Gabriel Cosmetics Saves Over $30,000 and Improves Order Processing Integrating Acumatica and Shopify With Celigo

About

Founded by Gabriel De Santino in 1992, Gabriel Cosmetics focuses on providing earth-conscious, natural beauty products. Today, the brand has grown into a beauty empire with the addition of Gabriel, Zuzu Luxe, and Clean Kids Naturally, making up a diverse collection of cosmetics and children’s skincare products to join the existing Gabriel Organics Skincare.

Background

Gabriel Cosmetics has seen significant growth in the last several years, moving up to the mid-level market as its product became mainstream. To scale with its small operational team as demand for its product grew, the team invested in the tools and systems such as Acumatica ERP and Shopify for its webstore to automate business processes across the supply chain.

The challenge

As the company adopted new platforms, it found itself having to manually integrate the different systems with technical projects, or had to bypass integration altogether, resulting in time consuming, error-prone, and expensive manual data entry that interfered with its ability to fulfill orders in a timely fashion.

“Our biggest pain point was with our own previous website,” said Jenna Pennamen, Director of Operations at Gabriel Cosmetics. “We were manually putting all our data in the systems. If there was any glitch overnight, or a windstorm over the weekend, or anything, it meant hours and hours and hours of data entry for us.”

“The most memorable one was Black Friday last year. We had a glitch and it threw off everything. We were stuck manually entering in 1,300 orders for one day over the course of more than a week. It was an absolute nightmare.”

The team needed three people working fulltime to manage the orders.

“With three people entering 1,300 orders, we had a lot of mistakes and a lot of customer service issues that came up the following week. So it was horrible,” she added.

As a lean operation with a tiny operational team, Gabriel Cosmetics could not afford to have dedicated resources focused on manual data entry, and it also didn’t have the technical resources to build and maintain integrations themselves.

The solution

To reduce errors, increase efficiency, and improve the customer experience, the team needed to integrate these systems to automate its order-to-cash business processes. Gabriel Cosmetics decided to adopt Shopify as its webstore, and then automate processes between it and the Acumatica ERP with a Shopify-Acumatica integration by Celigo.

“Celigo’s option was built out and ready to go,” said Pennamen. “The wheel didn’t need to be invented — it was ready to go and streamlined. So we decided to take that and explore that option.”

With the help of a service partner, the company was able to get the integration up and running without having a lot of technical resources. “I’m not technical and I don’t know SQL,” said Pennamen. “It was very nice to be able to have a platform that is user-friendly without me having to have an engineering degree.”

Bottom line

Celigo has helped Gabriel Cosmetics completely automate its order-to-cash processes, significantly improving order processing time while reducing errors, as well as the number of resources needed to manage the operation. This has led to a reallocation of headcount and savings of over $30,000.

With the Shopify-Acumatica integration, the team has been able to process orders faster, as well as provide better information such as tracking data that would improve the customer experience.

Celigo’s ease of use also meant that the integration was easier to build and maintain, allowing Pennamen and team to focus on larger, more strategic projects, which has been specially critical for the company during the pandemic.

“Celigo is the easiest integration I’ve ever accomplished and probably the least expensive, as well. It meant that we didn’t have to spend tens of thousands of dollars in order to get this integrated. Now that it is live, I literally need one hour of Celigo’s time to check it, and then I’m done. So that makes it very nice, and gives me a lot more options as a business,” said Penammen.

The team plans to expand the Celigo integration to allow wholesale customers to place online orders, as well as EDI.

“It’s night and day compared to last year. I don’t have any qualms about orders coming over this Black Friday,” said Pennamen. “It’s so much easier — I love Celigo integrator.io.”