Cancer isn’t pretty, which is why Ashleigh Cortes, the founder of The Stay Beautiful Foundation, launched her business to help women feel beautiful and empowered throughout their cancer journey. 

Ashleigh’s beloved grandmother was the owner of a day spa in Chicago before she was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. ​​As Ashleigh watched her grandmother endure harsh chemotherapy and radiation treatments during her fight, she realized that her grandmother needed to indulge in some self-care. She began bringing her grandmother beauty products that would bring a little bit of ‘glow’ to an otherwise daunting time. 

Her experience with cancer inspired Ashleigh to bring beauty and a bright day to those who need it most. So, in 2016, The Stay Beautiful Foundation was born. The non-profit started small, shipping 20 or so hand-labeled beauty boxes a month. With the help of ShipStation, Ashleigh has grown her business to send out hundreds of boxes a week to deserving women.

Beauty Inside and Out

The Stay Beautiful Foundation’s mission is to send pre-filled boxes of all-natural beauty products to women going through chemotherapy or who are otherwise affected by cancer. 

“When you think about cancer, people often forget about all the expenses that go into it. With that, oftentimes, self-care is left behind,” Ashleigh says. 

While her mission was clear, Ashleigh’s journey to finding a shipping solution that could keep up with her dreams wasn’t always smooth sailing. 

“When I first launched The Stay Beautiful Foundation, my initial delivery strategy was to send beauty boxes directly to the hospital,” says Ashleigh. “However, this process came with many leaps, hurdles, and roadblocks, which forced me to shift my strategy and deliver directly to women’s homes instead. 

The roadblocks didn’t end there, though. Ashleigh discovered firsthand how a business can be strained without a proper shipping solution.

“Shipping has been a challenge throughout this entire process. We were learning how to manage growth by receiving over 50 leads per month and creating labels to ship our beauty boxes. Standing in line at the post office became unsustainable, and we quickly looked for a solution to help us optimize our shipping process.”

Scaling with ShipStation

Before ShipStation, Stay Beautiful’s process was very manual. Luckily, Stay Beautiful Foundation has been able to scale their business after implementing ShipStation.  

“Now, I’m able to create 500 labels in less than a few minutes and get beauty in the hands of women who are battling cancer so much quicker. It allows me to put so much more time into the things that are really valuable to the Stay Beautiful Foundation and helps us grow and scale.” 

With the time saved on creating labels, the team at Stay Beautiful Foundation is able to dedicate more time to sourcing products, finding donors and sponsors, and cultivating an online community for women affected by cancer. 

Connecting with Konnectryx

When Ashleigh began using ShipStation, there was a bit of a learning curve when it came to integrating with Salesforce. As a busy non-profit owner, she didn’t have a lot of time for trial and error when implementing the program. That’s why the members at ShipStation connected Ashleigh to Konnectryx, a ShipStation Implementation Partner that offers consulting services to help businesses connect multiple solutions into one place. 

“Most recently, we updated our shipping strategy by leveraging programs like ShipStation and Salesforce with the help of Implementation Partner Konnectryx. This allowed us to see all of our beauties in one place, create customized orders, print labels, and get the beauty boxes in the hands of our women 5X faster,” says Ashleigh. 

“The team at Konnectryx was so excited about the work that we were doing at Stay Beautiful and offered to complete our implementation services with Salesforce and ShipStation at no charge,” says Ashleigh. “It really was just a great community of people who wanted to give back and really believed in conquering cancer with the power of beauty.”

With their shipping solution implemented and running, Ashleigh looks forward to the future. The Stay Beautiful Foundation aims to send out over 2,000 beauty boxes this year. 

To donate to The Stay Beautiful Foundation or request a box for yourself or someone you know, head to their website.