Clarity & Success itself began in Germany in 1995, being founded by Florian Henkel to provide goldsmiths and jewellers with a software package that would help them track and manage inventory and maximise their profits.
The company’s success led them to expand into other geographical markets and in 2002, Henkel approached family-friend John Russell to start an operation in the UK, where he had started to win sales, the first being Galio Jewellers in St Albans after they had seen the system at the Inhorgenta trade fair in Germany.
John, whose background was in Sales and Marketing having been MD for a German Company in the fastenings Industry, set about setting up the new office and in January of 2003 began trading from a summerhouse in John’s garden.
Clarity & Success was officially launched at the NEC in February 2003 and gained sufficient new business for John to be confident the Company had a secure future in the UK.
John was shortly joined by daughter Karen who, after an 18 year career with the NatWest bank was looking for a change of direction and who today is managing director not only of the UK facility, but also the Germany and Netherlands offices of Clarity & Success.
Success came quickly to the new team, with Neil & Barker becoming the first jeweller to adopt the system from the new operation, being still an active customer 20 years on.
By the end of the first year, Clarity & Success had signed up more customers across the breadth of the UK, from Truro up to Glasgow, Dublin to Hull and Ammanford in Wales to Tunbridge Wells, which considering the competition in the market at the time was an impressive achievement for a new company and relatively new brand.
Many of those customers are still with Clarity & Success today, including Galio, Kingshill Jewelllers, Freeman Jewellers, Mark A Linley, Sunderdass & Sons, R A Braithwaite and Craven Jewellers.
Early on, Clarity & Success began supplying systems to many of the Pandora franchise shops, which became an important part of the business, but never at the expense of its traditional retail jewellery customers, who continued to grow in number.
By this time, the UK office had grown sufficiently to warrant larger offices and in 2009 moved into new premises in the White House in Stafford. At this time, several key members of staff joined the Company that remain today. Adam Egan joined in 2009 fresh from University and now heads up the global development management. Adele Edwards joined in 2010 and controls the accounts for the UK and Netherlands as well as full reporting to the Holding Company and acts as Office Manager in the UK. Adele is also of course grand-daughter of John and daughter of Karen and continues the family legacy. Oliver Bundy joined in 2012 and is now Global Support Manager giving Clarity & Success a secure future with a long standing, knowledgeable, strong management team.
Meanwhile, the parent company had been expanding with sales in The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria, Sweden, Italy and Spain and other countries around the world.
Part of that success came from working with numerous jewellery brands to supply data files to Clarity customers to make adding item data and prices a simple matter of importing a spreadsheet, eliminating time-consuming manual entry and the risk of typing errors.
The latest version of the Clarity & Success software, Evolution, was launched to the market in 2018, and is now growing as both existing clients and new customers adopted the new software.
By 2019, Karen was looking for expansion in the UK, which came through acquisition of the then market-leader Bransom Retail Systems. Although the temptation would have been to force the Bransom clients to switch from the Bransom bsmart software to Clarity & Success, Karen chose to work with those clients and continue support of bsmart for as long as technologically possible, and help them move over to Evolution when it is the right time for them to do so.
The acquisition undoubtedly made the company the largest supplier to the UK market.
Today, Clarity & Success UK occupies The Stables, a newly-outfitted suite of offices on the same complex, into which it moved at the end of 2022. From there, the management of the software development takes place, working with the software teams in several locations.
“This means we can react to customer needs and changes in requirements quickly and effectively” says Karen. “We have our roadmaps set out for 2023 and beyond, and we have been holding very fruitful focus groups with a broad cross-section of clients to consolidate those ideas and plans.”
Although Clarity & Success itself is now owned by Remira, a large German supplier of POS systems to a range of retail industries, the day-to-day running of the company comes down to Karen and her teams.
“We know our market better than anyone, and we’re allowed to just get on with it, and the signs are that the executive management at Remira are very happy with the way we’re going”.
And the future?
“We have the backing and resources of a large group to call on, a superb team of developers, support and sales employees and some innovative plans in our roadmap. We stay true to our focus on retail jewellery and pawnbroking and fully intend to be around for at least another 20 years” concludes Karen.