and monthly financials gave only twelve chances a year to course correct.
Then came Maine. A flagship greenfield store 1,300 miles from home meant every training, hiring, and logistics decision had to be solved before the doors opened, with no store to train inside and no driving over to check.
For a company that runs on reports, that gap mattered. Leadership needed one trusted view of every store, from the Carolinas to Maine, without waiting on a monthly close or a walk-through. Each new location added more data, more people to train, and more distance between the people making decisions and the stores living with them.
Charlie Malouf’s team had a blueprint for disciplined growth. The question was whether the systems underneath it could keep pace: one platform for every store, one source of truth for the numbers, and a way to stand up a brand-new market without starting from scratch each time.
Broad River lives and dies on reports. The data warehouse gives us the ability to create those reports and see the business in very close to real time.
04 · The Solution
One platform, every market
One cloud platform, one data warehouse, and a repeatable playbook for every new market.
A Platform They Won’t OutgrowWhy Broad River Bet on STORIS in 2015
Broad River Retail converted to STORIS in 2015 and was an early adopter of NextGen, drawn to a cloud-based system built for speed. VP of IT and Business Intelligence Corey Edens has watched the platform mature without ever feeling like the vendor was chasing trends. “I think the platform itself, at its core, is probably one of the most stable ERPs that I’ve been around in my tenure in it,” he says. “You’re responsibly evaluating the needs of the industry, not just jumping on the latest trend of technology that exists out there.”
That stability matters more every year Broad River adds a location. Associate Director of Retail Technology Timothy Sobkowiak, who leads new-store implementation, says every rollout comes down to the same due diligence: how many distribution centers are in play, how many locations, and whether the financial mapping lines up cleanly, because STORIS touches every realm of the business. “At this point it’s almost plug and play for us,” says Stacey McCormick, Executive VP of Retail Performance and Merchandising. “We’re all on the same system, we all train on the same system, we all operate on the same system.”
At this point it’s almost plug and play for us. We’re all on the same system, we all train on the same system, we all operate on the same system.
STORIS Products Used
Clarity, Not GuessworkA Centralized Data Warehouse Behind Every Decision
As Broad River’s store count climbed past 40, walking every floor stopped being realistic. What STORIS gave the company that it didn’t have before, Edens says, is first and foremost the data warehouse — a centralized repository of historical and open sales data the BI team draws on for its own reporting, independent of a walk-through.
That visibility feeds directly into leadership’s decision cadence. Look at financials once a month, and a business gets twelve chances a year to course correct. With a daily snapshot from STORIS’s business intelligence tools, Broad River turned twelve annual decision points into 365 — insight, and the ability to change, improve, or double down, every single day.
Training a New Market from ScratchThe Sandbox That Makes a Remote Opening Feel Familiar
In an existing market, a new hire can train inside a store that’s already running. In Maine, the store wasn’t built yet, so training happened in a hotel conference room, with new hires learning a system they’d never touched in a building they’d never see until opening week. Associate Director Timothy Sobkowiak’s team solved it with an end-to-end sandbox environment that duplicates the new store’s exact setup inside a test account. “The functionality in that test account is the exact same as the live account,” he says. “They’re being trained exactly how it’s going to look.”
Regional Manager Dana Mallory, who helped lead the Maine launch, says the company leaned on seasoned leaders who moved up from the Southeast to give new “memory makers” a model to learn from. “It’s really important that our new memory makers here in Maine get to work with seasoned leaders who have seen this done,” she says, “and we felt like we had a very reliable platform to grow from with STORIS.”
Operational readiness means that when the customer walks in the door, we’re ready to go — our team knows the product, the process, what’s going on today.
05 · Watch the Video
Hear directly from the team
Six leaders on how STORIS powers a 40-store, multi-state operation.
06 · The Outcome
Results on the floor and in the numbers
What the team sees on the sales floor and in the numbers.
On the Sales FloorNextGen Adoption Is Closing In on 90%
Executive VP of Retail Performance and Merchandising Stacey McCormick has watched NextGen change the pace of a sale. Home furnishings consultants can spend an hour or two with a guest, and NextGen speeds up exactly the part that used to slow everything down at the end. “With NextGen being launched and utilized in our stores, we’ve seen our speed of transaction decrease dramatically,” she says. “You’ve made your decision, you want to sign on the dotted line and move on.”
Company-wide adoption is now close to 90%, and McCormick says she’s no longer fighting people to get off the old system. “Our sales team members are able to access information easier. They can put things in a cart, process payment — it just speeds up the guest experience and makes it more efficient. I think that’s always great for a retail business.”
Data and systems give us clarity. Without clarity you can’t have trust, and you can’t have alignment.
40+ Stores on One System
From the Carolinas to a greenfield launch in Maine, every location trains, sells, and reports on the same STORIS platform — no exceptions market to market.
~90% NextGen Adoption
Company-wide adoption of NextGen point of sale has decreased transaction time dramatically and simplified the end of every sale.
365 Data-Driven Decisions Per Year
A centralized data warehouse and daily BI snapshots replaced monthly financial reviews, giving leadership near real-time visibility into every store.
A Playbook for the Next 40
A sandbox training environment and a scalable, plug-and-play implementation model make each new market launch feel like the last one.
07 · The Impact
Ready for what’s next
A playbook for the next 40 stores, and a plan to double sales by 2030.
Ready for What’s NextDoubling the Business by 2030
Broad River put together a new plan heading into 2025: double company sales by 2030, roughly $250 million today to $500 million. Charlie Malouf says the technology and the strategy are already mapped out to get there. What a company at that pace needs from a partner, he says, is scalability paired with agility. “The fact that you’re able to be nimble and agile, and allow us to have a level of curiosity to investigate different technologies — to me, that’s what makes a true partner moving forward.”
STORIS has been that partner for a decade, giving Broad River the confidence to keep opening doors in markets it has never operated in before — and the systems to make each one feel, to the guest, exactly like the ones down the street.
Retail is a team sport. It doesn’t matter how good one leader is — it’s really the collective. The relationship, the trust, the partnership: that’s really what this is all about.
