There is an unwritten rule in luxury retail: you never leave your client. Not to check inventory in the back. Not to pull up a client’s purchase history on a desktop. The moment you disappear, even for two minutes, the experience breaks. And at Tom Ford Fashion, a broken experience is not an option.  

For more than 14 years, Tom Ford Fashion has partnered with KWI to build the retail foundation that makes that standard possible. What started as a foundational POS relationship has evolved into something more: a partnership built on retail expertise that has reshaped how Tom Ford Fashion serves clients on the floor, manages inventory across doors, and gives leadership real-time visibility into the business.

Leaving the floor, before

Before KWI’s mobile POS (mPOS) reached Tom Ford Fashion stores, associates had a fundamental problem: completing a transaction or looking up a product meant leaving the client to do it. 

Style locator required a laptop. Purchase history lived on a desktop in the back office. Transactions over a certain SKU count or dollar threshold would glitch on legacy registers, forcing associates to start over. If nine people needed to look something up at the same time, they were competing for one device. 

“Imagine nine salespeople trying to do the same thing, and the only laptop available was a shipping and receiving computer,” says Jappy Valderas, Operations Manager at Tom Ford’s Beverly Hills flagship. “It just wasn’t efficient.”  

Kevin Woods, General Manager at Tom Ford’s Woodbury store says

The floor transformed

KWI’s mobile POS (mPOS) changed the game. Associates now carry iPads. Every client interaction (product lookup, purchase history, checkout) happens in the client’s presence, in real time. 

Style locator, once a multi-step desktop process, now lives at an associate’s fingertips. Browse lets them find styles suited to a specific client without ever stepping away. Inventory availability across all locations appears instantly. Purchase history is accessible before a high-value client even walks through the door, allowing associates to prepare rather than react.  

The results are tangible: training new staff on mPOS takes roughly an hour, a fraction of what was required to learn the patchwork of disconnected systems it replaced. Transactions that previously hit a SKU ceiling now process without friction.  A client building an entire wardrobe in a single visit never has to wait while an associate steps away to process the sale – a process that can take 10 minutes or more. 

Jappy Valderas, Operations Manager at Tom Ford’s Beverly Hills flagship store says

Behind the scenes: inventory that keeps pace

The floor experience depends on what happens behind it. That’s where KWI’s impact on Tom Ford Fashion’s buying and operations teams tells its own story. 

Laura Bopp, Senior Director of Women’s Buying, describes what order entry looked like before KWI Merchandising: hundreds of SKUs across 15 stores, entered manually, one by one. “It was probably three to four hours of keying,” she says. “And a lot of mistakes, obviously.” 

KWI Merchandising eliminated that. So did the reporting depth KWI makes available, including a sales-by-transaction report with item-level client detail that Bopp had not encountered at other brands. “You can get reporting down to the client level,” she says. “The detailed level of reporting that you need.” She also found a new level of coordination across the business: “The stores could run the same report I was seeing, and I could see what the stores were seeing, like yesterday’s sales or live receipts, so you’re speaking the same language, in real time.” 

The KWI Snapshot mobile app extends that visibility to leadership. “I’m a fan of the KWI Snapshot app,” says Simon Kendall, President, Americas at Tom Ford Fashion. “It gives me a real-time view into my retail performance in a quick and easy-to-digest way. I appreciate that KWI incorporated a lot of my feedback into the development of the app. I use it every day, and often 3-4x per day.  In a fast-paced environment, it’s critical to understand performance and opportunity in real time.”  

For store operations, cycle count capabilities replaced pen and paper, giving teams a faster and more accurate picture of on-hand inventory. The article activity report lets teams trace inventory movement between locations, answering questions like “I know it was here yesterday; where did it go?” without making phone calls or guessing.  Tom Ford Fashion executives estimate that significant operational time has been saved versus the prior manual processes. 

A partnership, not just a platform

What Tom Ford Fashion’s team returns to, again and again, is not any single feature. It’s about the relationship. 

“We know people by name,” says Woods. “You know who to contact for a specific problem. The tech on the other end would know your voice. ‘Hey, Kevin, how are you?’ That’s a different feel than starting from scratch every time.” 

For Bopp, the difference is also the relationship. When KWI’s Customer Success Manager joined her account, the team discovered reports they hadn’t known existed and found faster paths to the answers they needed. “My favorite thing about KWI is the great customer service,” Bopp says. “The updates made were always centered around client feedback.” 

For anyone evaluating a new platform, Woods has a clear message for those tempted to start lean and figure out the rest later: the system you choose sets the ceiling for what your team can do and what your clients will experience. “I would suggest to anyone: it’s an amazing system. It’s your retail system. Pay for what you want. Learn what it can do. Don’t try to skimp.”  

Fourteen years in, Tom Ford Fashion is still finding new ways to use it: floor transactions that would have been impossible on legacy systems, inventory visibility that connects stores and corporate in real time, and a client experience built on never having to say, “let me go check on that.” The technology rewards commitment, and so does the team behind it.

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