Curly Secret, one stock pool for B2C and B2B

Healthy curls, and a growing shipping problem

Curly Secret makes natural care products for wavy, curly and coily hair. Founder Sanae Samhi built the brand on a clear position: beautiful curls start with healthy hair, no trends and no shortcuts. The range now covers seven care steps, from cleansing and conditioning through to styling and refreshing, and it has reached more than 75,000 customers and over 9,000 hairdressers worldwide.

Growth like that turns packing and shipping into a full-time job. In 2021, Sanae handed hers to us.

"Packing and shipping products can be very time-consuming. Taking the step to outsource was a small hurdle, but E-fulfilment Shop really thought it through with us, so a streamlined process for both our B2B and B2C customers was ready quickly. Because we can leave everything around packing and shipping to E-fulfilment Shop, we can comfortably give more attention to our customers, marketing and product development. That has allowed us to grow enormously, both inside and outside Europe."

Two channels that want opposite things

Curly Secret sells through two separate storefronts. One serves consumers directly, a bottle or two at a time, shipped anywhere in the world. The other serves the trade: salons, hairdressers and a distributor network across multiple countries, ordering by the pack.

Those two order profiles pull in opposite directions, and that is where most fulfilment setups start to leak.

Why we do not unpack everything on arrival

The reflex in a warehouse is to break inbound stock down into single units the moment it arrives, because that is the form consumer orders need. It is also what makes wholesale expensive: every trade order then has to be rebuilt by hand from loose bottles, which costs labour, adds packaging, and creates more opportunities to miscount or damage stock.

So we do not do it. Curly Secret's stock arrives in packs and stays in them. A wholesale order ships as the packs it already is. We open a pack only when consumer demand actually calls for single units.

One stock pool, nothing pre-committed

The consequence is what we are not doing: holding separate B2B and B2C inventory. There is one pool, and the decision about what form the stock takes is deferred until an order asks for it.

That matters most when a product goes viral, which for Curly Secret happens regularly. A spike on the consumer side does not need to be forecast in advance, and it cannot strand stock on the wrong side of an internal wall. The same pallet can answer a distributor order one day and a run on a single product the next. Nothing has to be re-allocated, and the trade channel never shows stock that the consumer channel has already sold out of.

Worldwide, from Ridderkerk

Orders placed before 23:00 leave the same day. From our warehouse near Rotterdam we ship to both consumers and trade customers across Europe and well beyond it, choosing the carrier that suits the destination and the parcel. Returns come back to us, are checked, and go straight back into sellable stock.

Since 2021

We have handled Curly Secret's logistics since 2021, across both channels, through a distributor network that keeps expanding and product launches that regularly outrun the forecast. Sanae's team has stayed focused on formulation, marketing and their community.