In 2021, high school buddies Aidan Drentin and Michael Ballato came up with a business idea sparked by the sun-kissed beaches of Melbourne, Australia: create a tanning product made from natural ingredients to help people quickly become tan.
A no-burn bronze is what Aidan and Michael’s goal was for their customers, and Brunae Body is designed to do just that. But, when they first started, they wondered: Did they have what it takes to turn their business into a blazing success?
Turns out, they did.
Their unique blend of tanning products with nourishing skincare ingredients and strategic use of micro-influencers to build product awareness has set themselves apart from their competitors and disrupted the tanning industry in the process.
Aidan and Michael told business podcaster Dylan Mullan that their business went from 10K to 100K to 300K per month in just a few short years, eventually selling a bottle of tanning oil every nine minutes to sun worshippers everywhere. Unsurprisingly, the B2C business, plus its quickly growing B2B division, grew in complexity.
With that explosive growth, they needed a heavy hitting, no-sweat inventory management system (IMS) that could help them manage all their inventory, packaging, and cash flow needs across multiple countries. The IMS they found? Cin7.
Though Brunae Body catapulted itself from start-up to thriving business quickly, the road to success was hard work.
Brunae Body first began selling in Australia, and their ambitious plans to expand had them working their way through a lot of red tape to get e-commerce sites up and running in the US and the UK. Becoming an international business in and of itself was a backbreaking task, but Brunae Body was also dealing with a third-party manufacturer, various 3PLs, and multiple warehouses overseas. Talk about stressful!
But the stress didn’t end there.
Selling to different countries meant they were juggling two sets of packaging with different labeling. And they were using unreliable spreadsheets to manage everything, including:
It wasn’t a happy, sunshiny place to be. “We needed one source of truth that could streamline all these moving pieces and components.”
The search for this one source of truth involved reviewing several IMS options, but on the recommendation of their accountant, Aidan and Michael looked at, and approved, Cin7.
The move to Cin7 was accomplished with minimal fuss thanks to Hawk Cloud Consulting and Kevin Smith, Director of Technology. Kevin, Aidan says, has a straightforward, hands-on, and transparent approach he truly appreciates.
“Kevin’s a really good guy. He doesn’t beat around the bush. He helped us with the whole implementation, including connecting to Xero and working in tandem with the accountants there to make sure the books lined up and the reconciliations were done correctly.”
Even now, with Cin7 fully implemented for several months, Kevin and his team are ready to jump on a call and offer advice when red-hot questions about 3PL connections, COGs accuracy or purchase or sales order inputting arises.
“They’ve got a high level of expertise in the software, and they’re very direct and to the point,” Aidan enthuses. “Kevin made Cin7 easy for us to use as a business.”
From there, it was about tapping into the specific features that would give Brunae Body the clarity they needed to grow.
"The addition of Co-Manufacturing was critical to achieve the end goal of Brunae Body which was understanding exactly what the Unit Cost across all their locations was, on top of managing stock across multiple 3PL's and Manufacturer Locations. That and adding shipping expenses to different stock movements made the visibility on their margins much more clear in each of their different markets. A clear path to making great and informed management decisions to help the business grow in the right direction"
Cin7’s ease of use along with its off-the-shelf functionality earns Aidan’s praise, especially after he saw how easy it was to onboard a new employee. Additionally, ditching the spreadsheets in favor of Cin7’s streamlined, all-in-one solution provided the Brunae Body team access to real-time information (such as live updates on COGs), and they can find the information in one place.
With Cin7, they’re also now able to:
Brunae Body is a multi-million dollar business, and according to Aidan, they’re excited to continue creating products that induce the deep, dark, but safe, tan their customers want while also expanding further into retail and growing their brand. However, they understand that their plan won’t succeed without community support.
As a part of Brunae Body’s ever-growing community, Cin7 derives warm satisfaction in helping Aidan and his team get their high quality, natural suntanning products (including a potential sunscreen option) easily and efficiently into the hands of customers who are eager to acquire a little color without the burn.