BaubleBar, Inc., doesn’t just sell accessories. It sells joy, personality and a bold sense of self-expression. Since opening its doors in 2010, the e-commerce brand has grown from a fashion jewelry startup into a vibrant, multi-category accessories company known for statement-making styles and playful, personalized products.
From custom necklaces to sports-themed accessories to a mass-market Target line, BaubleBar’s mission is simple: design products that spark connection and make people smile. The company’s products are sold not only through its own Shopify-powered site, but also in over 300 premier retailers globally, including every Target store in the U.S. The company also handles a significant volume of made-to-order products, which adds both opportunity and operational complexity to its growing business. About half of BaubleBar’s stockkeeping units (SKUs) are customized for each individual customer.
With around 150 employees working from several global offices, BaubleBar needed a more streamlined, tech-enabled way to manage customization, rapid fulfillment and an expanding product line. Behind the scenes, the company began looking for smarter systems to support its next chapter.
When Zach Forrester joined BaubleBar as director of engineering two years ago, the company was dealing with the fallout of a difficult enterprise resource planning (ERP) rollout. NetSuite had gone live concurrently with Shopify and a warehouse management system (WMS). The high-pressure launch was further complicated by a lack of in-house NetSuite team and limited guidance from a previous service provider.
The implementation quickly veered off course. “We were at the point where we were thinking of closing the books and reimplementing,” Forrester says. Instead of starting over, BaubleBar brought in an implementation partner Forrester had worked with successfully in the past: ScaleNorth. The long-time NetSuite implementation partner was up to the challenge and quickly stepped in to stabilize the environment and help BaubleBar clean up critical financial data just ahead of its busy holiday season.
“We were able to save it and fix the numbers right before holiday,” Forrester recalls. “We made the auditors very happy.” Since then, BaubleBar has continued working with ScaleNorth to refine and customize NetSuite to better support its business needs.
With over a decade of NetSuite administrative experience, Forrester knew exactly what he was walking into when he joined BaubleBar and it wasn’t pretty. “They had over 700 custom scripts,” he says. “That’s a heck of a corner to be put in.” Drawing on his knowledge of top-tier providers, Forrester reached out to ScaleNorth, confident in the NetSuite partner’s ability to help untangle the system and get it back on track.
ScaleNorth’s collaborative approach caught Forrester’s eye pretty quickly. “When I did an RFP, reviewing scripts was one of the last things other providers mentioned,” he recalls. “With ScaleNorth, it was one of the first. They were aligned with how I think, not just trying to tell us what to do.”
BaubleBar also leverages ScaleNorth’s robust business process outsourcing (BPO) services to support its day-to-day finance operations. The BPO team helps with tasks like reconciliations, reporting, and month-end close, giving BaubleBar added bandwidth without having to scale up internally.
BaubleBar’s decision to bring on ScaleNorth to stabilize and optimize its NetSuite environment has paid off. In fact, the partnership has been a game-changer for Forrester. “ScaleNorth has played a key role in both my success and BaubleBar’s,” he says. As a “team of one” that handles both the technical and functional sides of the business, Forrester needed a partner that could move fast and work independently.
“I don’t have time for 30-minute calls,” he says. “I send ScaleNorth a quick email and they come back with a ticket, a plan and a solution. That’s huge.”
For example, one of BaubleBar’s biggest pain points was its order-to-fulfillment process, which had been misfiring since day one. The data going into NetSuite and the WMS was solid, but what came back from the WMS was wrong, thanks to broken Celigo flows and bad scripts. ScaleNorth accessed all four systems (NetSuite, Shopify, Celigo and WMS) and came back in three days with a clean, custom solution that actually worked. “It’s future-proof,” says Forrester, “and it fixed a problem we’d been living with for years.”
Forrester says ScaleNorth’s value goes beyond NetSuite expertise. “Most ERP problems aren’t just NetSuite problems,” he explains. “ScaleNorth understands the full ecosystem. They know how to work across systems, which cuts troubleshooting time and gets us to solutions faster.”
Whether it’s Celigo, Shopify, or a WMS, ScaleNorth’s team dives into complex issues with minimal input and delivers real answers quickly. “I recommend ScaleNorth without hesitation,” Forrester adds. “I’ve worked with them at two different e-commerce companies with similar tech stacks. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling cookware or custom jewelry. If you need a smart, reliable partner, ScaleNorth can handle it.”
