Retailers chasing global growth often focus on the front end – the brand play, the retail partnerships, the sales channels. But it’s the ops stack that can quietly make or break it.
Ultra Violette – the Australian-based global suncare leader with an innovative range of skinscreen formulations – has grown fast. From e-commerce roots in 2019 to retail partnerships with Sephora and launches across the UK, Southeast Asia and North America, the momentum hasn’t let up. Its tech stack, however, couldn’t keep pace. It was a disconnected set of systems, manual order workarounds and reporting held together by spreadsheets. And yet they pulled off a four-market ERP rollout in just six months – right before Black Friday.
This is because they treated scale as an operational challenge – and solved it with early investment in the right technology foundations.
In a recent NORA webinar, Ultra Violette’s head of operations Jane Furphy joined their technology partners Annexa, to unpack the system-level decisions that made its global growth sustainable and shared a few of the ‘banana skins’ they dodged along the way.
The most common trap is patching
When growth starts to accelerate, many retailers fall into the same pattern – stringing together new tools to cover gaps, rather than stepping back to rethink the system as a whole. This approach creates layer upon layer of manual processes, duplicated data and blind spots in inventory, finance and fulfilment.
That’s exactly where Ultra Violette found themselves in early 2023. They were running multiple entities in siloed systems, with no single source of truth. And with plans to expand into Canada and the US, that level of complexity was no longer sustainable.
“We had limited integrations with our warehouses, which made it difficult to get inventory visibility and meant more people power was needed to raise sales orders in multiple systems.” said Jane, “then during our capital raise in 2023, we found major reporting deficiencies. Pulling together the information investors needed was a lot of work – and really showed that something needed to change.”
The team made the call to invest in a consolidated ERP and integration structure as a core part of their growth plan.
Don’t underestimate integration
Integration is about making sure the right data flows between platforms, in the right format, at the right time – across every order, region and partner. When you’re working with multiple 3PLs, trading partners, EDI layers and currencies, the complexity escalates fast.
As Annexa’s director Matthew Owens explains, “A lot of retailers underestimate what’s involved. It’s not just connecting to Shopify – it’s integrating 3PLs, currencies, compliance, EDI. There’s a lot to it, and if you’re not ahead of it, it can really slow you down.”
For Ultra Violette, that meant working with Annexa to map and manage integrations across four global warehouses, multiple Shopify sites and a new EDI setup for the US. Jane estimates that half the project effort went into getting those connections right.
The rollout wasn’t small. They went live across all four warehouses in the lead-up to Black Friday. Not ideal timing. But the team had fallback plans in place and regional contingencies mapped – and the go-live landed cleanly.
Compliance is foundational
Tax. Audit. Statutory reporting. It’s not the headline act – but it’s often where scaling retailers stumble.
As Matthew explains, too many brands leave finance out of the transformation picture. “Businesses focus on sales first, then try to figure out tax and reporting afterwards – which is quite difficult.”
UV did the opposite – embedding finance into ops early by shifting their 2IC to the CFO, to act as a translator between teams.
Don’t scale everything at once
Ultra Violette knew some of their early systems – Xero, DEAR/Cin7 – got them as far as they needed. They didn’t jump too early. But when the time came, they didn’t go halfway either.
They brought in NetSuite for global finance and inventory. Celigo for integration. And a local partner in Annexa who had done it all before – including the important nuance of co-manufacturing from Australia and exporting globally.
Want the full story?
Catch the on-demand webinar to hear Jane and Matthew unpack:
- Building flexibility across D2C and wholesale
- Structuring your teams to reduce friction
- How to pace international rollouts for long-term success
