A fresh approach to beauty deserves a fresh approach to business financial operations. That’s what Amy Liu, founder and CEO of Tower 28 Beauty and Victor Liu, CFO, decided as they explored the next steps for their company. The Los Angeles-based company creates beauty and skincare products utilizing clean ingredients to support sensitive skin. They found that the Tower 28 brand began to quickly expand while emerging from the pandemic.
With this rapid growth, they needed a holistic approach to their financial operations that enabled them to move quickly without losing visibility. Amy Liu says, “From 2022 to 2023, our business basically tripled, and our employee base has gone from 12 employees to 30 in just the past year.”
Victor Liu adds, “The number of our vendors has grown from 112 in 2021 to almost 300 now. And our monthly transactions have grown from 600 two years ago to almost 3,000 today. Trying to handle all of those as a small team, would've been catastrophic. But just being able to scale with all the tools, solutions, and services that BILL provides has been phenomenal.”
Scalability has been the name of the game for this rapidly-growing company. Tower 28 was founded in April of 2019, and they’ve broadened their distribution footprint to include retail placements in all Sephora stores across the United States and Canada, all while focusing on their mission of delivering high-performing beauty products that are designed for sensitive skin and made for all. And they’ve certainly been succeeding in that mission, as Tower 28 is currently the only beauty brand that’s 100% compliant with the National Eczema Association. But this growth was hindered at the beginning by time consuming manual processes like emailed approvals.
“Our finances were so frustrating in the beginning,” Victor recalls. “Historically if we needed a vendor onboarded or needed to pay a bill, we would email Amy and she would look it over. A screenshot would need to be sent, a PDF note would need to be created and attached to an invoice, and all that would theoretically happen for each transaction. It was like five different emails for each invoice.”
This complicated accounts payable (AP) process was interrupting Tower 28’s mission. And their finances were complicated even further by remote employees that needed access to company cards in order to pay their travel expenses. As their operations expanded, Tower 28 needed a solution that would help minimize their growing pains, and that’s how they discovered BILL.
Amy and Victor brought on a bookkeeper who had used BILL previously, and immediately saw the benefit of the platform. Being able to decentralize and take work off of Amy’s plate allowed her to focus on expansion, giving the responsibility of payments and approvals to her finance team. And, to save even more time, vendors manage their own information and can look up the status of each payment within BILL.
“If we had kept running our finances the way we were before, there's no way we would've been able to grow. I think, in a lot of ways, BILL allowed us to grow at the rate that we were able to,” says Victor. Utilizing BILL has allowed them to scale from paying 300 invoices a month to over 6,000 as their supply chain and vendor base has expanded, while gaining more insights into their spending.
“We did an internal estimate, and it could easily have taken 40 hours a week, an entire full-time employee, to handle just a lot of the functionality that we simply moved to BILL. Right now, what I'd say is that 90% of that work is automated. We still will have people do the approvals, but those are managers from other departments, and they can roll those tasks into their typical workday.”
How do you enable a small, geographically-dispersed team to grow and thrive? Give them the tools they need to succeed. Once their AP system was squared away, Amy and Victor looked for an option that would empower employee spending, without sacrificing visibility. Coming from a social circle of entrepreneurs, they had heard horror stories about employees falsifying receipts to spend more than they were supposed to, and they wanted to find a balance of trusting their employees without sacrificing control or visibility. One look at BILL Spend & Expense told them that they had found the right solution.*
“The BILL Spend & Expense solution ended up being so fantastic, because as we onboarded people, we could give them virtual cards or physical cards,” says Amy. “We would set limits based on their level of responsibility. A lot of our employee spending concerns were immediately alleviated, because you could control the amount of spending. You could look at the budgets and receipts at any time, on a real time basis.”
Victor adds, “We've found that BILL allows us to have both oversight and comfort, but with a lot of flexibility and real time updates as transactions come up. And it has also enabled us to do work on-the-go. We’ve approved payments from meetings, from airports, from conventions—basically everywhere.”
Amy says, “It's been a fast and fun ride at Tower 28, but services like BILL make such a difference, because we can scale without having this huge amount of notice. Getting my vendors paid is important to me as a business owner. I feel like things are under control, because I know they're getting looked at, as there are so many payments and transactions happening every day.”
* Card issued by Cross River Bank, member FDIC
