How Tower 28 Beauty Tripled Its Growth While Streamlining Financial Operations

Post sponsored by BILL

Clean beauty is one of the hottest trends in the beauty (skincare and cosmetics) industry. Last year, the clean beauty market size was valued at $6.3 billion and is expected to grow from $7.1 billion this year to $34.8 billion in 2032, boasting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.6% during the forecast period.

The future is so bright that one industry pioneer says clean beauty is no longer a trend but the way the industry is headed. While there is no set definition of clean beauty, the products are made with ingredients that are safe (for people and the environment), non-toxic, and free from harmful substances.

Solving a personal need

One of the hottest brands in clean beauty is Tower 28, which creates products with clean ingredients to support sensitive skin. Amy Liu founded the company in 2019 after spending more than 15 years working in the beauty industry. Like many entrepreneurs, Amy started her company to solve a personal need. She says, “I was frustrated that my chronic eczema meant I was stuck using boring, clinical brands that often didn’t even work. I wanted to create accessible, irritant-free, high-performance, FUN products designed for all skin types (especially sensitive!).”

Tower 28 is named after lifeguard tower 28, situated on the beach between two of Southern California’s most iconic locations—Venice Beach and the Santa Monica Pier.

Taking a fresh approach to financials

Post-pandemic, Tower 28 started to quickly expand. That’s when Amy, the company’s CEO, and Victor Liu (her husband), the CFO, decided they needed to take a fresh, holistic approach to the company’s financial operations.

The business tripled in less than two years, going from 12 to 30 employees and from 112 vendors in 2021 to nearly 300 in 2023. As they expanded their distribution base and started selling products in more retail locations, including all Sephora stores in the United States and Canada, Victor recalls their monthly transactions went from 600 in 2021 to over 3,000 today.

Even while successfully scaling the brand, the company’s growth was hindered by time-consuming manual processes like emailed approvals. “Our finances were so frustrating in the beginning,” Victor recalls. “If we needed a vendor onboarded or 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.”

There were even more complications. The complex accounts payable (AP) process was interfering with Tower 28’s mission and trajectory. Remote employees who needed access to company cards to pay their travel expenses complicated financial operations even further. As Tower 28 continued to expand, the business needed a solution that would help minimize its growing pains, and that’s how they discovered BILL.

Victor says, “Trying to handle all [these tasks] as a small team would've been catastrophic. But being able to scale with all the tools, solutions, and services that BILL provides has been phenomenal.”

Saving 40 hours per week on AP

In 2021, Amy and Victor hired a bookkeeper who had previously used BILL, and they signed on. The benefits of using the BILL platform were immediate. Giving the finance team the responsibility of payments and approvals took work off Amy’s plate, allowing her to focus on expansion.

“If we had kept running our finances the way we were before, there's no way we would've been able to grow,” says Victor. “I think, in a lot of ways, BILL allowed us to grow at the rate that we were able to.” Using BILL enabled Tower 28 to scale from paying 300 invoices a month to over 6,000. And as their supply chain and vendor base expanded, they gained more insights into their spending.

Victor adds, “BILL saves us 40 hours a week and an entire full-time employee by automating our financial back office. It provides us with real-time updates and strong control over card spend. It also enables us to work on the go. We've approved payments from everywhere. With BILL taking care of our financial operations, our team can focus more time and resources on company growth and product development.”

Control and visibility, all on-the-go with BILL Spend & Expense

Once their AP system was squared away, Tower 28 needed help enabling their small, geographically dispersed team to grow. Amy and Victor sought an option to empower employee spending without sacrificing visibility. They’d heard horror stories from their social circle of entrepreneurs about employees falsifying receipts and spending more than they were supposed to. They wanted to find a balance of trusting their employees without sacrificing control. One look at BILL Spend & Expense showed them they had found the right solution*.

“The BILL Spend & Expense solution ended up being fantastic because as we onboarded people, we could give them physical or virtual cards,” says Amy. “We would set limits based on their level of responsibility. Many 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.”

“BILL allows us to have both oversight and comfort, but with a lot of flexibility and real-time updates as transactions come up,” adds Victor. “And it has enabled us to work on the go. We’ve approved payments from meetings, airports, conventions—basically everywhere.”

Amy adds, “It’s been a fast and fun ride at Tower 28. 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. There are so many payments and transactions happening daily, and I feel things are under control because I know they’re getting looked at.”

*Card issued by Cross River Bank, member FDIC.

About the Author

Rieva Lesonsky is the owner of SmallBusinessCurrents.com and has been covering small businesses and entrepreneurship for over 30 years. Get more insights about business trends by signing up for her free Currents newsletter.