Description
Welcome to Veras Retail! New website, new brand, and new capabilities – we’ve got a lot of explaining to do, so I’ll get right to it.
First, our new name, Veras Retail. While we are retaining our legal name of Zoftec, LLC, we will be doing business as Veras Retail from this point forward. The reason for the change will become clear (if it isn’t already).
As for how we came up with the new name and new brand – we worked with the creative and talented team at Conversiv (www.conversiv.com) to understand our company’s market and culture, and build a new brand from the ground up that reflects
who we are and what we aspire to be.
The name “Veras” doesn’t specifically have any meaning, though it does contain the Latin root word “ver”, meaning “truth”. That’s not a bad place for us to start – we have always prided ourselves on being transparent and forthright with
customers, but the meaning of “truth” goes beyond that context – it speaks to our focus on the retail “Moment of Truth”, that point in the store where the customer decides to buy.
It’s also no accident that we’ve chosen to be “Veras Retail” and not “Veras Technologies”, “Veras Software”, or some other variation on the theme. We wanted to make sure that there was no doubt of where our focus and our passion lies.
Our tagline, “It Starts at the Store”, further reflects our mindset. I don’t like buzzwords, but there’s been a lot of talk recently about the “customer journey” in retail. While there’s no doubt that today’s shopper is an omnichannel
shopper (and our solutions support and enable that truth), we firmly believe that for almost every retailer, the customer’s journey starts in the store, with those first impressions of the retailer’s brand cemented by the first greeting,
the first browse down the aisles, and the first purchase at the point-of-sale.
(As for the iconography in our new logo, it’s a bit of a Rorschach test, as different people see different things – but we think that it captures the optimism and fun that we bring to our work every day).
At the risk of being accused of burying the lede, the reason we chose this time to rebrand ourselves is huge news in and of itself – our acquisition of the JDA store systems - JDA Store, Win/DSS, and JDA CRM. With this transaction, our
business will fundamentally shift from the predominantly services-based model that Zoftec has had since its founding in 2008, to a product-based business as Veras. When Rohit founded the company in 2008, his vision was to build software
for retailers that solved problems in unique ways. Over many coffees (and a few beers), Rohit and I would brainstorm possibilities to answer retail problems from the mundane (“how can I be sure that the promotion that goes live tomorrow
will ring correctly at the POS?”) to the profound (“how can I understand the customer’s behavior in the store when they don’t make a purchase?” – the BIG question that still drives us today).
Now, with a suite of proven products and a new set of customers to accompany them, we have both the financial model that will allow us to place bets and make investments to solve those problems for a greater number of retailers, as well
as having the platform components of POS, inventory, and CRM to use as the scaffolding upon which we can build new and exciting capabilities.
If you’re a current Zoftec customer, hopefully you’re excited about the news. Rest assured, our pursuit of new customers and investment in new features will not come at the expense of customer service – we wouldn’t be where we are without
you, we thank you for your business and support, and we hope you look forward to growing with us in the future. If you’re new to Veras Retail, we look forward to meeting you, understanding your needs, and sharing our roadmap and vision
with you. We’ll be sharing additional details about our growing company and evolving plans, both here on our website as well as direct outreach to all of our current and new customers.
Our goal is simple – for Veras Retail to be the leading provider of in-store systems to specialty retail. In our case, because we don’t answer to shareholders or outside investors, when we say “leading”, we don’t mean the biggest - we
mean the best.