Yellow Shoes is a retail business with 500 employees across more than 80 locations throughout Canada. Until recently, each store created its weekly employee schedule by hand and posted it on a bulletin board in the back. With Evolia, the company was able to automate schedule creation, shift swapping, and availability tracking, saving managers several hours per week. Store managers now also have real-time visibility into labour budgets.

Results since implementing Evolia:

• Several hours saved per week by managers across 80+ locations
• Real-time budget control by store, with tighter labour cost management
• Fewer scheduling errors and last-minute adjustments
• Same-day absences are now filled in minutes instead of requiring a chain of calls and texts
• Greater employee satisfaction through mobile access to schedules

A Solution for Multi-Location Retailers

Yellow Shoes is a Canadian retailer that has been fitting families for a century. The chain operates more than 80 stores across the country, employs 500 people, and has built its reputation on customer service, product quality, and its commitment to the local community.

That scale comes with significant operational demands. Every store needs a weekly schedule. Every schedule requires knowing employee availability, managing last-minute changes, getting manager sign-off, and giving employees a way to view it. Multiply that across 80 stores and the workload adds up fast.

The Problem: Paper Schedules, Endless Phone Calls, and Constant Surprises

Before Evolia, scheduling at Yellow Shoes worked the way it had in retail for decades. Managers created schedules by hand on paper. They verified employee availability by phone. Then they printed the finalized schedule and pinned it to the bulletin board in the back of the store — hoping every employee would actually go check it.

The same small problems repeated themselves week after week, store after store: missed shifts because someone hadn’t checked the board, confusion about who was available and when, endless back-and-forth to fill a same-day absence, manual tracking of hours worked per store to stay on budget.

What Yellow Shoes needed: a Canadian-based, mobile-friendly tool that both managers and employees could use without a steep learning curve and one that included proper labour budget tracking.

The Solution: Evolia

Yellow Shoes chose Evolia for four reasons that mattered to their business:

• A Canadian provider that understands the local market and works in French
• A user-friendly platform that store managers and frontline employees can master without intensive training
• A mobile app that lets employees view schedules and submit their availability from their phone
• Real-time budget visibility by store, so head office can align staffing with each location’s revenue

The demo confirmed what the team had hoped for, and implementation followed quickly. While software rollouts often go sideways at this stage, that wasn’t the case here.

The support didn’t stop at go-live. Sandra describes the Evolia team as available, responsive, and proactive, both during the rollout and in day-to-day platform use. That continuity made a real difference as stores began adopting the system.

Employees adapted to the software and the app quickly. The two things they appreciated most: no more bulletin board, and no more phone calls just to sort out availability.

The Results

The operational impact was felt quickly, across three areas.

Time savings for store managers. 

Building, adjusting, and communicating schedules previously took each manager several hours per week. Across 80+ stores, that represents a significant portion of payroll spent on administrative tasks rather than selling, coaching, or running the store.

Better labour cost control. 

Per-store labour budgets give head office real-time visibility into how resources are being used. Fewer errors, fewer last-minute adjustments, and a closer match between planned hours and actual store needs.

Faster resolution when the unexpected happens. 

Same-day absences are the clearest example.

For employees, the benefits are straightforward: the platform respects their time. They can check their schedule on their phone, update their availability without picking up the phone, and request shift swaps without bothering a manager on a Sunday night.

For retailers considering making the switch, Sandra is direct:

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