How Barefaced Eliminates the Need to Hire 10 People With 1 Partner in ShipBob [Case Study]

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Learn how Barefaced takes advantage of ShipBob’s impactful logistics and fulfilment offerings, like TikTok Shop fulfilment, subscription fulfilment, Customisation Suite, and more to unlock scalable growth. 

Customer Profile

Jordan Harper founded Barefaced in 2019 with a “Less but Better” philosophy and the goal of creating a skincare line that was effective, but simple to follow and maintain. Barefaced offers customers effective products, educational skincare content, and a loyalty-based rewards program called “No Sun Club.”  

About Barefaced

More isn’t always better. And Nurse Practitioner, Jordan Harper, knew that also applied to skincare. When she discussed at-home skincare with her patients, she found that they were often overwhelmed with options. 

With so many products already on the market, Jordan wanted to create a skincare line that would simplify the number of products in people’s bathroom cabinet and make it easier for them to form long-term, consistent skincare routines so they could see the results they craved. That desire led her to start Barefaced.

Jordan’s status as a skincare influencer on Instagram and TikTok and Barefaced’s effective formulations quickly launched the brand into popularity. As the brand grew, their need to outsource fulfilment became apparent. Learn how Barefaced selected ShipBob to be their outsourced fulfilment partner and which ShipBob features they leverage to unlock scalable success.  

Finding a fulfilment partner that’s like having 10 employees in 1 

As told to ShipBob by Barefaced’s Callie Tivnan, E-commerce Manager, and Christina Williams, Customer Success Manager.  

Just after Jordan founded Barefaced in late 2019, we launched our first product the Toning Pads (our pore unclogging toner wipes, which would later become our best-seller). The next year, we decided to take things up a notch – we launched a handful of new products, moved onto Shopify Plus as our ecommerce platform, added an email and SMS subscription component, created a loyalty program, and completely rebranded. 

Despite all of these big changes happening, while also growing quickly, we were actually fulfilling so many orders ourselves out of a garage. It became too many orders for us to handle on our own, so we eventually started to look for a fulfilment partner. We evaluated a few different ones, but when we looked at ShipBob we found that they met all of our needs.  

One of our main priorities was finding a reliable partner that could store all of our inventory and provide tools that would help us manage it. We rely heavily on ShipBob for inventory tracking and forecasting and that’s been a key part of our partnership.

“Our area of expertise is not logistics or inventory management, so we lean on ShipBob a lot for that. We’ve learned so much about this industry since working with ShipBob, as they are true supply chain experts, which has been good for everyone on our team.”

Callie Tivnan, E-commerce Manager, and Christina Williams, Customer Success Manager at Barefaced

When thinking about fulfilment, there’s such a focus on the packing and shipping aspect that the inventory management piece can often go unnoticed. But ShipBob’s ability to help us track and reconcile inventory is really great.  

“Logistics can be so challenging and tedious, and it takes up so much time. We’re such a small team and we all wear so many different hats, so we needed a fulfilment partner that was able to take care of the logistics piece for us. It’s great that we found ShipBob and have them as our partner. In order for us to do what ShipBob does, we would have to hire 10 or more employees. It’s crazy to think how much ShipBob does.”

Callie Tivnan, E-commerce Manager, and Christina Williams, Customer Success Manager at Barefaced

Creating efficiencies with an integrated tech stack and connected sales channels 

We have Attentive, Recharge, Loop, Klaviyo, and Gorgias integrated with our ShipBob dashboard, which has been really helpful.  

For example, with Gorgias, we’re able to create a replacement order from Gorgias and it automatically gets uploaded into ShipBob. There’s a lot less back and forth between the different platforms, which allows us to cut out unnecessary work. It makes it a lot quicker to handle customer service inquiries and issues.  

We also have our TikTok Shop connected with ShipBob. TikTok keeps changing and there’s always something new going on, which makes it difficult to keep up. Luckily, we have ShipBob as our partner and they’ve made the process so much easier.  

Before we were set up with ShipBob, we’d have to manually fulfil those orders. But now when we get an order through TikTok Shop, it rolls in to ShipBob just like any other order. So now as we grow or if we have a post that goes viral, we don’t have to worry about how orders are going out. We would never have been able to manage that without ShipBob, so we’re very thankful that they’re able to fulfil our TikTok Shop orders.  

In general, the ShipBob interface and dashboard are so great. There’s so much we enjoy about it – the ease of creating a manual order, a new product, or a new bundle, and so on. The analytics dashboard has a lot of information we look at weekly and monthly.  

