Curl power: How Sunshine Curls untangled its delivery dilemma with Parcel Protect

When you build a brand with your own face – and in Yasna Mostofi's case, your own hair – the customer's relationship isn't really with a business. It's with you.

Yasna founded Sunshine Curls after noticing that curly hair products were hard to find in Australia, and that even when customers tracked them down, they didn't know how to use them. She went about solving this problem by using the products on her own hair and sharing the results online, building the kind of personal credibility that's irreplaceable in eCommerce.

“I've been educating people online, and they've been engaging more and more with my content, both organically on Instagram and through Meta advertising,” she says. “People seeing results in my own hair has built a lot of trust. One by one, people have started to cotton on to the fact that there is a solution. You don't always have to straighten your hair.”

It's a powerful way to build a brand, but it comes with its own pressure. When customers order online, they expect speed, reliability and transparency, and when you're the face of the business, those expectations fall on you personally.

“People expect you, as the founder, to give them that white-glove solution,” she says. “But we're not actually a big brand, and we can't really afford to absorb all of that cost. So it's a bit of a catch-22.”

Growth brought more customers and more orders, but it also brought more deliveries going missing or arriving damaged. And every lost or damaged delivery meant weeks of Yasna's time swallowed up in back-and-forth – until we helped take the split ends out of the claims process.

Key takeaways

Personal brands can carry personal risk. When you're the face of your business, delivery problems may erode the trust you've personally built. For Yasna, every unresolved issue was a potential threat to the relationships that had driven her growth.
Delivery problems may cost more than the price of a lost parcel. Before Parcel Protect, every lost or damaged order meant weeks of back-and-forth that pulled Yasna away from running her business; an operational drag that's easy to underestimate and hard to recover from.
Great service doesn’t need a big budget. With Parcel Protect, Yasna can individually insure each parcel and give customers the fast, seamless resolutions they expect without breaking the bank.

Outgrowing the garage

“I started by packing the orders myself out of my fourth bedroom,” Yasna recalls. “Then I moved into the garage, and then I moved into a warehouse. And then I realised that it really started to hurt to pack the orders myself. I wasn't able to keep track of my inventory, and I wasn't able to scale the business as much as I wanted to.”

Outsourcing fulfilment to a third-party logistics (3PL) provider was, as Yasna puts it, “a leap of faith”. But years of doing the work herself meant she walked into the conversation with a clear-eyed sense of what it may cost.

“Having done my own fulfilment for so long, I already had my finger on the pulse of what the delivery costs were,” she says. “That gave me a really good foundation to go to a 3PL and understand roughly what cost savings I could make by leveraging their infrastructure and delivery network.”

Working with the 3PL gave her the infrastructure to scale more efficiently. But when things went wrong in transit, the buck still stopped with her.

“I still found myself literally losing weeks of time talking to customers, finding out where their products were, and getting to the bottom of everything myself, because I really wanted customers to have that excellent experience.”

The silent saviour

What Yasna needed was a way to give customers the experience they expected, without it having to run through her. It was her insurance broker who pointed her in the right direction; recognising that Parcel Protect was the right fit and arranging cover on her behalf.

“I contracted Parcel Protect to offer that level of service, but without me having to deliver it personally,” she says. “It just allowed me to refocus on more important areas of the business that I needed to work on. It's saved me a lot of time, but it hasn't compromised on excellence.”

What she values most is how invisibly the whole thing runs. “Parcel Protect is a silent saviour,” Yasna says. “It just integrates with my existing operations without me really having to do a whole lot. Customers occasionally come to me, but I redirect them to my Parcel Protect portal, which lets them very quickly lodge their problem.

“The Parcel Protect team will contact that customer and deal with the issue very quickly. Sometimes they'll even authorise a replacement within 30 minutes. That order usually automatically goes to Shopify and gets fulfilled via our normal process. So it's completely seamless.”

It's a solution she'd recommend to any merchant still trying to manage delivery issues on their own. “Traditional insurers just don't really offer the same type of cover,” she says. “With Parcel Protect, you can individually insure each parcel in a very cost-efficient way. The customer gets a great resolution, but it doesn't cost you a fortune. So this is a perfect solution for people running small eCommerce stores that just need that little bit of support.”

Being the face of the business still means being responsible for the product, the content and the customer experience. But with the hard parts handled, Yasna can focus on what brought her here in the first place.

“I love being able to provide a solution for people that are struggling with the same things I did when I was a kid,” she says. “I love talking to customers. I love being able to grow this business that's really helping people in a small area of their lives that, I think, makes a big difference.”

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