BaubleBar uses Surefront to accelerate speed to market by 30%

The New York-based jewelry and accessories giant cuts their product development cycle down from 12 weeks to 8 weeks. 

• New product launch times cut by over 30% - Surefront reduced the length of BaubleBar’s product development time from 12 weeks to 8 weeks
• Customer Inquiries reduced to just minutes - Finding products among a catalog of 50K+ SKUs to respond to customer inquiries no longer takes weeks with Surefront’s single source of truth
• Linesheet production reduced from hours to seconds - Surefront eliminates the manual input BaubleBar previously required to locate products and find and compile data
• Hundreds of hours of manual product data entry reduced to minutes and seconds - BaubleBar went from manually entering product data to automating product setup in BaubleBar’s new ERP in just minutes

BaubleBar chooses Surefront 

Founded in 2011, BaubleBar is a New York-based fashion, jewelry, and accessories brand carried by thousands of brick and mortar and online retailers across the globe. The business caters to a wide variety of product audiences by partnering with leading retail and consumer brands to bring fashion forward accessories to market. Within their first decade, the company experienced rapid growth, with a thriving BTB (business to business) and well-established DTC (direct to consumer) client base and were looking to expand into new product delivery categories. The retail leader had become highly successful in attracting customers, however bringing products to market rapidly enough to pacify demand was a formidable challenge. 

As the business began to scale, the ability to rely on a solitary ERP system to launch thousands of new products each month was no longer viable. The system just wasn’t working efficiently as BaubleBar needed to be able to scale products to meet demand, and likewise, production and development teams needed something more collaborative than a disjointed product lifecycle management (PLM) software. The company sought out a solution that would allow them to actively engage both internal teams and external partners on a wide array of products all at once. They chose Surefront’s unified  PLM + CRM + PIM product collaboration platform to drive those collaborative efficiencies and provide the organization needed to scale growth and improve the speed to market of new product development. 

Detailing the Needs for Scale and Growth

Because BaubleBar had grown so quickly, the company needed to create a more robust hub for everything from product development to sourcing and sales management. Before adopting Surefront, BaubleBar’s product development process was largely relegated to exchanging email, Excel docs, and PDFs among internal team members and manufacturing partners. This prevented the team’s highly skilled manufacturers, buyers and sales aficionados from giving the necessary focus to their specific areas of the business, and employees needed to be more focused on communicating with internal and external partners. The time it took for those collaborative communications to properly complete product orders posed significant delays to BaubleBar’s ability to bring new products to market quickly. In addition, BaubleBar’s teams were also spending too much time on backend administrative tasks. Sourcing was also negatively affected, regularly pushing back BaubleBar’s production schedule by weeks at a time. The company needed a technology solution to help their product development, design, and production teams keep up with the brand’s massive growth. Any solution they adopted would need to be a centralized solution for product development that could give them a critical but necessary advantage in producing trending products ahead of the competition. 

Onboarding and Implementing Surefront

BaubleBar chose to level up their operations by adopting Surefront in February of 2021. Surefront’s customer success teams began the onboarding process immediately, with consistent collaboration and expertise between BaubleBar and Surefront’s project leads helping to expedite the time of adoption down to just 8 weeks. From there, BaubleBar’s product development team and manufacturing partners were able to begin daily use of the platform by April of 2021.

The first area of improvement for BaubleBar was to use Surefront to standardize and consolidate the company’s entire catalog of products across different lines. The initial set up prior to adoption saw the company using spreadsheets and multiple systems to catalog, with some of these systems being paper-based and some digital, producing a less than ideal and very disorganized system for product information. Locating products in BaubleBar’s catalog of 50,000+ SKUs used to take weeks, but by implementing Surefront, there is now a single source of truth for those thousands of SKUs in a single, easy to use and highly searchable database. Finding specific products among the tens of thousands of SKUs used to take weeks, but by utilizing Surefront’s catalog tools, BaubleBar’s teams are now able to quickly locate any item or style requested by a customer in seconds flat. 

The next step was to improve product development. Surefront’s PLM platform offered a streamlined destination for new product development using Surefront’s SmartCatalog feature, which helped BaubleBar create a complete internal digital catalog. Robust product visuals and data are centralized in one place for easy selection and sharing. And, when it’s time to request or create quotes, BaubleBar’s sales teams can do so with the click of a button. Bringing new products to life has never been such a seamless process, and what used to take 12 weeks, now just takes 8 weeks, giving BaubleBar the speed to market increase they needed to stay ahead of trends and maximize product sales. 

Conclusion and Benefits

In the time since the adoption of Surefront, BaubleBar has almost doubled their team size and platform usage volume. BaubleBar’s team members, factories, and vendors all use Surefront daily now, as a standardized platform for all aspects of product ideation and retail delivery. All of BaubleBar’s product development functions now completely take place on the platform as a single source of truth. Product development has been cut from 12 to 8 weeks; gone are the days of dedicating 50+ hours of work and multiple workweeks to search for products with specific attributes among thousands of SKUs, and the hours once dedicated to manual data entry per product line are now spent in much more productive ways, giving BaubleBar the competitive advantage they needed from Surefront.

While the metric benefits are very obvious, with increased speed to market and streamlined customer inquiries, the holistic value of Surefront has become an added bonus. BaubleBar teams are now free from unnecessary clerical work, which allows individual employees to focus on the parts of their job that they are the most skilled in and love doing. Teams are able to prioritize workflows by business need and customer need, instead of being bogged down by administrative tasks, which has BaubleBar poised for even more market share and business growth in the months and years to come.