How HiSmile saves hours every week with Starshipit

In just 18 months, founders Alex Tomic and Nik Mirkovic turned their humble teeth-whitening brand, HiSmile, into a $20 million global success story. With a combination of innovative social media and influencer marketing and efficient shipping automation with Starshipit, they’ve revolutionised the teeth-whitening industry.

Introduction

HiSmile began with a vision to disrupt the dental care market. After identifying various inefficiencies and customer pain points, Alex and Nik focused on creating a convenient, mess-free teeth whitening solution that resonated with a younger audience.

"We didn’t want to be another cosmetic product," Alex explains. "We wanted to represent lifestyle, happiness, and positivity."

But as every retailer knows all too well, logistics is where the rubber really meets the road, and for HiSmile, getting this crucial step right allowed them to scale to international success. Of course, this phase of the company’s growth didn’t come without its fair share of challenges.

Challenge

Key takeaways

• Managing growing order volumes across multiple systems consumed time, increased errors, and hindered HiSmile’s ability to scale efficiently.
• Rapid growth into new markets required a solution to simplify carrier selection and ensure reliable international deliveries.
• Without a centralised shipping platform, maintaining a seamless delivery experience across global markets became increasingly difficult.

As HiSmile expanded, managing their growing order volumes became increasingly complex. Their team juggled multiple systems daily, logging into Shopify to retrieve order details and then into separate carrier platforms to arrange shipments. This fragmented workflow consumed valuable time, introduced the risk of errors, and hindered their ability to scale efficiently.

HiSmile needed a platform to unify these processes, get set up for international success, and allow them to focus on what mattered most: growing their brand and delighting customers worldwide. That’s where Starshipit came in.

“At the start, we were just writing out orders but we were all about finding processes to speed things up. We researched software that could just grab the orders and do the labelling and after searching we found Starshipit who could all the things we needed,” says Alex Tomic, co-founder of HiSmile.

Solution

Key takeaways

• Starshipit centralised order management and carrier selection, reducing manual work and errors, while saving valuable time.
• The integration with DHL Express allowed HiSmile to efficiently automate international deliveries (including customs paperwork), and reduce the chance of human error.

Managing multiple platforms and carriers from one dashboard

As HiSmile expanded, the fragmented approach of managing orders across platforms and carriers became time-intensive and prone to errors, creating significant bottlenecks.

Starshipit provided the perfect solution by bringing these systems together into one centralised platform. With Starshipit, HiSmile could directly integrate their Shopify store and DHL Express account, along with other carrier partners.

This integration enabled the team to:

• Centralise order management: View and manage all orders in one dashboard, regardless of sales channel or shipping partner.
• Automate carrier selection: Automatically allocate the best carrier for each shipment based on delivery speed, cost, or other rules.
• Simplify label generation: Generate shipping labels in bulk with just a few clicks, eliminating the need to log in to separate platforms.
• Focus on their business: Using Starshipit’s pre-built, best-in-class integrations means the HiSmile team could instead put their energies into growing their business, not maintaining integrations.

By consolidating their operations into Starshipit, HiSmile not only saved hours of manual work each week but also positioned themselves to scale globally with confidence. The streamlined process reduced the risk of errors, allowing the team to focus on enhancing their customer experience and growing their brand.

“Starshipit offered the easy integration we were looking for, they integrated with our carrier partners and it could do all the things we needed it to do like import the orders, create the labels and make it really fast to get orders out the door,” says Alex.

Tip: Learn more about Starshipit's support for DHL services here.

The challenge, however, was integrating DHL Express into their existing operations. HiSmile needed a solution that would allow them to manage shipping seamlessly across multiple platforms and carriers without the complexity of building and maintaining custom integrations. This is where Starshipit played a pivotal role.

Starshipit’s native integration with DHL Express was a game-changer for HiSmile. Instead of dedicating time and resources to creating their own connection between Shopify and DHL Express, HiSmile was able to rely on Starshipit’s pre-built, fully supported integration. This eliminated the need for complex development and ongoing maintenance.

With Starshipit handling the integration, HiSmile could focus on growing their business while Starshipit's team ensured that their DHL Express connection remained up-to-date and functioning smoothly. Any changes to DHL’s API or new features were automatically incorporated by Starshipit’s team, meaning HiSmile never had to worry about compatibility issues or technical roadblocks.

Are you ready for better shipping experiences?

Are you ready to streamline your shipping processes and delight your customers like HiSmile? Starshipit provides best-in-class integrations and automation features that can take your fulfillment to the next level.

If you’d prefer to be shown how it all works, we can offer you a free, personalised demo of Starshipit with one of our shipping experts. They can walk you through the different capabilities of Starshipit, as well as help you discover how Starshipit could work best for your specific brand and industry.

Or, if you’re ready to try it for yourself, you can sign-up for a free 30-day trial right now, and a member of our team will reach out to assist you shortly.

You can also view our interactive demo right here. We look forward to seeing you on the other side of shipping success!