How CLEARSTEM Has Grown Over 6,000% with ShipBob in 4 Years [Case Study]

Learn how CLEARSTEM uses ShipBob to ship hundreds of thousands of orders, reach thousands of clinics, and connect with dozens of retailers.

“We got started with ShipBob in October 2019. At the time, we were shipping anywhere from 800 to 1,000 orders per month. By the end of 2024, we’ll be shipping 50,000 orders per month. In the years since we’ve been with ShipBob, our order volume has grown over 6,150%.” 

–  Kayleigh Christina, Co-Founder and CMO at CLEARSTEM 

Key metrics

• 6,150% growth since 2019 
• 1 million units sold 
• 2-person operations team maintained after 4 years with ShipBob 

About CLEARSTEM

Licensed Clinical Esthetician Danielle Gronich is known as The Acne Guru® because of her proven track record helping people heal their skin from within. Kayleigh Christina, a Certified Holistic Nutritionist, utilized Danielle’s integrative approach to skincare and experienced life-changing results in under two months. 

As health and wellness experts, Danielle and Kayleigh joined forces and delved into the root causes of acne. Their research uncovered a disturbing trend: many conventional skincare products contained harmful ingredients that worsened skin conditions. Frustrated by the lack of options for acne-prone people, they sought to create a clean, effective alternative. This led to the development of CLEARSTEM, a skincare brand focused on combating acne and aging without compromising one’s holistic health.  

The two started CLEARSTEM in 2017 and have scaled their operations to help people all over the globe with their skin. In the process, CLEARSTEM outsourced fulfillment to ShipBob to help streamline their logistics across many geographies and channels, with continual growth year after year. 

Scaling with a reliable fulfillment partner after leaving 2 different 3PLs 

As told to ShipBob by Kayleigh Christina, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at CLEARSTEM. 

When CLEARSTEM first got started, we were doing self-fulfillment. We had a label maker plugged into a laptop that printed out labels from Shopify. We’d attach the label to a bubble mailer and haul a bunch of CLEARSTEM orders to the post office a few times a week. 

Eventually, we got to a point where we needed to work with a fulfillment provider to continue to grow, and we ended up working with 2 other 3PLs before partnering with ShipBob. 

We’ve always been a profitable company but the fulfillment providers we were working with prior to ShipBob didn’t have transparent pricing. There were so many hidden fees – sometimes we were charged a mystery hourly rate, or sometimes there were 20 extra charges tacked on our invoices. We didn’t even know what they were charging us for. We set our prices by our COGS, so we were feeling drained of cash. 

In addition to the pricing issues, the 3PLs we worked with had incredibly outdated technology. They didn’t have a strong backend system where you could view analytics and data. We didn’t have a dedicated rep, so we were in the dark about a lot of the fulfillment data until we got our invoices. On top of that, we weren’t getting quality fulfillment. Orders were arriving at customers’ doors with crinkled paper or broken products.  

That’s when we began looking around for a new fulfillment partner. Based on our prior experience, we knew we wanted a provider with transparent pricing, premium fulfillment, the ability to fulfill retail orders, and white-glove service with a dedicated service representative. We liked the feeling of a partner that we could work very closely with, but with the resources of a large fulfillment network. That criteria is what led us to ShipBob.  

Before we made our final decision, we got in touch with fellow entrepreneurs for their feedback. When we initially outsourced fulfillment, we didn’t do enough research or get enough testimonials from real brands. This time around, we wanted to do our due diligence and how we decided to move forward with ShipBob.  

“What we love about ShipBob is we have fulfillment pricing information so much ahead of time that we know exactly how much to build into our COGS. We couldn’t do this with our prior fulfillment providers. We’ve been able to build a proper pricing forecast and models, and do so much cost analysis because ShipBob makes it easy to calculate what our actual costs will be, which helps us continue to run profitably.”

–  Kayleigh Christina, Co-Founder and CMO at CLEARSTEM 

And because ShipBob has multiple fulfillment centers across the US, we’re able to store and ship our products close to our customers, which helps us bring down shipping costs regardless of where we’re shipping throughout the country.  

We got started with ShipBob in October 2019. At the time, we were shipping anywhere from 800 to 1,000 orders per month. By the end of 2024, we’ll be shipping 50,000 orders per month. In the years since we’ve been with ShipBob, our order volume has grown over 6,150%. 

“Our business relies heavily on the key integrations between ShipBob, Loop Returns, and Shopify. The direct integration between ShipBob and Shopify is crucial to our success, serving as the primary driver for all our third-party services that depend on up-to-date order data. Additionally, the direct integration with Loop Returns enhances our customer support team’s efficiency and empowers our customers.”

