NewStore took the till off the counter.

Start with the Associate App How I led the design org

Using it daily: 60k+
Countries: 40+
GMV on it: $10B+
Kind: Omnichannel retail platform

In short

NewStore is the software a shop floor runs on, and I spent nine years designing it.

Point of sale, stock, orders and the customer’s history, in one app in an associate’s hand, plus the tools head office runs the same orders with. 60,000 people open it at work every day, at 90+ brands in 40+ countries. I joined in 2017 as a senior product designer, took the design function over in 2018 when there were no designers left in it, and led it as Director from 2024: product design, research, content and communication design.

The company: 2015founded by Stephan Schambach, who also built Intershop and Demandware200+people4offices: Boston, London, Amsterdam and Berlin

The brands running it

The work

What I designed, and what happened to it after.

Four products, and what happened to them after I handed each one over. The team owns the measurement as well as the work: every number has one named owner and half an hour a month, and the ones we do not trust yet are published saying so rather than quietly counted. That system is on the design leadership page.

The Associate App

The till leaves the counter, so a sale finishes wherever the conversation is. I designed the first version, then handed it over and directed it.

50,000 associates

Omnichannel Manager

Head office, support and finance all need the same order and all want a different screen. This is the one screen they can argue in front of.

10,000 daily users

newstore.com

The whole company website, rebuilt in eight months. Designed and coded in house by the design team.

1,000 commits

The documentation

New information architecture, a CMS so people across the company could write, an AI answering questions inside it, and an MCP connection so a model can be handed the whole thing as context.

171,400 views a year

Before this existed

The shop knew less than its own website.

Associates shared a computer at a fixed station, pointed at the till. The software was not built for anybody to enjoy using and nobody expected it to be, and the brand that owned the shop found out what had sold weeks after it sold.

Meanwhile the customer standing in front of them was holding a phone that knew more about the stock than they did. Online there were ratings, reviews, every detail and every size. Walk through the door and none of it was there: nobody could tell you whether it was in the back, and ordering it for you meant walking you over to a computer.

Three problems, and underneath they are one: the shop could not see.

Apple had already shown people what a shop feels like when the till is in a hand. Retailers could not buy that from anyone. They built it themselves, and it was usually bad.

A shop assistant standing on the floor of a bright boutique, scanning the tag on a jacket a customer is holding up, using a phone in her hand — Drag it. On the left, one till and everybody waiting for it. On the right, the same sale finished wherever the customer happens to be standing. Both generated, not photographed.

A queue of customers holding clothes and waiting at a fixed shop counter, while one assistant works at a black point of sale terminal with a receipt printer and a tangle of cables — Drag it. On the left, one till and everybody waiting for it. On the right, the same sale finished wherever the customer happens to be standing. Both generated, not photographed.

Five areas

Once the counter went, the rest followed.

Take the till off the counter and the rest is consequence. The counter was where the conversation with a customer ended; move the till and it does not have to end there. The money had to move into the hand with it. And once an associate can walk the floor with the whole catalogue, every shop is also a warehouse: what is on its shelves can be sold to somebody in another city and posted from there.

Clienteling, which is keeping a relationship with a customer between visits, came during COVID when nobody could come in. A shop is expensive and the way you get more out of one is to let the people in it sell past its four walls, which turned out to give a local store a relationship with its customers that it never had.

I led the design across all five. The teams built them, the retailers ran them, and these are the numbers those retailers report on NewStore’s own pages.

Two people outside a wooden cabin on a snowy mountainside, one holding out a phone to the other, who is carrying a snowboard

A shop on a mountain

Burton put a hut on a mountain and sold snowboards out of it.

You try a board, you check out on the associate’s phone, and it is at your house by the time you get back. Nobody designed that. It is what a shop becomes once the till stops being furniture, and a sports brand worked it out before we did.

Burton is the customer who goes first. When Apple opened Tap to Pay on iPhone to software like ours, they were one of four brands running it on NewStore in September 2022, and every one of these experiments started with somebody there being willing to try it in a real shop.

No counter to stand behind and no terminal to carry, so the shop can be anywhere the customers already are. The picture is generated rather than photographed.

The hard part

Nobody in a store chose this app.

It was handed to them at the start of a shift. Nobody downloads this because they liked the screenshots and nobody is in a mood to learn it, so every second of friction is paid for in every store at once, by somebody being judged on how fast the queue moves.

Which is why easy is not a finish on this product, it is the product. A team has to be productive on it in an afternoon, and one of them, VEJA, trains a whole store in about two hours.

14m 35s

median, from an associate’s first login to their first completed sale.

An afternoon turned out to be generous. Nine in ten get there before their first day is out.

On the floor

The people who were handed it.

The whole page turns on designing for someone with no say in it. This is that someone, on NewStore’s own page, in their own words. It is the only review that counts.

“It’s fast, user friendly, logical design”
Store associateR.M.Williams
“Customers are happy to pay do the payment on the device and it's quick”
Store associateClarks
“Being able To Complete refunds as a seamless service to customers”
Store associateWhite Stuff
“It’s so easy to use and a really useful addition to the store”
Store associateFootasylum
“It is fast and helps with the flow of the sale”
Store associateLorna Jane

More of them on NewStore’s POS page

What they say

Engineering, product and marketing, on the same person.

Benjamin HoskinsChief Technology Officer, NewStore

What everyone else said

Nine years later

What designing for people with no say taught me.

When somebody has no choice about using your software, every design argument gets settled on the floor rather than in the review. A second you did not remove is paid a thousand times before lunch. A screen that needs explaining is worked around by Friday, and you find out from a workaround, not from a survey.

It is the most honest feedback loop I have worked in, and it set a bar I still use: a whole team should be able to learn the thing in an afternoon.

I build my own products now, for people who choose them freely and can delete them on a bad day. I hold those to the same bar. It turns out the discipline you learn from a captive audience is exactly the one you need when you do not have one.