Video Testimonial
We have seen over the last three years at least 3X growth each year, and we don’t see that slowing down at all.
Vice President of Technology and Data, Tru Fragrance & Beauty
Tru Fragrance & Beauty
Client since: 2017
Uses: Sellercloud, Skustack, Shipbridge
Industry: Beauty, Cosmetics & Face Creams, Custom Merchandise, Luxury Goods
Founded: 1969
Headquarters: Willowbrook, IL
Company size: 51-200 employees
Types of items sold: Perfumes and colognes, including customized items.
“We have seen over the last three years at least 3X growth each year, and we don’t see that slowing down at all.”
John Goliak, Vice President of Technology and Data, Tru Fragrance & Beauty
Before Sellercloud
Tru Fragrance & Beauty originally started as a men’s fragrance store and manufacturer. Since its humble beginnings in 1969, the company has grown a lot, with some of the most significant growth they have seen in the last 20 years. “Back in 2005, the current ownership group bought us and we were in a single warehouse with about ten office employees,” explains John Goliak, Vice President of Technology and Data at Tru Fragrance & Beauty. Today, they have three warehouses and over 100 full-time employees.
When Goliak started in 2014, the company had a single storefront and no e-commerce. Their first venture into e-commerce was when they created a Magento store later that year. Pretty quickly, Tru Fragrance expanded to Shopify, Amazon, and Walmart and began supplying retailers Ulta Beauty, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and many other retailers.
The Challenge
As Tru Fragrance started to sell on more marketplaces, they quickly saw how difficult it was to maintain and update product information across them all. “We needed a place to connect all of our channels into a single source,” said Goliak. It was becoming time-consuming and increased the risk of human error and overselling as inventory was not synchronized across channels. They recognized they needed a single source of information to connect with everything they were working with.
Inventory management was also becoming more challenging as order volume increased. “We needed a better way to keep track of inventory and to implement a better way of picking orders,” said System Administrator Christian Dominguez. They needed to keep up with the orders they already had and improve efficiency to take on more orders, all while reducing mistakes. They needed a solution that could take on their multichannel orders and inventory management instead of two separate solutions that didn’t communicate.
Finding the right solution for Tru Fragrance wouldn’t be easy. It needed to avoid any language barriers. “100% of my employees speak Spanish, and I would say 90% of them don’t even speak English,” said E-commerce Operations Manager Ricardo Navarro. A solution would need to be adjusted to how they worked and not force their warehouse staff to modify their workflow.
The Solution
When Tru Fragrance found Sellercloud, all their worries melted away. They had found a solution that could successfully connect all their marketplace stores to one central source of information, drastically reducing the difficulty of managing inventory over many channels. “My favorite feature about Sellercloud is the ability to connect multiple storefronts to the platform so that we can keep inventory consistent across all our different SKUs and brands,” said Goliak.
Tru Fragrance now had a place to monitor order volume, shipping, and inventory to ensure they were always on top of demand. Navarro praises how this has meant they never oversell because Sellercloud tracks their inventory, and information is shared with multiple platforms whenever a sale is made. He is also pleased with how many processes they have streamlined where they used to need someone to enter information manually. “We can literally work on all of our platforms in one database, and it’s been awesome,” said Navarro.
Navarro also greatly enjoys how Sellercloud could easily expand Tru Fragrance to other marketplaces and increase their reach. What made it even more impressive was that they didn’t have to create product listings individually per channel.
They also brought other products from Sellercloud’s ecosystem into their business, further boosting efficiency. “Using Sellercloud’s complete ecosystem of Sellercloud, Skustack, and Shipbridge, we’re able to get orders in quickly and get them packed and ship very efficiently and fast in our warehouse locations,” explained Goliak. The interconnectivity of Sellercloud, Shipbridge, and Skustack has meant Navarro has been able to automate many operations. “I’m still finding new ways to automate the operation every single day,” he adds.
Tru Fragrance had a lot to say about Skustack specifically. “Having a WMS system like Skustack allows you to know exactly where your product is,” said Navarro, who also greatly appreciates the insights Skustack provides.
However, what really made Skustack appealing to Tru Fragrance was that it overcame the language barriers in the warehouse. All warehouse staff must do is scan products, and Skustack tells them where to go. Training their employees was an absolute breeze. Navarro shares how, with as little as two minutes of training, their employees could carry out extensive tasks, such as cycle counts. What’s more, Skustack increased employee productivity, enabling them to complete cycle counts in a couple of days while before it took two weeks.
Increased productivity also meant Tru Fragrance could cut back on labor costs because it didn’t need so many people working so many hours to fulfill orders. “In 2022, before the implementation of Skustack and Shipbridge, we saw [an average of] 320 orders a day processed between two eight-hour shifts. Since then, we almost tripled our business. We process 820 orders a day, all in one shift. Eight hours. So, we really have been able to cut back on those labor costs,” explained Navarro.
However, according to Goliak, the biggest deciding factor in using Sellercloud was that they could customize it from day one. “The people at Sellercloud have been able to help me customize my needs so that we can really fit what we need here at Tru Fragrance,” adds Navarro.
After Sellercloud
Since making Sellercloud Tru Fragrance’s e-commerce solution, the company has grown to four Shopify and six Amazon stores and expanded to TikTok Shop. “Since we started, Sellercloud has enabled our e-commerce operations to grow tremendously,” said Goliak. When Goliak started at the company in 2014, they had a single storefront and no e-commerce. Today, with the help of Sellercloud, e-commerce produces 20-25% of orders, processing hundreds of thousands per year.
Tru Fragrance has also been more than pleased with Sellercloud’s customer support, saying that they always respond as quickly as possible and find solutions that best fit their needs.
They are also highly optimistic about their future with Sellercloud, believing it will take Tru Fragrance even further. “With the help of Sellercloud, we definitely feel that the sky’s the limit,” said Goliak, adding, “We have seen over the last three years at least 3X growth each year, and we don’t see that slowing down at all.”
Goliak, Navarro, and Dominguez highly recommend Sellercloud to any business in the e-commerce industry. Goliak advises that any company starting in e-commerce should connect with a company like Sellercloud for their entire operations and “not piece things together” with different solutions, and highlighted that Sellercloud has an entire ecosystem for everything they could need and having everything flowing through one system gives you peace of mind. “To grow your business in e-commerce, I highly recommend an all-in-one solution like Sellercloud,” Dominguez finishes.
