Beauty Bakerie Profile

Cashmere Nicole began processing cosmetic orders from her kitchen in 2011. After battling cancer, raising her daughter as a single mom, and a feature on Beyonce’s website, Nicole had Beauty Bakerie, a cruelty-free and vegan cosmetics brand. The company was up and running into a fully-fledged operation by the fall of 2015, with Nicole as CEO and Founder. Today, the brand boasts 8 product collections with 7 retailers in 40 countries.

Solution Partners: ShipWorks, Shopify 

Market: International 

Industry: Beauty 

Challenge

Limited space and unorganized workflow

Nicole wanted Beauty Bakerie to serve as a vehicle to empower women ‘to be better not bitter’ about everything. The cosmetics were a way to tell women that anything is possible. In order to do that, she had to find a way to expand her shipping options outside of just USPS, while also expanding outside of her kitchen. To grow the business, Chief Logistics Officer Nicholas Lara says the newly expanded company decided to bring distribution in-house and utilize ShipWorks and SkuVault as their primary order and inventory management systems. 

Solution

Automated processes

Beauty Bakerie expanded across new product collections and existing product lines, so they needed a combination of systems to automate workflows to accommodate their growing SKUs. “SkuVault would allow us to manage everything we had in-house and sum up the value, and also to track the movement of all the products that are moving to different locations,” Lara says. “Prior to using SkuVault, everything was QC’d manually, so we now get to track who was processing the order, and when, and how fast, so all the metrics and information we wanted to track is available for analytics.”

After testing out a few shipping softwares, Beauty Bakerie found the best fit to be ShipWorks. Again, the automated processes were the true selling point. “The filters and rules are my favorite part about ShipWorks because it allows us to automate certain workflows and processes so we can eliminate the room for manual error as our orders increase or change,” he says.

“Being able to have the peace of mind to go online and check what’s happening on the inventory side and where we stand on orders is very helpful.”

 

Without the partnership of ShipWorks and SkuVault, Lara says their direct-to-consumer channels and B2B channels would suffer. “Being able to connect ShipWorks and SkuVault and have both of them compatible without us having to find a way to code them to speak together is very important,” he says. “It’s helpful to complete the orders, but also to go back and look at the orders for any anomalies or inefficiencies and see what happened each step of the way. Beauty Bakerie’s 99% order accuracy rates are ultimately what keep our customers coming back."

Results

Expanding business and retail space

When Beauty Bakerie got their real start and recognition in the fall of 2015, they had 40,000 Instagram followers, one product collection, and five colors. Today, they have 369,000 Instagram followers, eight product collections, and about 88 SKUs. They grew from four people in the company to 17 and expect to grow to 30 by the end of this year, with an additional three brick-and-mortar stores. With business only going up from here, Lara says Beauty Bakerie continues to find new benefits to the SkuVault and ShipWorks partnership that work to propel them forward. “To this day we’re still continuing to use and figure out what the additional features are so we can start to leverage as we grow the business, both from increasing product collections and expanding our existing lines,” he says.