Automation Engine Helps The Flex Company Pump Up its Sales

The Flex Company launched in 2016 with a revolutionary invention — a disposable menstrual disc — and a clear mission: to improve the lives of people who have periods.

At first, the team was small and the sales model was primarily subscription-based. However, Founder and CEO Lauren Schulte Wang was ready to take on the world with her vision for changing the status quo when it came to menstrual products.

Thanks to a powerful growth mindset and an unwavering dedication to company culture, The Flex Company skyrocketed to success. Within just 12 months, the team had expanded to eight people and generated $4 million in revenue.

The brand won retail placements in top U.S. stores, including Target, CVS, and Walgreens, opened a Shopify Plus store in the U.K. to sit alongside its successful stateside D-to-C online store, and established a reputation as a sector best-seller on key marketplaces, including Amazon.com.

A Smart Solution

As so often is the case for brands like The Flex Company, with rapid growth came operational complexity. By 2019, the business needed a reliable platform to streamline its systems and support ongoing growth.

The Flex team started looking into its options and put Stitch Labs, Skubana, and Brightpearl in the running, among others.

Ultimately, the key features that drove the decision were Brightpearl’s strong automation engine capabilities, financial reporting, and ability to stitch together customer profiles across channels, which set it apart from the competition.

“At the heart of our decision to bring in Brightpearl was a goal of becoming a more modern, omnichannel business,” said The Flex Company's Senior Vice President of Supply Chain Aaron Alpeter.

“Brightpearl’s ability to integrate with our existing tech stack — including Shopify Plus, Klaviyo and Quickbooks — and to stitch together the different elements of our business has been central to this journey.”

Within six months of going live, Brightpearl provided The Flex Company with a "plug and play" integration to its Shopify Plus stores and 3PL, as standard. With its market-disrupting automation engine and simple, intuitive interface, it quickly started saving the Flex team vital hours and empowered its business leaders to spend less time dealing with systems and more time making continued growth a reality.

“The automation engine is one of the best Brightpearl features in my view,” Alpeter noted. “We use it for things like automating all order routing. For example, if inventory is low in one warehouse we automatically re-route orders to get fulfilled in another warehouse and also automatically upgrade the shipping so it still arrives when we promised it would. This is something that we previously would have done manually — and would have taken lots of time. That’s the great thing about Brightpearl; it has allowed us to better leverage our existing team.”

Streamlining and Simplifying

With growth doubling year-over-year, Brightpearl’s ability to provide a dynamic ecosystem that grows as businesses do has played a key role in The Flex Company’s impressive success.

From streamlining order management and automating workflows to boosting CRM and giving the ability to bundle different SKUs together, Brightpearl has been designed by experts to provide retail businesses like The Flex Company with the freedom to grow fearlessly.

“The platform has been a powerful factor in our growth,” Alpeter said. "Brightpearl’s native integration with Shopify has given us streamlined visibility across two Shopify stores and our other channels. It’s stitched everything together, it’s given us flexibility and resiliency and, crucially, it’s enabled us to look at the business holistically.

“We’ve been able to expand into three separate warehouses and maintain a ‘single source of truth’ visibility across our inventory and operations," added Alpeter. "That’s been really valuable to us. Our team is definitely more productive — they’re around twice as fast at processing orders now.

“In the future, I see us going deeper in our markets, growing our range of products and expanding internationally,” noted Alpeter. “At The Flex Company, when we do something, we like to do it at the highest level possible. With Brightpearl, we feel confident about continued growth and an exciting future.”

Mark Hook is the global communications director at Brightpearl, a retail-tailored digital operations platform built for omnichannel merchants.