Helping Beauty Brands Grow

Simplicity is key to a fruitful fulfilment journey, even if your brand sells via numerous channels. When a customer places an online order, whether via your website, or a marketplace, or a social media platform, it should automatically feed through to your warehouse team. The chosen items should then be picked, scanned and dispatched on the same day to ensure prompt delivery and a notable customer experience. A reliable system will also update your stock levels so you’ll never sell a product that’s not available, while alerting you when stocks are running low

The logistics journey for your offering is likely to be complex and hard to keep track of without the right support, particularly if you’re selling multiple beauty products. Outsourcing this time-consuming process to a trusted fulfilment partner will afford you more opportunities to focus on other key aspects of your brand, while being safe in the knowledge that your customers are privy to a seamless, satisfying service. And don’t simply accept a one size fits all approach to fulfilment. Your fulfilment partner needs to understand your specific requirements and create a bespoke plan that will best serve your business going forwards.

For example, at Huboo our Continuous Improvement Team analyses all client processes to optimise the service we provide, working in tandem with operations, finance, supply chains and future projections departments to identify untapped opportunities and make improvements. This enables the team to fully collaborate with you throughout your Huboo partnership to guarantee scalable growth while maximising efficiency.

A frictionless fulfilment process allows brands to be more agile as new trends – and subsequent commercial opportunities – emerge. You need to be able to react quickly to meet sudden spikes in customer demand and, while this will inevitably pose challenges to inventory planning, this can be overcome if you’re using software that offers real-time insight into omni channel sales and warehouse inventory levels. Assessing current sales data alongside historic data makes it easier to spot seasonal patterns and ensure that you aren’t left with expired or leftover products once a spike has passed.

This is equally important to bear in mind when preparing for peak season eCommerce events. A fulfilment provider needs to have the tools in place to meticulously forecast orders so that warehouse teams can flex in size to serve different needs, including key calendar dates for beauty, such as Mother’s Day and Christmas. To that end, we partner with retail operating system Brightpearl, whose inventory planning function ensures that you always have the right products to meet demand, particularly during those trickier to forecast peak season events.

Your warehouse should include dedicated storage areas for beauty products so that they leave them in the same condition they arrived in. Not every warehouse will be up to spec – you need to make sure you have clean, temperature regulated ambient spaces and, of course, that you rvaluable products are kept out of direct sunlight.

In addition to this, your fulfilment provider needs to demonstrate that it has batch control and quality assurance measures to ensure products don’t exceed best before dates. This is particularly important in the case of perishable products or those that contain organic ingredients. One example of best-practice is adopting a first-in-first-out method so that older products are picked, packed and shipped as priority, minimising the risk of waste and items reaching expiration dates.

Unboxing is the first physical interaction that your customers have with your product. So it’s vital that customers experience products and packaging as intended and, crucially, without any damage. Sustainable, seasonal packaging, protective insulation materials and appropriate sized boxes are all helpful when it comes to achieving this. Some fulfilment providers can also meet more intricate specification requests to make sure that beauty products are pristinely presented, such as adding samples to an order or including a branded note, tissue paper or a spray of fragrance.

Brands need to consider the optimal locations for getting products out to customers effectively. Geographic proximity means faster, more cost-effective and more environmentally friendly shipping, so try and choose a fulfilment partner that has a proven presence in the locations that matter most to your business – and that can boast easy access to major transport networks, allowing for cohesive and effective distribution further afield.

A good delivery experience encourages customers to order again, and that doesn’t always mean the same or next day. Customers want high levels of service at a reasonable cost, transparency  throughoutthe fulfilment process – in a nutshell knowing where the item is and when they can expect it – and a guarantee that it will arrive at the time stated when they made the purchase.

In addition to this, customers are becoming more eco-conscious, so it’s important that you’re fulfilling orders in a way that’s as sustainable as possible. Beauty brands can clearly demonstrate their ESG credentials to customers when they have the relevant accreditations in place.

As part of this process, fulfilment providers should have teams dedicated to achieving relevant industry standards. This isn’t merely a box ticking exercise, it ensures that your products are managed, fulfilled and delivered – from eco-friendly warehouses – with integrity.

KPIs and sales targets are more than just about numbers and metrics. They help you to understand how a fulfilment provider is performing and the impact of this on your business. Putting KPIs in place with a provider with allow your partner to make continuous adjustments to achieve your strategic goals faster.

This is why at Huboo we adhere to a clear service level agreement that has the potential to yield the best possible customer experience. Our SLAs include 99.9% picking accuracy, same day order dispatch and returns processing as standard.