PacSun's Digital Journey- Innovation Delivered

PacSun, a leading retailer of emerging brands and trending fashion, caters to an engaged community of inspired youth, through its strong digital presence, in-person activations, and a strong retail presence across its 300 nationwide stores. Committed to bolstering their omnichannel sales capabilities and delivering unified customer shopping experiences, PacSun recently added Manhattan Active® Point of Sale (POS) to its existing portfolio of Manhattan’s industry-leading supply chain and omnichannel commerce solutions. With Manhattan Active® Order Management, Manhattan Active® Store Inventory and Fulfillment, and now Point of Sale, PacSun operates a suite of unified commerce applications that provides associates with intuitive experiences across all selling, service, and fulfillment functions, while providing operational consistency, agility, and profitability across all channels and stores.

Originally deployed in 2016, PacSun was looking to solve the challenges it was facing with its legacy point of sale software. Extensive customizations, monolithic code, and a poor associate experience opened the door for many things to go wrong. Victor Seanez, PacSun’s Senior Director of ERP and Business Applications, mentioned that at times PacSun could have 300 open support tickets in single a day, relating to functional issues with promotions, returns, and checkout. The on-premise system also operated in silo, disconnected from other mission-critical systems, causing inefficiencies for both employees and customers. Simple tasks, like processing an in-store return for an online purchase, could take up to 15 minutes, as associates had to manually search through multiple systems to find the order before they could even begin processing the return.

Realizing that both their associate and customer experiences were suffering, PacSun decided to modernize their in-store shopping experiences with Manhattan Active Point of Sale. In September 2024, the retailer finished a five-month pilot of Manhattan’s cloud-native POS offering, allowing for the new system to be in place across all its stores in time for peak season. Although this represented an aggressive timeline that would make many retailers anxious, PacSun was confident in Manhattan’s ability to deploy in time successfully.

One of the main goals for this upgrade was to minimize disruptions to the stores. PacSun strategically started with implementation at two stores with low transaction volumes followed by a high-volume store. Armed with learnings, PacSun was confident that the new system would function as expected and scale to meet the demands of high-pressure environments. The POS transition was then pushed across 30 stores each day with a goal to complete migration between Labor Day and two weeks before Black Friday. PacSun also made it a priority to use as much of Manhattan’s base code as possible.

While the main goal was to deliver more personalized, modern shopping experiences to consumers at the most important in-store touchpoint, other benefits to the new system included ease of learning. The less than one hour training video proved sufficient for associates to learn and quickly adopt the system. This eliminated the need for lengthy and time-consuming in-person training and resulted in significant cost savings related to associate enablement and travel between locations.