Lux Skin streamlines its operations with Airwallex

Jack Grace’s eCommerce story started back in 2012. After dropping out of high school, he set to work, determined to learn how to market online and sell products directly to consumers.

Now, Jack is the owner of DOTCOM, a completely self-funded, multi-million dollar company that’s one of Google and Facebook’s largest advertising clients.

With his successful eCommerce businesses selling everything from supplements to womens’ shapewear, Jack has seen major success. One of his brands, Lux Skin, has experienced stand-out growth over the last five years due to its direct-to-consumer online model and innovative, high-quality beauty device products designed to be used at home.

Jack Grace

Lux Skin Founder

“When you’re dealing with large amounts of money you want things to be as simple, straightforward and intuitive-to-use as possible, and that’s what Airwallex provides us. It’s a one-stop-shop.”

The challenge

Prior to bringing Airwallex on as their financial partner, Lux Skin were using their traditional bank and services such as Wise to send funds to their suppliers. 

“We were finding the level of customer service really low, and the online platforms weren’t user-friendly,” says Jack. “There were also restrictions in terms of the volume of funds and number of transactions you could transfer. Two million per year just wasn’t enough for us.”

“With all the restrictions and other issues, we started looking for an alternative to our financial services: from payments acceptance, transfers, global accounts, and more. That’s how we found Airwallex, and it’s been a part of our Lux Skin journey ever since.”

Simplifying their financial business model with Airwallex

Lux Skin has five different online entities set up for different regions. They had previously used Stripe in these different regional entities to enable them to get domestic pricing for their financial products, however, this was complex and difficult to manage for their finance team. 

Lux Skin decided to move all their payment gateways across their different international entities to Australia with Airwallex, with the aim of streamlining their tax returns and making it easier to manage their finances on an ongoing basis. 

With Airwallex set up on their European, Australian, Hong Kong, and British Shopify storefronts, Lux Skin is now able to seamlessly collect different currencies from their customers and see a streamlined overall view of all their incomings and outgoings. 

“Another feature we like about Airwallex is being able to manage several different websites as one financial group. We have five different websites for Lux Skin that serve multiple geographic areas, so being able to connect them all in one group and aggregate the funds into one account at the click of a button, has saved us so much time,” says Jack.

One easy-to-use platform

Jack and his team love being able to log into Airwallex and see Lux Skin’s key financial information in one simple, streamlined platform. 

“We just log on and we can immediately do everything we need to do. From checking how payments are tracked with their processing, to sending funds overseas to our suppliers, it’s all just so easy. We don’t need to log onto multiple platforms with lots of different software anymore.”

Excellent customer support

“The support we get from Airwallex really is above and beyond. We have a sole account manager who we can turn to with any issues or questions. I can just give them a buzz on their mobile at any time and I know I’ll get an answer quickly,” says Jack. 

“It just doesn’t happen like that with PayPal or other companies that businesses use for their financial needs. They don’t really care about you as a person, and you feel like you’re just another number in their system.”

“We can definitely tell that Airwallex cares about our business and the people in it. Our success is their success, and you can see that by how they treat us.”

Jack Grace

Lux Skin Founder

“The fees are significantly lower across most of Airwallex’s financial products, and everything is done with super-fast speed. For us, if we’re sending funds to Hong Kong or China for example with Airwallex, they’ll usually arrive the same day or the next day. Your bank could never achieve that.”

Saving money on conversion fees

In the past Lux Skin relied on conventional banks to handle payments to suppliers and warehouses. While receiving all kinds of currencies, but mostly in the US dollar- this meant they had to receive this in different currencies, convert it to AUD, and then convert it again to their suppliers’ local currency. It just wasn’t cost-efficient.

“To be honest, I didn’t think about currency conversion at first, because I just thought ‘okay, we’re growing fast, this is what we need to do, and this is how it has to be’. But if you sit down and actually calculate the amount of money you’re losing to conversion fees, it’s massive. Even if it’s just 1% of a million dollars, that’s potentially huge.”

“With Airwallex, we now have the ability to easily collect all the currencies we deal with. We can make easy, fast transfers worldwide that are much cheaper than what we were using before. And the money we receive, we can choose to keep it in one of our Global Accounts or convert it if we choose". 

Saving precious time

Airwallex is a vital part of Lux Skin's business. Jack says that Lux Skin’s finance team has reaped the benefits of Airwallex’s easy integration with existing systems. 

“We’ve saved a lot of time by implementing the Airwallex platform into our business processes, especially through the integration with Xero,” says Jack.

“When we were using Stripe, the way it integrated into Xero was it would put every single payment in individually, which for us could be hundreds or thousands of payments per day. But then, they also have a transaction limit, so after 200 or so transactions, it would stop importing and you wouldn’t be able to see anything. It was a nightmare.”

“With Airwallex, all payments are put directly into Xero with no limit, making it very simple to reconcile. We can quickly see what’s going in and coming out of each Global Account.”

Continuing to grow as financial partners

“In the past 12 months, we’ve taken on all of Airwallex’s offerings and integrated them into our business,” says Jack. 

‘Now that everything is in place, I’m excited about our growth together going forward, and I know we can focus on scaling up. Airwallex has helped us have all the systems in place that we need to keep our growth trajectory going.”