About

We did not just think of a cool add-on for the retail/hospitality industry,

this is our life's work - we're serious!

platform + opus = platopus

Our Story

We have been in the business of digital transformation for over twenty years and during that time we've helped our many customers with just about every digital thingamabob*, widget and add-on you could imagine for both front and back of house ... we hate to sound conceited, but you name it and we have probably built it. 

We didn't just do this work for anyone, we've been lucky to work with some of the most dynamic and successful business in the UK; Pret A Manger, Itsu, Leon, Bills Restaurants, Greggs, Gail's, Coco di Mama, Cafe Rouge, Eat, Bella Italia to name a few, also many non-hospitality businesses such as Charles Tyrwhitt, Forbidden Planet, Frieze Art Fair. 

We've won awards, spoken at conferences, sold millions of products, helped open hundreds of locations, looked after our customer's customers, seen a lot of kitchens and drank a LOT of coffee! 

Missing Features ...

Twenty years is a long time and of course retail and hospitality technology is very different today. There is no need to build everything from scratch. There are many super apps and services out there, everyone's business has a few of them, but your business is unique and you want your experience to be just a little more tailored that these apps offer.


You have a great POS system, but it's customer pickup system is not great. You have a great ordering system but it's not so great in the kitchen (you need it to work in a specific way). You have several ordering systems and want to get sales data for all of them. You  have a great website, but it's allergen information is not very helpful.


In short as great as these apps and services are, they are usually missing a few tasty features. Not everyone needs them (that's usually why they are missing) but when you do need them they show up like a big hole in your workflow. Some of the requirements are technical, some of them operational and some are just plain human.

Platopus Retail

At heart we are technologists and problem solvers, and we came to realise that these same missing features surface over and over again, no matter who the customer, no matter how organised (or disorganised).


So we decided to build Platopus Retail, a platform, an eco-system, a call-it-what-you-will, which would give Operators some super-useful features which they could easily add to their existing systems.


Platopus Retail follows some core principles we believe in; digital transformation should be easy, everything should connect and just work, systems should be as reliable as the sun rising in the morning, operators should not be tied to one partner for any service, and above all your customers come first - make them happy and everything else follows.


We believe it should not take a long time to get something working, the longer and more complex a roll-out is, the less enthusiastic everyone will be about it and the higher the chance of failure. We try to produce technology which improves things for everyone and at the same time offers the path of least resistance.


What you are looking at is the end-result - we hope you like it, will try it or just speak to us about it. We are sure it will change your your way of thinking about transformation and subsequently change your business, hopefully without you even trying to, after all - it's our life's work.

* yes we really did say thingamabob but you could call it any number of things such as a  whatchamacallit, a thingy or something more specific such as an allergen guide, customer pickup system, kitchen display, website, training system, e-commerce system, how-to card, customer portal, recipe system, labelling, reporting, customer feedback, ticketing, shop opening system ... you get the idea.
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