Spotlight
Glaize
Ecommerce smarts for a high growth start up
Ecommerce
In 2024 co-founders Gina Farran and Tom Christensen entered the Dragon’s Den ready to see their pitch prodded and poked by the panel of wizened investors. Their business is Glaize, a pioneering beauty industry startup that offers an alternative to traditional manicures in the form of ready-to-go, stick-on gels. Tom and Gina emerged from the Den that day with the Dragons eating out of the palms of their hands.
Following the coverage, sales blew up and the Glaize team had to contend with thousands of tiny ecommerce transactions and found they couldn’t get the visibility they needed on sales, subscriptions, discounts, refunds and VAT.
"Our previous accountants were struggling to accurately record our Shopify transactions in Xero, which is fundamental for us as an e-commerce business."
Tom Christensen, Co-founder, Glaize
Tom contacted Practice, who stepped-in to carry out a complete assessment of the brand’s Xero and Shopify setup. The brief was to identify gaps and suggest a way forward. The answer was a piece of software called A2X which seamlessly integrates the Glaize website and finance system and neatly reconciles and records the complexity of ecommerce accounting.
"They knew how to set things up in a way that was tailored to our use-case. They immediately understood what we were looking for and why that was important to us."
Tom Christensen, co-founder, Glaize
Having felt such anxiety around their numbers, Practice were able to provide Tom and Gina with reliable numbers in Xero which reconciled back to their Shopify platform. As an added bonus, they also used the margin reporting function in A2X to record the unit costs of all Glaize’s SKUs so that the team could automate gross margin reporting in their internal reports and investor decks.
"Having number in Xero that we're confident in means we get an accurate view of where the business is. It's allowed us to plan a lot better than we were able to do before."
Tom Christensen, Co-founder, Glaize
Some months later, the work enabled the Glaize team to celebrate a huge milestone - their first profitable month. Tom explains, "If we hadn’t switched accountant we wouldn’t even have known we were profitable that month!”
