The Italian beauty brand Superfluid is on a mission to ’create beauty products inspired by real skin’. The Milan based Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) beauty brand launched June 2020. Targeting European millennials and generation Z, Superfluid knows customer experience is at least as important as the product itself. General Manager Stefano Tartaglia explains how the flexible plug and play efulfilment solution of Salesupply plays an important role in delivering customers a ‘WOW’ experience.
Disrupting the beauty industry
“At Superfluid, we are trying to disrupt the old paradigm of beauty and the beauty industry. Shifting from what we define as unrealistic and toxic beauty standards to promoting the idea that we believe in: beauty in real life is accepting and loving who you are instead of achieving a certain standard,” explains Stefano Tartaglia, General Manager of Superfluid. “I joined Superfluid in 2019, when it was solely an idea on a keynote slide. At that moment we had to build the team, the brand as well as the overall customer experience and the delivery experience. Especially in ecommerce the latter two add just as much value as the product itself.”
Real Plug & Play Connectivity
Early in the process, Superfluid invited 7 ecommerce fulfilment providers with a warehouse in Italy to participate in the tender. The 2 main criteria of the tender were to provide a fitting solution for the fulfilment of the ecommerce model Superfluid was designing, combined with simplicity. ”We needed a straightforward ecommerce fulfilment solution which is – if you like – a commodity. You can find this almost anywhere varying in price and maybe performance,” clarifies Stefano. “But this commodity combined with the simplicity of a real plug & play integration is very, very rare. Normally it is:’I can offer you this solution, now it is your problem to make it work in the real world’. To make our case even more difficult there are extra legal and quality demands when it comes to fulfilment of beauty products. Salesupply was able to deliver a strong plug & play connection even with all the extra demands and requirements.”
Internationally scalable fufilment solution
“By the time we selected Salesupply we didn’t know Brexit would require us to set up a fulfilment location in the UK. When it became clear that the only sensible and sustainable way to serve the UK market was to fulfill UK orders from within the UK, we decided to work with Salesupply there as well. We then discovered another use of the Salesupply solution: scalability: the ability to replicate the same setup internationally. Together with Salesupply we managed to set up the UK connection between Christmas and New Year’s. For me this was astonishing. It literally took us 2 hours to integrate the connection with our Shopify account and the rest of the day was for testing and physically setting up within the new warehouse.”
Delivering the WOW experience
“As mentioned before, in ecommerce the delivery experience is absolutely crucial. That’s why we wanted to create a Superfluid WOW experience upon delivery of the product. This exists of two parts.
The unboxing: we want to give our customers a unique Superfluid unboxing experience to make sure the brand characteristics are clearly visible from the moment the package arrives. Avoiding the standard cardboard box means customization and this equals higher cost, complexity and headaches in the fulfilment center. Together with the team of Salesupply, we worked on finding the right balance between customization and complexity to make sure the process was feasible, affordable and scalable. We trained the fulfilment team until the very details such as where the label should be placed.
And then there is the delivery. We are currently simplifying our model to offer express delivery on all orders all over Europe as opposed to delivery options at different speed and different cost depending on where customers live. We want Superfluid to feel close to our customers, everywhere they buy from in Europe. The same counts for returns. We do not want our clients to have to return a product internationally and then wait for their refund. That’s why we are working with the local return solution from Salesupply.”
The year of the truth
At the moment of writing Superfluid is still in its first year and the brand is growing steadily. Superfluid has over 50k followers on Instagram, its main account and orders are increasing each week. What is in store for Superfluid in 2021? “For Superfluid 2021 is a crucial year,” says Stefano. “You could call it the year of truth, we really want to prove our brand and our concept. Several retailers have reached out over the past months to include Superfluid in their offering but we feel we need to prove the mode.
