Exiting Wall Street Leads to Lip-Smacking Success 

In 2012, licensed Wall Street stockbroker Melissa Butler founded  The Lip Bar, a black woman owned business with a clean beauty mindset. It all began in her kitchen, where Melissa spent her nights formulating a vegan, non-toxic lipstick to counter the “one-shade-fits-most beauty industry.”

Melissa first pitched The Lip Bar on Shark Tank without receiving a deal, but her diverse lipstick shades, and eventually, her full lineup of cruelty-free beauty products for every complexion, proved to be a stunningly winning idea. The now multi-million dollar business’s makeup line graces the shelves of Target, Walmart, and CVS. The award-winning beauty products are also available at its flagship store located in Detroit, Michigan, and on its website, Amazon, and TikTok Shop.

However, growing the business hasn’t been a completely blemish-free experience. Their formula needed another ingredient: Cin7.

Clearing Up The Lip Bar’s Processes with Cin7

Like most small product businesses, The Lip Bar faced challenges managing the complex back-end processes required to get its products to its customers. And the all-women The Lip Bar team discovered their challenges were multiplied with their sub-par inventory management solution Fishbowl Inventory.

“When I joined The Lip Bar, I inherited Fishbowl. It was in the beginning phases of implementation,” explains Ashley Gilbert, head of operations and business development. “Fishbowl was very clunky. Their support network was not very strong. It was also constantly having updates, and I wondered if they were sort of Frankensteining things over there.”

There were other problems with Fishbowl that concealer couldn’t fix, including its lack of inventory visibility, user friendliness, and integrations with needed applications. With Fishbowl, the The Lip Bar team had to painstakingly input inventory and order information manually. And in the almost two years The Lip Bar relied on Fishbowl, they never synced with QuickBooks, which eliminated the business’s ability to invoice customers directly. 

It was one big, frustrating situation that finally reached a boiling point. 

“When we were nine months out before the end of our contract, we knew we were not going to renew, and we decided to explore different systems and options.”

The Lip Bar looked at six or seven different platforms, assessing them on a slew of factors that included cost, scalability, and reporting and order capabilities. They also questioned whether the solutions would give them the power to:

• Achieve inventory visibility across multiple warehouses and locations
• Gain real-time insights from a single source of truth (especially important when selling on multiple channels)
• Make transfers and adjustments with the click of a button
• Generate purchase orders and to invoice directly within the system
• Automate their workflows
• Sync seamlessly with Mason Hub (The Lip Bar’s existing 3PL)

After reviewing the pros and cons of each solution, The Lip Bar believed Cin7 was the all-in-one, full coverage solution for them.

“With Cin7, we have a user-friendly and strong interface, visibility into all our locations, the ability to make transfers and stock adjustments, and to have reporting in one system. Cin7 also has a good network of people that provide the support and level of service we need.”

Much of that support was provided by Kevin Smith, Director of Technology at Hawk Cloud Consulting. According to Ashley, Kevin was fantastic.

“He was a very, very patient and knowledgeable consultant. Kevin was always very honest and transparent,” she raves. 

From working on location set-up, co-manufacturing workflows, automations, and cost tracking to setting up their multi-channel mapping process and fulfillment requirements, Hawk Cloud Consulting was instrumental in making Cin7 work for The Lip Bar.

“We started with a full process audit and a revisit of the project’s scope, which led to us reconfigure workflows, retrain staff, and architect custom workarounds,” Kevin says. “We also deployed mid-implementation projects, such as moving to a new 3PL, which we integrated via API after reviewing all of their possible workflows and made a bulk SKU change so they could serve their Walmart Seller Central channel.”

Plus, Kevin and his team ensured The Lip Bar could utilize Cin7 bundles and co-manufacturing capabilities using Advanced Production processes.

“He was very organized, thorough, and attentive throughout the process,” says Ashely. “Given the fact that he’s in Australia, it’s impressive that he was always on time and willing to work in our time zone. And when our contract was done, he was still willing to answer a few questions for us.”

Ashley also received strong support from the team at Accountfully. Accountfully provided operational consulting on a daily and weekly basis designed to support The Lip Bar’s growing omni-channel business model and to help them scale with greater visibility and confidence.

The strategic guidance from Accountfully that bridged the gap between inventory management and accounting! They recommended and implemented more efficient processes resulting in streamlined inventory workflows for The Lip Bar. Accountfully also helped to simplify the Lip Bar’s month-end close and improved the quality and timeliness of monthly financial reporting. Talk about a mult–use tool! 

Putting Their Best Face Forward with Cin7

With Kevin and Accountfully at their side, the The Lip Bar team implemented Cin7 in approximately four-to-six months, going live in 2024. Like an exfoliating Konjac sponge, Cin7 gently but thoroughly scrubbed The Lip Bar’s processes to reveal a smoother, more refreshed version of itself.

Specifically, The Lip Bar can now:

• Trust its inventory with real-time visibility
• Utilize and store master-level information for every SKU (e.g., track shifts and discontinuations, upload pictures of each item, etc.)
• Give team members their own login and the power to perform their tasks easily and effectively (something Ashley calls “self-service”)
• Mass upload their data, saving precious time

“We save two-to-three work days, which is about 16-to-24 hours of manual labor. We don’t have to manually upload and sync inventory or upload orders one-by-one, like we did with Fishbowl.”

The Lip Bar is also basking in the glow provided by Cin7 automated workflows. “Automations with Cin7 are huge and super helpful. They can’t be underestimated or undervalued.”

Looking forward, the The Lip Bar team plans to continue happily applying Cin7’s renewing benefits, growing the business, and supplying its customers with responsibly made products that deliver maximum impact with minimal effort.