Cleaning Up Scheduling and Communication:
Buff City Soap Franchisee Glow Brands Boosts Profitability through Improved Customer and Employee Experience with a Single Operation and People Management Solution.
The Numbers
65 Store Locations
More Than 700 Employees
Saved over $263,000 Annually
A Unique Solution For a Unique Company
Imagine watching someone craft scented soap with quality ingredients right in front of you — each product one-of-a-kind. This unique customer experience separates Buff City Soap from the competition. The plant-based home and personal care brand franchise creates handmade soaps free of harsh chemicals and takes pride in its nourishing products, buyer experience and sustainable practices. Customers can feel confident in the brand’s personal touch and commitment to quality. Achieving these results consistently at scale requires harmonized communication and business management.
During the brand’s rapid expansion, some Buff City Soap locations experienced growing pains in communication, shift scheduling, brand standard consistency and reporting. Glow Brands, a Buff City Soap franchisee with 65 stores and 700 employees, partnered with Woven to create an all-in-one customized platform to unify their multi-unit, frontline operations and streamline vital business functions. Adopting Woven saved Glow Brands’ Buff City Soap business unit $263,000 annually, improved employee shift scheduling, simplified reporting and created clear lines of internal communication that translated to better customer service.
“We really bought into Woven because of its capability to fulfill so many of our needs. They were an incredible partner and designed a custom solution to address our specific pain points,” said Megan Reese, director of operations for Glow Brands.”
Keeping Up with Rapid Growth
Quickly expanding operations and locations challenged Glow Brands' communication and business management practices, leading the company to seek solutions. Company leaders needed a way to:
- Manage shift scheduling and labor costs
- Uniformly and efficiently deliver messages about sales, company announcements, brand standards and much more to staff at locations across the country
- Consolidate information for reporting and audits
Buff City Soap’s point-of-sale system included a scheduling function, but there was no way to set parameters. Glow Brands’ district and regional managers and regional vice presidents would have to access other systems to cross-reference allotted staffing hours. A separate platform addressed some missing scheduling communications aspects, such as switching shifts, but left other areas uncovered.
Yet another program housed communication. While it included many appealing features, it added another employee log-in, and there was no way to control access. Everything on the platform was open to everyone, making it impossible to create communication for specific groups like managers or corporate leaders. Maintenance ticketing took place on a fourth system, and reporting was laborious due to the many separate information sources.
Despite all of the software solutions, holes remained, leading to significant gaps in labor hours, lost productivity and efficiency and, ultimately, diminished profitability.
Using Woven
in the Pandemic
Demand for soap soared during the pandemic, so Buff City Soap locations needed to stay open to fulfill customer needs. Woven helped the Glow Brand franchises operate their stores amid challenging conditions by:
- Managing staffing in busy stores
- Delivering corporate pandemic policies
- Maintaining a COVID-19 screening system to report symptoms and test results and receive HR’s all-clear to return to work
This support helped Glow Brands open new locations while many other businesses struggled.
Many Problems — One Solution
Glow Brands’ Buff City Soap locations began using Woven in 2020. Company leaders were introduced to the software as an incident reporting platform, but when they dove into the product, they realized its capability to solve their pain points in a single program. Woven’s team worked closely with Glow Brands executives to build a platform and dashboard designed specifically for the company’s needs.
Woven provides an easy and secure communication system. Store employees can securely chat with each other without sharing personal phone numbers or email addresses, and management can share news and events with all 700 employees, each of whom uses Woven. Additionally, information like brand standards, dress codes and other company policies live within Woven, and content can be gated for specific users. Employees can manage incident reports, maintenance tickets and supply orders within the platform. Instead of a dozen point solutions and passwords for employees to remember, with Woven, there’s only one. Consolidating the technology stack radically improved employee usage.
Woven also facilitates shift scheduling. Managers can see how many staff hours they are allotted, and staff can see and communicate about their shifts. Glow Brands was able to control labor costs and achieve better team member retention.
With the single dashboard, corporate leaders have all the relevant data at their fingertips. The information helps them make the best decisions for their growing business. Woven continues to work closely with Glow Brands to update the software as needs change.
“Woven has given us the greatest gift — time,” said Reese. “As a new and quickly growing company, there’s nothing better than being able to simplify our processes to save time and effort. It’s a major win for our teams and our customers.”
Executive Overview
Industry: Retail
Locations: 65 franchise locations
Employees: ~700
Use Cases: Communication, knowledge management, labor management, shift scheduling, executive reporting, location audits, work orders, incidents
Products Used: Woven
Key Results:
- Simplified and improved shift scheduling
- Saved individual managers and region leaders 104 hours a year
- Saved individual district managers 208 hours a year
- Cut costs by $4,047 per store, totaling $263,055 in annual savings across all of Glow Brands’ Buff City Soap locations
- Enabled more efficient and standardized communication among 700 employees in geographically dispersed locations
- Streamlined reporting for more informed business decisions
Key Discoveries:
- Woven consolidated Glow Brands’ many operational functions across a large tech stack to a single dashboard
- A single password provided employees access to company policies, operational updates, scheduling, training and maintenance reporting
- Combining data into one platform saved employees and managers time, translating to significant cost savings
- Corporate communications were delivered directly to all employees at once
- The centralized platform increased employee retention by simplifying tasks and providing information and transparency during rapid growth and change