Evolve Beauty design and market organic cosmetics with environmentally friendly packaging. The beauty products they make aspire to be completely green and use natural ingredients that work in harmony with the body. Laura Rudoe, the company's CEO, began developing her eco-friendly range of products in November 2008 and launched them in October 2009. She sells her beauty products through health food stores and online cosmetic retailers as well as via her own website online. Since beginning as a one man band she has grown her business rapidly outsourcing her manufacturing as well as taking on a number of freelancers. As a self-professed virtual company she operates entirely over the web collaborating with her employees and third party manufacturers using Brightpearl’s online business management software system.
Laura tells us her story below...
Extremely easy and cost effective
“Initially I was working on Sage 50 but found that it was very restrictive. It did not give me the functionality to collaborate over the web. Working from home I need the ability for the third party manufacturer who produces my products, my accountant and a number of freelancers who help with product development, sales and PR to be able to have visibility of the business’s data. As things stood with Sage if any of them needed access to anything they would need to come to me and work on my computer. On top of travel time and cost, this meant that whilst others were using the system I did not have access to the information that was imperative to letting me get on with running the business.
I looked at a number of other business software packages to move to including Salesorder, OpenERP and Netsuite. However, these were either too expensive to implement, had a bad reputation for customer support or did not have such a good interface or import functionality as Brightpearl. So I decided to give Brightpearl a try and it has exceeded my expectations in terms of the collaboration I needed as well helping make my business more efficient in ways I had not even imagined.
Brightpearl was extremely easy and cost effective to implement. There was no need to pay a hefty fee for it to be setup and the import from Sage was quick and incredibly smooth. I was very impressed. Any questions I had were answered quickly and competently by the friendly support team.
Incredibly intuitive and easy to use
The best thing about Brightpearl is that I can now operate entirely online. The ability to collaborate over the Internet means I don’t have to waste money hiring out office space, need anyone to travel to use my business software and save time by no longer have to share my system. Overall this equates to my company being more green and cost-effective. Plus because it is incredibly intuitive and easy to use I find it straightforward to train new users to use the system.
Another great feature of Brightpearl is that it allows me to do tasks in a batch. Customers can be tracked, tagged, emailed and updated in no time at all. This is has streamlined my sales and lead generation by making it easy to communicate with current and potential clients as well as with my suppliers. The reminders are very useful too; they help me to be more effective when it comes to both sales and PR.
Having the multi warehouse functionality has helped me immensely. Most of my stock is managed externally but some will also sit with me, my freelancers or with the manufacturer. Being able to mark up all of us as separate warehouse facilities means I can keep track of all of my stock all of the time.
Everyone on the team was incredibly helpful and really responsive
After a few months of running my back office in Brightpearl I decided to move my website over to their ecommerce system. Previously I have developed my website myself on Magento but as it was an open source platform I found that the version changes over time were difficult to handle as they required quite a high level of technical knowledge. I was just about able to manage but it was taking up far too much of my time.
I was amazed at how quick and painless the process of transferring my site over was. Nancy was able to recreate everything in one day . Everyone on the team was incredibly helpful and really responsive to any tweaks or changes that needed to be made. This is major advantage over open source software like Magento, with them you get no support you are completely on your own.
I have now set up a wholesale website using Brightpearl too. Prior to moving I would never have attempted to get a wholesale website up and running. However because Brightpearl is so easy to manage and I can instantly upload the products I have in my system to the site itself I got this going in no time. So now I am able to trade wholesale too selling cases of my products to others over the web.
Brightpearl is also great because my customers can access their own accounts online. They can log in and look at transactions or orders themselves. This really takes the strain off our team, there aren't that many of us, so this saves us the time it would otherwise take having to deal with these kind of queries.
At the same time of moving our website to Brightpearl we decided to look at a new payment system. Brightpearl had an integration with SagePay which looked an ideal solution. SagePay takes payments securely online for us and as a well trusted brand, has even aided our online conversion rate. The integration itself was really easy and enables us to have even more information in the Brightpearl system with less chance for mistakes and mix ups between different systems.
Ultimately Brightpearl has helped me to solve all the problems I was experiencing plus a few I didn’t even know I had. My company is now more efficient, more organised and more environmentally friendly without costing me the earth.”
