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What if your business ballooned from a few hundred customers to a few hundred thousand in just a few years? Would it collapse or thrive? What if you could be prepared for sudden growth so you don’t have to wonder which way things would go? Take it from discovery commerce platform Birchbox; you can be ready.
The company, which creates custom personalized boxes of beauty, grooming, and lifestyle product samples, went from 600 subscribers to more than 400,000 in 36 months, mostly due to word of mouth. In the early days, Birchbox used Salesforce CRM to simply keep track of contacts. As they grew, their need to implement other processes also expanded.
“Salesforce is a key to allowing us to scale because as we added more subscribers and more brands, it became more and more imperative that we have really professional tools to manage the relationships between them,” says David Kaplowitz, Birchbox Senior Manager of Operations and Planning.
As a result of the experience, Kaplowitz advises other companies to get started using a customizable CRM early in their lifecycle. “When you’re young, you’re probably right if you’re thinking is ‘We don’t need this now.’ But you’re going to need it soon, and when you do need it, it’s not the time to be implementing it. You need to implement it before you need it.”
Here are three big ways Salesforce has helped Birchbox with its scalability:
“There was a time that having access to products that people wanted was enough to make you a successful retailer,” says Kaplowitz. “The Internet has completely taken that away. Accessibility is no longer a competitive advantage. Retailers need to add value to the process.”
Birchbox’s method for adding this kind of value is by personalizing the customer experience. They get to know their subscribers via profile information and by carefully monitoring their reviews and general activity on the company’s Web site. All of this info is tracked and saved in Salesforce. The result is customized samples and editorial content that feels very personal. If the customer likes a sample, they can then use Birchbox to buy the full product.
Birchbox works closely with brand partners to supply the samples sent to subscribers each month. The company can view this pipeline and run reports in Salesforce, which provides their sales team with context when it comes to selling very specific opportunities to brands. Plus, they can give the brands a heads up early in the process, without over-selling or over-promising.
According to Kaplowitz, “In the past there was a little more guess work: ‘Okay, we’re probably going to want some product for people with curly hair in the next few months, so let’s talk to some curly hair brands.’ Now the sales team can say, ‘We have X number of people who we are going to want to give your product to in X month.’”
Inspite of its massive increase in size thus far, Birchbox still considers itself to be very early in the growth phase as a company. They continue to work to be innovative in the area of online beauty and grooming sales.
“Because we’re growing so quickly, our understanding of our needs changes very quickly too. We may need something very different in three months from now, and we’ve been impressed with Salesforce and its ability to adapt with us. Letting us change our minds and change the way we’re using it, relatively quickly,” says Kaplowitz.
