How Enactor got its start,
and why we still build differently

We started Enactor as five people in an office above a Thai restaurant in London, writing point-of-sale software because we thought there was a better way to do it than what was on the market at the time.

Back in the 1970s and 80s, POS and store systems were hardwired: proprietary hardware, proprietary software, built by a handful of manufacturers. That changed through the 1990s, as hardware and software separated into a best-of-breed model and dedicated software vendors emerged, writing in procedural languages like C, C++ and Pascal. Those systems were capable and configurable, but they were also standalone: they didn’t talk to each other, and they weren’t built for a connected world. The 2000s changed things again. New applications, written in flexible, object-oriented languages like Java, brought a richness and connectivity that hadn’t existed before. By the 2010s, we wanted to go further still: not just configurable, but something our clients, and our own team, could change without touching the core code underneath it. That’s the low-code environment we still build on today, with tools designed specifically to keep adapting as retail changes.

Becoming a genuinely international business, rather than a UK-only one, was probably our biggest turning point. It’s one thing to sell in your home market. It’s another to operate across dozens of countries and continents, and across every kind of retailer, and still keep the complexity and flexibility that different clients need. That’s what forced us to grow up as a company.

In the early days, that made us technically interesting to clients rather than mainstream. What’s changed since is the market, not us: as retail has moved through unified commerce into omnichannel, the approach we built years ago, composable systems brought together without sacrificing integrity, reliability or security, looks a lot like what initiatives such as the MACH Alliance are now asking the whole industry to do.

None of that matters if it doesn’t help retailers, so it’s worth being plain about what we’re actually trying to do. Our mission is to help retailers achieve competitive advantage: more efficient businesses, better-served customers, and, if we’re honest about it, retail that’s more interesting and more fun to run.

That mission matters more now than when we started. Retailers across every category, luxury or value, fashion or DIY, are operating on much lower margins than they were ten or twenty years ago. We don’t have a silver bullet for that. What we can offer is long-term flexibility: software that adapts as the pressures change, so retailers aren’t forced to throw away what they’ve already built every time the market shifts.

We wanted to build something that truly changed how systems were delivered in retail, not just on day one, but for as long as retail keeps changing.

Mike Carrell Founder, Enactor