QUICK READ:
- Touchland sells skincare-forward hand sanitizing products designed to turn a daily activity into a luxurious experience.
- Touchland closed deals to get its products into 4,000 retail stores within 12 months, even as the hand sanitizer market declined by 6%.
- Touchland uses NetSuite Connector to automate fulfillment of Amazon orders. It maintains optimal stock levels across six warehouses with NetSuite Demand Planning.
- Moving to NetSuite in Touchland’s early stages laid a foundation for fast growth, its founder said.
About Touchland
Touchland operates on the belief that common acts of personal care should be more than necessary chores; they should be as enjoyable as luxury beauty treatments.
The brand sells wildly popular, stylishly packaged, “beauty-forward” hand sanitizers that hydrate while leaving hands smelling great. It offers 15 hand sanitizer scents created in partnership with the well-known Givaudan perfume house. Touchland(opens in new tab) is more of a lifestyle brand: Yes, phenomenal products, but also an attitude and approach to life customers deeply share with the brand.
Touchland has strategized brilliantly in its commoditized category, taking “typical” moments in daily life and turning them into fun, cool experiences. And the world has taken notice. The brand is celebrity-endorsed — think unpaid social media posts from Kris Jenner and Naomi Campbell — and saw press coverage garnering over 68 billion earned media impressions in 2022.
An overview of Touchland’s sales channels:
- B2C sales come via its ecommerce site and Amazon.
- Wholesale channels include big-name retailers like Ulta, Target, and Sephora.
- B2B channels involve Touchland supplying sanitizer dispensers to customers like Equinox, Standard Hotels, Beacon Capital, Marriott Group, Warby Parker, and Four Seasons.
- Corporate clients often buy sanitizers as gifts for their employees and customers.
- Touchland sells through online wholesale marketplace Faire.
Touchland launched in 2018 in Miami, Florida. The team works with several manufacturers and 4,000 retail doors, selling more than 10 of its Power Mist sanitizers every minute. To date, Touchland has powered more than 1 million hand washings via its Touchlives program, which donates sanitizer to public schools.
Retailers and Partners Buy In
Touchland has prioritized data analysis since its founding. The idea is that understanding data translates into an advantage over competitors that don’t take an analytical approach.
After six months of B2C sales in the US, Touchland was able to analyze the data it had amassed to capture the attention of retailers. One metric that captivated retailers’ attention was average order value (AOV). While AOV market standards are 1.5-2x unit MSRP, Touchland had $60+ AOV from the beginning — meaning customers were buying six or seven units at a time. This data was incredibly helpful in showing retailers that customers were not buying Touchland to meet a specific cleaning function; they were buying multiple scents for each mood of the week or for gifting.
In the year after its 2018 launch, Touchland had closed deals with names like Urban Outfitters, Bloomingdale's, and Neiman Marcus. Ulta launched Touchland in 1,300 stores in January 2020, where products sold out within two weeks.
Potential partners also came knocking. While many brands approach Touchland for partnerships, the company is highly selective, choosing only those that sync with its mission. Its first collaboration was with Disney, chosen for the brand’s ability to ignite joy. Then came Smiley, the trademarked, iconic smiley-face image that soared to popularity in the ‘70s.
Investing in ERP
Touchland previously used QuickBooks for accounting, and other departments used separate software for their respective operations. There was little connection between the numbers in finance and numbers in operations. From the beginning, Touchland had cemented itself as a fast-growing business. Leadership determined that to scale faster, it was time to invest in a single technology foundation.
When Touchland was selecting an ERP system, NetSuite was an early contender and eventually an easy choice. The leadership team traded QuickBooks and other software for NetSuite ERP(opens in new tab) to create more efficient processes and establish an integrated view of every department’s operations.
To ease any resistance to change before implementation, Founder and CEO Andrea Lisbona sat down with her team and essentially sold them on how the ERP system would help them work more efficiently. And it did: Within 12 months of implementing NetSuite, Touchland secured 4,000 retail doors, even as the hand sanitizer category decreased by 6%. The brand had an award-winning product, a 56,000-person waitlist, tremendous social media following, and continued headlines in top magazines. Retailers were excited to grow the brand given its strong performance in stores.
Cleaning Up Processes
For Touchland, the biggest benefit of NetSuite is an ability to interconnect operations, said Lisbona. The most noticeable example of this is faster order processing with less effort: Orders come in from retailers and get routed through the warehouse for distribution, all with barely any human interaction.
Specific solutions Touchland used to clean up processes include:
NetSuite Connector: Touchland uses NetSuite Connector to sync its ERP environment with Amazon, as the system automatically transfers data between the systems. Touchland uses NetSuite Connector(opens in new tab) to track inventory across warehouses and automate ecommerce-related accounting tasks, like recording transactions and managing payables.
Besides Amazon, NetSuite Connector syncs the ERP with other online marketplaces and logistics providers. After working with such a seamless flow, Touchland won’t launch any additional sales channel if it can’t connect to NetSuite, Lisbona said. As many initiatives and plugins as other systems offer, in the rare chance a channel can’t connect through NetSuite, the brand usually waits until the platform offers a NetSuite connection.
NetSuite Demand Planning: Touchland more recently expanded its use of the suite by implementing NetSuite Demand Planning, critical for a brand that typically has more demand than supply. The company fulfills from six warehouses, each targeting different sales channels, which makes demand planning all the more complex. Armed with accurate demand forecasts from NetSuite Demand Planning(opens in new tab), Touchland knows when to place a PO with its vendors and which specific items to include in that PO so it can fulfill orders without holding too much stock and tying up cash.
This also aids with timely order fulfillment, which is critical because those big-name retailers keep vendor scorecards tracking Touchland’s performance. The team uses NetSuite to maintain scores that are as close to perfect as possible.
NetSuite Advanced Customer Support: The Touchland team works with NetSuite Advanced Customer Support (ACS)(opens in new tab), using all of their allotted consulting hours each month to make sure they fully understand how to maximize the system.
The Future Looks Luxurious
Touchland plans to continue proactively refining its workflows with ERP, Lisbona said. Her mantra: Don’t wait for issues to arise or for risks to appear before figuring out how to use technology to scale smartly.
Having worked with the NetSuite team for over two years, Lisbona is a vocal proponent of ERP. She said she may as well be a salesperson, because at entrepreneur and beauty events, she tells other companies that if they really want to grow to the next stage, they have to get serious about an ERP system like NetSuite.
Time is of the essence for many companies, she added. Many have been in operation quite a while, with revenue in the millions, yet continue attempting to manage the business in Excel. Lisbona advises businesses to put that ERP foundation in place early so they can build upon it versus facing lost opportunities and a vastly more complex implementation later.
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