The New Stand Improves Days and Mobility

Jul 1, 2021 | Case Study

The New Stand is in the business of improving your day. A newsstand for the social media age, it calls itself part bodega, part blog. Originating in the New York City subway in 2015, the small locations are now all over New York streets, office buildings and even ferries. New Stand also has a location at Los Angeles International Airport and plans to keep expanding.

“Being a day-improvement company means being in service of people and helping to make their days just that little bit better,” says New Stand founder and COO Lex Kendall. “New Stand is here to solve modern pain points. Everything from charging or basic grab-and-go products to really inspiring and uplifting content that we push through our mobile app.”

Powering the sales of snacks, drinks, interesting items, cool new gadgets, phone chargers (and very few newspapers) at these small stands is Teamwork Commerce, which provides point-of-sale devices and a cloud-based backend system to support The New Stand’s ever-changing product line. New Stand employees run Teamwork on iPads that provide full-featured customer checkout capabilities.

Teamwork also works with The New Stand’s app, which allows customers to receive loyalty points and special discounts alongside a daily digest of interesting news articles.

“Teamwork has enabled us to build a business in multiple formats from Day 1,” Kendall says of the various configurations of New Stand locations.

Kendall also credits Teamwork with supporting some of their more innovative ideas. “Things like self-checkout built into our member app were only possible with Teamwork,” he says. “We had to figure out how to make the wallet in our app sync with our stores and Teamwork enabled that. There’s a whole host of things going on in the background that you don’t see, but that you obviously need a really strong tech partner to be able to execute.” The New Stand also offers an innovative “swap charge” device that provides a phone charger that customers can borrow like a library book for 72 hours for free.

“We had to figure out how to be able checkout a swap charge and have that payment integration. Teamwork allowed for that,” Kendall says. “Teamwork’s been an amazing partner to keep up with us and allow us extensibility inside our platform. It allows us to add features, other partners and to evolve constantly.” Kendall credits the flexibility of the system — which uses off-the-shelf iOS hardware — as a key component of current and future expansion plans.

“One of the great things about Teamwork is that we can start up a new location so easily. It’s really plug-and-play for us, which is essential for a company that’s expanding as fast as ours is.” Kendall says. “For us it’s as simple as setting up a mobile hotspot, turning on the iPad, configuring the system, and Teamwork is live and ready across the entire stack of our service.”

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