Show Notes | Series 1, Episode 8 | CoolBlades
About our podcast
Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, is a bitesize 15-minute podcast that gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
About our guest
CoolBlades is an online hair and beauty retailer specialising in salon-quality hair styling products. Founded in 2005 by a husband and wife team of former stylists, nearly 20 years later it’s now a leading online supplier of hairdressing products for top salons, beauticians and trade stores. Moreso since the pandemic, they sell direct-to-consumer. The retailer operates primarily via its website as well as through Amazon, and grew 191% in 2019/20 after salons closed during the pandemic. For this podcast, we spoke to Rupert Hughes, E-Commerce Director at CoolBlades.
Transcript highlights:
● “We were going at a steady rate, making sure we had capacity to grow nicely over the next five to ten years - then the pandemic hit. Because all the salons AND trade stores were closed, everyone came online straight to us. The equivalent of a year’s worth of stock was sold within 10 days. A few thousand combs - which would usually have lasted a year - sold in a week.”
● “One of the things we’ve learnt is the importance of thinking ahead and making sure you have capacity built into your systems. We were lucky in that we’d moved warehouses only a year before the pandemic, which was a bit of a risk and an extra cost for us - but if we hadn’t that capacity for stock, we wouldn’t have coped.
● “Having capacity to think ahead also applies when it comes to software. We put Brightpearl in place in 2017 - our system before that was very slow and clunky to use, and simply wouldn’t have coped with the pandemic sales spike. Implementing Brightpearl was an investment, but it had features we could see real benefits of, and sure enough, when things took off overnight we were able to manage.”
● “There’s a lot of customization you can do with the Brightpearl platform which automates day-to-day tasks such as invoicing, auto-fulfilment of orders, or ensuring particular shipping instructions with a particular courier. That functionality takes a lot of the boring tasks away from staff and allows them to concentrate on the parts of business where we really deliver value, like talking to customers, etc.”
● “I initially came on board to do some SEO work for CoolBlades, so when the pandemic hit, the brand’s Google ranking was very strong - that was definitely a large contributing factor to our success during lockdown.”
● [On website sales v. marketplaces] “When we sell through the website we have more contact with customers, we want to make sure our traditional customers get great service and their questions answered - whereas marketplaces allow us to sell volumes of orders we wouldn’t have been able to achieve otherwise.”
● “When we introduced Brightpearl it gave us the ability to allow back-end systems to talk to the website in real-time, so we could fulfil orders more quickly, extend fulfilment promises to customers (Next Day delivery etc), and we could keep prices and inventory up to date. Prior to BP someone was having to do that manually every morning, which was a horrible task and it meant things got missed.”
● “You can clearly see the month we put BP in, sales went up - the only real reason for that is because high-selling products we weren’t constantly keeping in stock were now always in stock. It made a massive difference.”
Top takeaways
● CoolBlades ranked in 34th place on the Brightpearl Lightning 50
● That followed a 191% YOY revenue increase in 2019/20
● The tech that’s driven their growth includes: Brightpearl, Amazon FBA and their strong Google ranking (SEO investments)
● The pandemic meant the retailer saw a huge shift in direct-to-consumer sales, when it was primarily a B2B supplier.
● The brand has been able to invest their 2019/20 growth into the brand’s future, growing at a steady level with new direct-to-consumer visibility.