– Sal Perera, Director of Supply Chain at CLEARSTEM 

Maintaining a 2-person operations team as an 8-figure revenue brand 

When we first joined ShipBob, CLEARSTEM only had two full-time employees. Now, we’re a team of 16. For a brand of our size, we operate a very lean team, especially considering the scale of our operations and supply chain. 

The operations team at CLEARSTEM is made up of only two individuals: our COO, Marc Smookler, and Director of Supply Chain, Sal Perera. Sal works very closely with ShipBob to resolve issues if they come up, make sure orders are packed properly, and ensure that all of the small details are hit no matter who or where we’re shipping to.  

We heavily rely on the ShipBob team to help with inventory planning, distribution, and placement. Our team really leans on ShipBob for logistics and fulfillment expertise because we don’t have that internally. We’re a part of the ShipBob Inventory Placement Program (IPP) which has been really beneficial. 

“Because of IPP, I don’t have to spend time planning and setting up multiple shipments going all over the country, which saves me and my contract manufacturers time in setup and delivery. Additionally, the unit cost in freight is much less than sending individual pallets, saving on average a few hundred dollars a shipment. 

I just send one large shipment of product to one location with no pre-planning or calculating how much inventory needs to be allocated to each fulfillment center. Once plugged into the system, each fulfillment center will allocate inventory based on zone distribution for our shipments. If I feel that one center requires more or less inventory, I can adjust that amount which is a nice feature.” 

– Sal Perera, Director of Supply Chain at CLEARSTEM 

Trusting that ShipBob will seamlessly fulfill orders when order volume spikes 

ShipBob has been invaluable for assisting with advanced planning. Whether it’s a holiday or an exciting sales opportunity, like our recent Good Morning America sale, Sal sets up calls with ShipBob to make sure everything will go smoothly. 

We work backwards to make sure everything is integrated, and everyone is in the know. Sal works with ShipBob to make sure the logistics piece is in place so we can effectively market those sales.  

“For our Good Morning America sale, the pre-planning and preparedness of ShipBob helped our orders go through without a hitch and we fulfilled our obligation on time and in full to the end customer. If we do any promotions like this in the future, I won’t hesitate knowing that ShipBob will take care of the back end distribution.”

– Sal Perera, Director of Supply Chain at CLEARSTEM 

It’s important for us to loop in ShipBob so we can act proactively and work together so sales and promotions go well. We’re lucky to have ShipBob’s support because everything has gone smoothly. 

Getting our products into over 40 retail stores and 2,000 clinics worldwide 

When we first joined ShipBob, we weren’t doing any retail orders, but it was important for us to choose a fulfillment partner that could help us grow into it. We were mostly doing direct-to-consumer, but now we’ve built up a more robust B2B business. CLEARSTEM is in Neiman Marcus and all 10 Erewhon locations. 

We also ship to spas, resorts, and estheticians that are making bulk orders of 30 products or more at a time. There are over 2,000 clinics that we work with. They place orders on our wholesale Shopify store, which is connected to ShipBob.  The ShipBob and Shopify Wholesale connection is so easy and has allowed us to scale this part of our business to thousands of clinics without having to spend excess time managing it.  

In addition to retail support from ShipBob, we also leverage ShipBob Delivered Duties Paid (DDP) shipping to reach our customers outside of the US. Using ShipBob DDP allows us to ship worldwide and we’re lucky that ShipBob has a solution like that because we’ve used it since we onboarded.  

“Having ShipBob integrated with our Shopify platform, international orders come through seamlessly without any intervention or manual work. All customs documents are loaded onto the order and handed off to the local international carriers. This DTC process is so valuable for our customers around the world.”

– Sal Perera, Director of Supply Chain at CLEARSTEM  

ShipBob has great worldwide support. We’re really looking forward to activating other countries with ShipBob, especially because we don’t have someone internally with global expansion expertise. It will be helpful to work with ShipBob to make sure those launches go smoothly.  

What’s next for CLEARSTEM 

We’re trying to rewrite the way that people think about skincare and make it so that they don’t feel handcuffed to prescriptions. The more people we can help, the better. Growing with ShipBob as a partner is crucial for us to make sure that all of our marketing initiatives, promotions, and expansions go smoothly so the customer has a positive experience.   

We’re excited to grow globally because people all over the world struggle with acne.  

We’re working on certifications so we can enter one of ShipBob’s Canadian fulfillment centers. We have a strong community there, so we’re looking forward to being able to branch into new countries and leverage ShipBob’s support there as well. 

CLEARSTEM’s team at ShipBob

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