Aroma Retail Grows from Startup to International Scent-sation with Savvy Ecommerce Parcel Shipping

How does an entrepreneurial dream blossom into a multi-million-dollar business? Aroma Retail formulated the perfect blend of pure-grade fragrance oils and savvy ecommerce parcel shipping to grow from a home-based startup to a scent-sational omnichannel seller with over $6MM in annual sales.

In 2017, Cristina Reding founded the environmental scenting company Aroma Retail in her kitchen, making candles, room sprays, and reed diffusers for hotels to sell in their gift shops. Little did she know that an appearance on Good Morning America would skyrocket the company to process $250K of orders in a single hour! The company’s rapid rise in popularity required strategic shipping operations to keep orders flowing and volume growing at a manageable rate.

To successfully navigate the transition from a small business shipping a handful of orders a day to a thriving international ecommerce company with 4,000+ orders per month, Aroma Retail faced two high-priority shipping hurdles common to growing businesses: peak season shipping and limited shipping options.  

Aroma Retail needed reliable, agile shipping operations to support both normal order volume spikes and high-volume peak season shipping—without breaking their website or shipping orders late. Handling a rapid increase in order volume is a frequent problem for high-growth ecommerce businesses because shipping operations that worked for a small business can’t keep up. Thankfully, Aroma Retail already had a scalable shipping solution in place to help them conquer this challenge.

“Descartes XPS has been with us from the early days when we were shipping less than 10 orders per day, offering phenomenal customer support. Without any hiccups, it’s scaled with us as we’ve grown—easily supporting us during, for example, Black Friday/Cyber Monday when we now typically experience a $300K spike in business or when we processed $250K of orders in one hour after being featured on Good Morning America!” said Jim Reding, CEO at Aroma Retail.

To keep up with peak season shipping and higher order volumes, Aroma Retail scaled shipping operations to increase the efficiency, speed, and accuracy of shipping. With batch label creation, integrated scale, destination-based rules, searchable shipping history, a single dashboard with order details in one place, and ecommerce shipping cost threshold alerts from Descartes XPS, the company kept orders flowing on time, even during spikes in volume.

Secondly, Aroma Retail needed to move beyond flat-rate parcel shipping to offer customers more shipping options while controlling shipping costs. To give buyers greater choice, the company wanted a way to provide rate shopping during checkout, empowering customers with multi-carrier shipping rate comparison while receiving discounted shipping rates. They found their solution in the Descartes XPS live quoting feature.

Live quoting enables Aroma Retail to offer its customers shipping choices during the checkout process. “The biggest benefit is that domestic and international customers can ship via the method they’re most comfortable with, whether that’s the post office, FedEx, or another carrier,” explained Sloane Suarez, Operations Manager at Aroma Retail. “Plus, for fragrance oil refill orders, we offer customers free shipping; Descartes XPS gives us the option to rate shop ourselves to find the most competitive rate.”

Today, Aroma Retail’s team of 25 employees operates a 13,000 square-foot factory and the Las-Vegas-based retail location Smelly Bar, where they blend fragrances and produce resort-quality scent machines, pure grade fragrance oils, and every other scented product they sell. They are an international ecommerce seller with a fragrance line of over 100 scents available on the Shopify-based Aroma Retail site. 

“Descartes XPS has been instrumental in helping us scale rapidly from a home business to over $6 million in annual revenue. We can easily handle massive volume spikes without any bottlenecks or additional burden on our ecommerce website. Plus, rate shopping during checkout caters to our customers’ diverse shipping expectations—and keeps them coming back for repeat orders—while Descartes’ discounted rates and efficiency gains help us curb our shipping and labor costs.”

Jim Reding, CEO, Aroma Retail 

By leveraging the Descartes XPS parcel shipping solution, integrated with Shopify, Aroma Retail simplifies and accelerates their shipping process to keep up with growing demand. The company attributes their growth to an emphasis on customer care and innovation as they develop custom signature scents for “everyone from small ice cream shops to NFL football stadiums, as well as developing collections dedicated to specific places, moods, and seasons” (Aroma Retail). 

The Descartes team is grateful to walk alongside Aroma Retail and witness their growth journey as the company brings pure-grade fragrances to consumers and public spaces around the world, enriching the environment for all who encounter their scents.  

Tools for success: Descartes XPS, Business Automation Rules 

• Lower Shipping Costs – Aroma Retail saves up to 89% on domestic and international parcel shipping with discounted labels from Descartes XPS. 

• Improved Customer Experience – Customers receive shipping options at checkout, and Aroma Retail ships orders quickly and accurately, even during seasonal peaks. 

• Scalable Shipping Operations – Aroma Retail seamlessly imports orders, automates rate shopping and service selection, and batch prints labels from 10-300 orders/day. 

• Limited Growth – Because Aroma Retail leveraged scalable parcel shipping software, they were able to rapidly grow their business without limits from shipping logistics. 

• Late Deliveries – Aroma Retail avoided late deliveries by using the shipping solution to seamlessly migrate data, verify addresses, and fix errors to save time. 

• Unhappy Customers – The company prevented dissatisfaction by proactively providing more shipping options to customers at checkout and ensuring on-time deliveries. 

Ecommerce businesses shouldn’t have to struggle with shipping orders on time during peak seasons, especially while trying to grow. If these challenges sound all too familiar, we hope you will decide to make a change. Let technology simplify your shipping operations so you can focus on growing your business. 

Descartes offers free 1:1 live support for all customers. Try Descartes XPS for free and contact us to help configure your setup and solve your shipping problems today.