ICONIC London crosses the pond worry-free

Founded in 2015, ICONIC London is a leading brand for everyday glamour makeup and luxury skincare hybrids. 

They believe no animal should be harmed in the making of their products and are completely and proudly cruelty-free.

“Before we established a new subsidiary in the U.S., we were already making sales to U.S. consumers,” says Ann Masson, Chief Financial Officer, “but those were export sales that we were making from here in the UK.”

Eventually the company adopted an ecommerce model in the United States. “We immediately had to be filing taxes in 28 states,” Ann explains. “Overnight we went from having no U.S. sales tax administration to having to be ready to file right away in those 28 states. It wasn't a slow buildup, one at a time. We had to be immediately ready in that whole array of spaces.”

But the company didn’t want to hold back the potential of the business because of sales tax requirements. “We knew it was important to find a solution that could help us with that,” Ann says. “ICONIC London is quite a small company. We have just under 40 employees in total across all the different functions and a very small finance team. There are just three of us, including me.”

ICONIC London uses Shopify, so the fact Avalara had a prebuilt integration was critical. “I had worked with Avalara at one of my previous companies,” Ann says, “and we chose Avalara because we realized that they have the right expertise and could so easily connect with our Shopify platform.”

With Avalara AvaTax connected to ICONIC London’s Shopify store, all of the relevant tax calculations are made automatically at the point of sale. “Then, on a monthly basis, Avalara Returns takes care of our tax filings,” Ann adds. “We check and approve those, and then everything is submitted electronically.” 

“One of the first steps that we needed to take was setting up all of the business registrations in the 28 states that we knew we needed to file in,” Ann recalls. “Avalara has a team dedicated to walking customers through that process, helping you get all of the setup in place from the start.”

“Avalara has certainly made our tax compliance easier,” she adds. In fact, I can't even imagine how we would have done it in a manual way. I think it would've been impossible.”

Ann credits Avalara with being a key enabler of ICONIC London’s direct-to-consumer expansion into the U.S. market. “We couldn't have achieved what we have without having that tool to help facilitate us building that business,” she says. “I'd really recommend it as a solution that can help you automate your tax filings and tax calculations as well as being a technical solution that's very easy to use and implement.” 

“As ICONIC London continues to grow, I'm sure there may be many more opportunities for expansion in other locations as well as the U.S.,” Ann concludes. “I would certainly not hesitate to get in touch with Avalara to help us once again find the right technical solutions for our tax filings.”