Curating a branded first-impressions with ShipBob’s Customisation Suite 

We’ve recently added personalised touches into our packaging to elevate the unboxing experience. 

It’s the customer’s first physical experience with the product, which sets the tone for our brand, so we want to make it count. We’ve been able to use ShipBob’s Customisation Suite to create a great initial impression.  

ShipBob has helped us along the way as we’ve added customised packaging and kitting for our orders. We sent ShipBob a lot of videos about how we want things to look and they’ve done a great job executing our vision. Customers have been tagging us in their unboxing photos on Instagram which has been great.  

For inspiration, our team will compare notes based on what we’ve loved about the unboxing experience from other companies – whether it’s a surprise for first time customers or a different box used for subscription orders. We’re just getting started and we’re excited to see all of the ways ShipBob can help us improve our unboxing experience. 

Making the most of recurring orders with ShipBob’s subscription capabilities 

A large chunk of our orders are subscription orders. With ShipBob, those orders are processed at midnight on the day they are due to reoccur. So by the time we’re logging on in the morning, those subscription orders have already been packed and fulfilled. The process is totally automated, we don’t have to do anything.  That just speaks to ShipBob’s efficiency and the scale of their fulfilment centres.  

We went to ShipBob’s merchant conference, Fulfilled, this year and learned about the different packaging and marketing opportunities for subscription orders. We’ve started tagging our orders in the ShipBob dashboard based on which order it is within the subscription, starting at the first order and going all the way up to the tenth order, to be able to customise orders.  

We plan on adding different marketing inserts into the orders based on ShipBob’s automation rules. The way those are set up, we’re able to get really creative. We’re working on some strategic plans for our subscription orders based on ShipBob’s robust capabilities.  

Having a fulfilment partner that champions and encourages our growth 

In the past, I worked for a company that did their ecommerce fulfilment in-house. When I came to Barefaced, I was so happy to know we had an external partner doing the order fulfilment for us. Logistics is such a beast and so many companies spend so much time and money trying to make their fulfilment more effective and efficient.  

Barefaced would not have been able to grow and scale as much as we have in last few years without ShipBob. We come to our Merchant Success Manager, Lacey, all the time with different ideas and questions.  

“ShipBob has always been so helpful and accommodating of our big ideas. Even when we have little questions, ShipBob answers them right away. ShipBob takes our feedback seriously and always tries to implement changes to make things better. It’s a true testament to the fact that ShipBob is more than just a fulfilment partner, but they’re a thought partner too. It’s apparent ShipBob wants to see us grow.” 

Callie Tivnan, E-commerce Manager, and Christina Williams, Customer Success Manager at Barefaced

ShipBob is continually explaining new ideas and concepts to us and we’re having collaborative conversations that are helping us grow. We’ve been to every one of ShipBob’s Fulfilled events since the beginning, and each time we learn something actionable and new (plus, we always really enjoy seeing the inner workings at a fulfilment centre).  

Most recently, they’ve been telling us about their Inventory Placement Program, which automatically distributes and replenishes inventory throughout their fulfilment network, so when we’re ready for that, we can implement it. We’re grateful ShipBob keeps reminding us of all of these additional opportunities to save time and money.  

What’s next for Barefaced  

We have an exciting new product launching soon and some big holiday promotions coming up. We know that ShipBob will be able to support us through both of those periods of increased order volume. 

From an operations perspective, our latest initiative is Amazon FBA. We’re currently doing Amazon FBM with ShipBob, but we’re aiming to add FBA. The ShipBob team has been super helpful as we’ve gotten our products set up and ready to send to Amazon, while they can serve as our back-end inventory hub. There’s been a learning curve, but the ShipBob team has walked us through it and made sure no stone was left unturned.  

We can’t sing high enough praises for ShipBob. We really enjoy the partnership we have with ShipBob and are excited to keep growing with them by our side. 

Barefaced’s team at ShipBob

Lacey Morgan

Lacey is the Sr. Merchant Success Manager who supports Barefaced.

Casey Armstrong

Casey is the Chief Marketing Officer at ShipBob and serves as the Executive Sponsor for Barefaced. 

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Written By:

Meredith is a Content Marketing Specialist at ShipBob, where she writes articles, eGuides, and other resources to help growing ecommerce businesses master their logistics and fulfillment.

Read all posts written by Meredith Flora