Experience taught Leonie Henzell how to launch and run a great ecommerce brand. Cin7 gave her the enterprise-level technology she knew she needed to keep on growing.
Leonie Henzell started her first online store to answer what now seems like a silly question: How do you give a gift when you live far away from your loved ones?
Today, Leonie would’ve been spoiled for choice, but ecommerce was still in its infancy in the early 2000s, and retailers like Peter Alexander were still taking orders by fax.
“I thought it was just a good idea to let people order online, buy a gift, and we’d send it to them,” Leonie says. “It seemed like a logical idea to me, and it was.”
So the former physiotherapist launched Bockers & Pony, an online retailer of gift hampers which she ran until she sold the brand in 2016.
“As a physiotherapist, I was what they call an ‘all-rounder.’ I think I was just searching for something that I had a huge passion for, but that turned out to be in ecommerce,” Leonie says, with a laugh. “I do like ecommerce a lot.”
Leonie launched two ecommerce brands in 2019.
Soul Baby Gifts sells customizable gift hampers for parents and their newborn babies. Customers can buy pre-packaged hampers or select from over 200 products to build their own.
“There’s a lot of baby-gifting companies in Australia, but there is none that truly allows a customer to choose all the items that go into the gift, choose their packaging, have the packaging monogrammed, and then check out,” Leonie says. “People really want to customize and personalize their own gifts.”
Soul Baby’s sister-brand, Beauty’s Got Soul, makes and sells candles, hand creams and body products sold individually or in gift sets.
“The concept was to create two amazing ecommerce businesses that are future-ready,” Leonie says. “I had this experience in ecommerce and I know how to scale a business, so I wanted to be ready with a foundation, structure and system in place that is ready to be scaled when and as the business grows. It’s almost opposite to what people usually do.”
Leonie saw high growth potential for both brands, especially Beauty’s Got Soul. Experience taught her to look for scalable inventory/order technology with the features she needed from the start and the flexibility to add integrations and workflows as her business changed.
“Businesses usually have to start over with a brand new system at a certain point in their growth,” Leonie says. “I don’t want to have to stop and completely rebuild everything in two years’ time. Cin7 feels like it gives me that luxury to grow. It is enterprise-level technology that everyone can afford.”
In her previous business, Leonie had used Saasu with Magento, a combination that lacked much of the functionality she needed, such as CRM and fulfillment and logistics management features.
“Cin7 provides an intuitive and seamless platform for Soul Baby Gifts and Beauty’s Got Soul to connect all of the important business functions of an ecommerce business: our website, courier logistics, including tracking and notifications, and accounting,” Leonie says. “Cin7 is our ‘mother ship’ and is a stellar choice when planning to build and scale a business quickly.”
Leonie currently uses Cin7 to connect two Magento websites to Cin7 and to streamline picking, packing and shipping from her small warehouse facility. Integrating and automating these ecommerce-to-warehouse order workflows have reduced the time it takes to process orders by 60% in comparison to her previous business.
Cin7’s packing slips help save time by showing images of the products that have to be picked for customized orders. Meanwhile, Leonie knows that she can quickly integrate with a 3PL, should fast growth make it necessary to outsource to a third-party warehouse.
On the production side, Leonie uses Cin7’s BOM feature to track inventory and costs of the ingredients used in the candles she makes under the Beauty’s Got Soul brand.
Leonie also noted that Cin7’s streamlined integration with her Xero accounts contributes to the overall fast and accurate administration.
Finally, Leonie relied on Cin7’s onboarders to help with setting up the system to work the way she needed it to.
With Cin7’s help, Leonie’s lean staff can focus their efforts on marketing, growing sales and keeping customers happy.
It’s rare for anyone to say they “love” their inventory management system,..
Childsmart grew by selling children’s products to retailers face-to-face. When..
The makers of Invisawear offer a truly unique product: smart jewelry that saves ..
