Color Wow is the flagship product line of Federici Brands LLC, and was the first haircare brand to address problems unique to color-treated hair, such as root coverup. The brand has been recognized with an unprecedented 90 major beauty industry awards. Privately held and operating in both the U.S. and U.K. markets, Federici Brands is known in the beauty space for their disruptive innovations in hair care. Their corporate mission declares that, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. The company proves this every day by offering prescriptive product recommendations that solve common haircare problems plaguing their customers – from frizzy to damaged, dry or oily hair.
Situation
Leveraging the popularity of creators and influencers has been key to Color Wow’s success. Color Wow partners with popular TikTok creators to help boost their brand visibility and sales. It even ran a successful brand ambassador program that offered a range of benefits to content creators such as free gifts, exclusive access, and event attendance to boost engagement.
Included among their ambassadors is world-renowned conceptual hair stylist, Chris Appleton, highly sought after by some of the biggest names in music, entertainment, fashion, and advertising for his original and outstanding work.
Color Wow US sells through their ecommerce site and also through Amazon, Ulta, and Sephora.
Federici Brands was an early adopter of TikTok Shop for their U.K. business, where the new selling platform first launched. With the beta release of TikTok Shop in the U.S. market, Federici Brands naturally wanted to move quickly and take advantage of this new channel to drive growth in the lucrative U.S. market.
For their back office ERP, Federici Brands relies on NetSuite as their source of truth for product catalog listings, to track order fulfillment from TikTok Shop U.K., and to reconcile inventory across all their selling channels.
Pipe17: TikTok Shop Fully Integrated
There was only one problem plaguing Color Wow’s TikTok plans: Order operations for the brand’s TikTok Shop U.K. business was still largely dependent on manual processing. Color Wow needed to find a solution partner that could deliver a fully automated order operation to support their growth. A solution built on NetSuite, that seamlessly connects Color Wow’s U.S. and U.K. TikTok Shops, and US 3PL partners so that NetSuite could track and reconcile orders, inventory and fulfillments.
Color Wow decided to turn to Pipe17, thanks to a recommendation from a mutual partner. First step was to get Color Wow’s product catalog into their TikTok Shop. Because TikTok is an ecommerce marketplace, detailed listing data was necessary. Pulling this volume of data proved challenging for Federici Brand’s ERP to support.
Fortunately, they were able to use Pipe17’s bidirectional data sync features to pull Color Wow’s entire product catalog from their U.K. TikTok Shop and push it to their U.S. TikTok Shop. Problem solved! While this was a one time pull, Pipe17 does provide periodic sync between catalog items between many popular ecommerce platforms and your TikTok Shop.
Even still, there remained a number of complex NetSuite financial integrations required so that all orders from the new store would post correctly. These included custom mapping for tax amounts, discounting, order holds, order cancellations, customer deposits, and refunds. Pipe17 was able to support all of these out of the box with no code required. Everything was configured through the Pipe17 user interface just like a business application.
Finally during the onboarding, Color Wow US decided to use ShipStation and fulfill from their own warehouse until sales volumes justified the migration to their US 3PL. No problem! Pipe17 was able to connect ShipStation to Federici’s own warehouse in under an hour. Pipe17 innovation makes it easy to add or update channel connections. When Color Wow is ready to migrate to their 3PL, they simply switch on the connector for that 3PL, which takes about an hour including testing (we support hundreds of 3PLs and WMS).
“As an early adopter of TikTok Shop, we were excited by its potential but concerned about the impact it would have on our order operations. Thanks to Pipe17, we are now seamlessly processing orders from our TikTok Shop through to fulfillment, and immediately reconciling them with our ERP. Pipe17’s onboarding team was great to work with. They got us up and running much faster than we anticipated.”
For the future, Color Wow is working with the TikTok Creator Marketplace to build their brand ambassador community here in the U.S. It will continue to rely on Pipe17 to expand their operations on TikTok Shop, including support for settlement reporting coming soon.
