How Professional Beauty Solution became an online powerhouse

Matt and Lisa Williams are the owners of Professional Beauty Solution, and not unlike a classic beauty transformation story, their business has undergone a radical transformation since they started. As  Matt recalls, “When my wife, Lisa, and I took over this business from my parents 13 years ago, we started out distributing one line of mineral makeup.”

Today, Professional Beauty Solution supplies world-class beauty brands to over 2000 salons, spas and clinics across Australia. They also  provide  salons with  all  the marketing and training needed to transform  their beauty business  into a profitable one (a holistic 360 approach!).

“Using Starshipit has helped Professional Beauty Solution future proof for growth and scalability!”

— James Stonham, PBS Warehouse Manager

The challenge: how to get orders to customers faster

James Stonham, Warehouse Manager at PBS, explains how much time they spent manually managing inventory and shipping parcels from their single warehouse in Kernell, Sydney. “Initially, when I scoped out the fulfilment workflow, I counted 50 clicks to fulfil an order.

“Using Starshipit has reduced our handling from 50 to 15 clicks. Includes, producing an order; pick & pack; generating a shipping label. ”

— James Stonham, PBS Warehouse Manager

The solution: doubling down on fulfilment and inventory automation

In order for Professional Beauty Solutions to scale successfully they decided to review their manual processes and tools to increase their capacity to ship more orders. The team decided to invest in implementing two key automation platforms, Fishbowl and Starshipit, to ensure they would be able to scale quickly and efficiently.

Fishbowl’s inventory automation allows small businesses to compete with big business

Professional Beauty Solutions implemented inventory automation software, Fishbowl, the world’s number one inventory management software for QuickBooks. Fishbowl’s rich feature set allows small businesses with fewer employees, but with large inventory, to save time by organising their store’s inventory information and keeping it up-to-date.

Fishbowl Warehouse also hosts in-depth data and their business intelligence tools help you prevent stockouts, calculate the actual cost of goods sold, and updates you on the most recent bestselling products.

Starshipit’s automation features do all the work, so you get your beauty sleep

• Address auto correction

With the help of Starshipit’s address validation feature, the number of incorrect delivery addresses has reduced considerably. This also is a huge cost savings there are hefty penalties for non-deliveries and improves overall customer experience as it improves first-time deliveries.

• Pre-defined packages

To save the team hours, they use pre-defined packages, satchels and boxes, which include the weight and dimension of the package. The team have over 35 packages saved, so this save’s having to enter the dimensions or weight every time as orders are automatically allocated to the correct size box. This saves a huge amount of time and speeds up the dispatch process.

• Bulk Print Shipping Labels

PBS also use Starshipit’s bulk print feature which allows you to easily filter and select orders per courier to bulk print 100’s of shipping labels at a time.

• Customer Tracking Notifications

The team prides themselves on delivering a premium service, so they know the importance of enhancing customer engagement and experience, so they are currently setting up Starshipit’s customer shipping notifications and branded tracking pages, which auto-send via email or SMS at 5 stages during delivery. This means your brand has 5 opportunities to engage your customer with brand messages or you can upsell or cross sell. You could even include a link to content to keep them entertained until their order arrives.

Ready to ship smart and grow faster with multi-courier automation software?

Deliver more products to more people by switching to fulfilment automation software that gives you one place to manage multiple couriers and can save you up to 50% in handling time. Starshipit also integrates with leading eCommerce platforms to make it easy to start shipping straight away. Try our 30-day trial for free, no credit card required.