Five Reasons Body Art Alliance Replaced QuickBooks With NetSuite

Jenni Moseley, Alliance Marketing Manager

March 7, 2022

When Melissa Gagnier-Solis started working for her brother’s company, Painful Pleasures, in 2011, the ecommerce-focused business had seven employees, few resources and a disorganized accounting system. Its primary line of business involved distributing tattoo, piercing and medical supplies.

“One of the first things I did was look at what the organization needed comprehensively from an ecommerce perspective,” recalled Gagnier-Solis, now president and COO of Body Art Alliance, the business that grew out of Painful Pleasures. Gagnier-Solis soon replaced the company’s shopping cart platform, X-Cart, with Magento. Then, in 2015, she began to realize Painful Pleasures was outgrowing the QuickBooks system(opens in new tab) it was using for accounting.

“We were selling on three or four different channels at the time,” Gagnier-Solis said. “Syncing live inventory across those platforms just wasn’t achievable with the system that we had in place.”

Painful Pleasures needed a platform that could grow and scale along with the company. Leadership looked at four different alternatives to QuickBooks(opens in new tab) before selecting NetSuite in 2015 in part because it was a cloud-based system that didn’t require an internal server. It worked with Providence Consulting Group (PCG), a NetSuite Alliance Partner, to implement the ERP system. 
 

Top Reasons to Switch From QuickBooks to NetSuite

Here are five benefits that the Body Art Alliance gained by replacing QuickBooks with NetSuite:

  1. Improved inventory management. The system was also able to handle the company’s operations, accounting and inventory management processes, which it had struggled with when using the previous system. NetSuite could feed inventory data in real time to all of the different websites where the company offered its products. “That was ultimately why we went with NetSuite,” Gagnier-Solis said.
  2. A platform for growth. NetSuite also provided a platform that Painful Pleasures (and later Body Art Alliance) could scale with the business as it grew. It didn’t take long for users to see how NetSuite could help. “Our people loved it and could see the business transformation that took place,” said Gagnier-Solis, “from accounting to operations to marketing to having the real-time data that we didn’t previously have at our fingertips.”
  3. Consolidated subsidiaries on a single platform. NetSuite would further prove its value in 2020 when Painful Pleasures merged with three other businesses in the market—FK Irons, World Famous Tattoo Ink and NeoMetal/Norsco — to form Body Art Alliance. Using NetSuite OneWorld, it was able to turn those businesses into multiple subsidiaries running on a single instance of ERP. “We’re able to share information and reporting across all of those business units,” said Gagnier-Solis.
  4. Direct integrations to other applications. Body Art Alliance has also taken advantage of NetSuite’s ability to connect directly to other applications and currently has about 15-20 integrations, including Shopify, for ecomerce, Avalara for tax compliance management, OzLINK for address/shipping tracking, and RF-SMART for mobile inventory oversight, among others. With RF-SMART and NetSuite, the company replaced its previous three-step fulfillment process, which relied on pick tickets, with a scanner-based inventory management(opens in new tab) approach. “It now takes us just one step to fulfill an order,” said Gagnier-Solis. 
  5. High levels of operational visibility. Having NetSuite in place across all four of Body Art Alliance’s entities also provides high levels of operational visibility that wouldn’t have been possible with its previous, disparate technology systems. “We have more visibility into our business and transparency into where we can improve,” Gagnier-Solis said.


Body Art Alliance grew its revenues by 37% in 2021 and now has a total of 370 employees. The company expects more revenue growth in 2022.

“The tattoo and piercing industry is booming,” said Gagnier-Solis, “and fortunately we recognized early on that we needed the capability to scale and grow. The way to push a business forward is with really good processes and continuous improvement. Technology tools like NetSuite allow us to do that.”

Read the business guide on how to move your financials from QuickBooks to NetSuite(opens in new tab).

 

NetSuite has packaged the experience gained from tens of thousands of worldwide deployments over two decades into a set of leading practices that pave a clear path to success and are proven to deliver rapid business value. With NetSuite, you go live in a predictable timeframe — smart, stepped implementations begin with sales and span the entire customer lifecycle, so there's continuity from sales to services to support.