Stay-at-home mom turned entrepreneur Gisselle Hernandez founded Glamlite in 2018. The colorful Los Angeles-based cosmetics brand gained popularity with its unique makeup palettes, such as the “Pizza Palette,” which went viral on social media and sold out within 48 hours. Since then, Glamlite has carved a unique niche by creating makeup collections in collaboration with major global brands and fostering a community of makeup lovers proud of being themselves.
Although Glamlite sold internationally from the beginning, their growth was limited by exorbitant USPS shipping fees, long shipping times, and an inability to track international packages. After learning about how Managed Markets could help the team address these challenges, Gisselle quickly signed up. The results exceeded her expectations.
“The value of Managed Markets has been immeasurable,” says Gisselle. “From improved customer retention to increased sales, it transformed our business and enabled us to compete globally like never before.”
Glamlite has seen the following results in the six months following activation of Managed Markets:
- 2.25X growth in international sales
- 24% increase in average order value (AOV) of international sales
- 67% conversion rate improvement in the UK
- 77% conversion rate improvement in Germany
The Challenge: Shipping issues stifled international growth
The blockbuster success of Glamlite’s “Pizza Palette” helped the brand build a devoted audience of makeup lovers across the globe. Domestic sales were multiplying fast, but despite their success in the states, Glamlite had a hard time growing internationally. This was mainly due to their reliance on USPS, which charged high fees for international shipping and could take several weeks — oftentimes months — to deliver international packages.
“We were using USPS to ship internationally, and it put us at a disadvantage,” says Gisselle. “The high shipping costs and long delivery times were making it very difficult for us to compete with brands based in those markets who could ship at rates less than a tenth of our own.”
USPS also didn’t offer international tracking, leaving Glamlite and their customers in the dark about the whereabouts of their shipments, with some customers never receiving their orders at all. Unsurprisingly, Glamlite’s international sales and customer retention rates were far below where they felt they should be.
Knowing she had to make a change, Gisselle turned to Shopify, her commerce partner since the beginning of her entrepreneurial journey. She was excited to learn how Managed Markets offered solutions to her international shipping woes, and she enabled it about as quickly as she could.
The Solution: Managed Markets makes international shipping fast and affordable
After enabling Managed Markets directly from the Markets page in Glamlite’s Shopify admin, the team found numerous features that helped prove it was the perfect solution to their challenges. Managed Markets enabled Glamlite to offer fast, affordable shipping to their international customers by ending their reliance on USPS in favor of DHL. This switch alone helped transform Glamlite’s international customer experience. The team jumped on the opportunity to capitalize on this exciting moment by ensuring their audience knew about the update.
“Once we turned on Managed Markets and gained access to DHL, we did a marketing campaign announcing our products were now available internationally for 2-3 day shipping,” says Gisselle. “We had customers in the UK placing their orders on Friday and receiving deliveries on Tuesday. That was almost unheard of in the past, and it made a huge difference.”
Using Managed Markets also gave Glamlite the opportunity for the first time ever to add international sales rights to many of their licensing contracts for various product collections in their store. The updated contracts opened the door for Glamlite to market more of their catalog across more countries throughout the world and increase sales. The team updated the website to ensure shoppers knew that fast international shipping was now available for each of these collections and sent email and text blasts to their customers as well.
New opportunities to boost brand awareness have also emerged thanks to Managed Markets, as Glamlite plans to partner with hundreds of content creators in key international markets. The brand struggled to cement such partnerships in the past because of difficulties shipping PR packages abroad. With those challenges now behind them, Glamlite plans to flood the international market with their content with the help of influencers in the cosmetics space whose audiences are very likely to be interested in Glamlite’s products.
The Results: Glamorous gains across the globe
Managed Markets enabled Glamlite to tap into the enormous pent up demand for their products internationally and led to significant growth in the brand’s international sales. Fast and affordable international shipping has boosted customer retention rates and helped Glamlite compete more effectively and capture more market share in many new markets.
All this momentum has sparked a variety of deeply focused sales and marketing efforts to help the brand achieve market dominance around the world, which paid off quickly as conversion rates in key international markets including the UK and Germany grew by 67% and 77% respectively in the six months following the launch of Managed Markets.
“We’re bringing some of the most unique makeup products that we have here in America to regions where they don’t have licensing, and that’s something that’s only possible because of Managed Markets,” says Gisselle. “We’re looking at Glamlite becoming one of the fastest growing brands in the UK and Australia next year, and we believe we could double our revenue.”
As Glamlite continues to scale globally, build new partnerships, and achieve unprecedented success, there is no doubt that their entrepreneurial journey is only just getting started.
It would be impossible to sell internationally at our current scale without Managed Markets. We couldn’t target the international markets or compete with brands based in those regions because I couldn’t ship for even one tenth of their costs. Now it’s a level playing field, so it’s game time. You can’t put a price on that.
