480 hours saved: How bbhugme scaled globally by ditching spreadsheets

There is an invisible tax quietly draining growing e-commerce teams.

It isn't a lack of customer demand or poor marketing. It’s admin. The constant, daily drip of emails, spreadsheets, stock checks, and data entry that slowly eats up your day.

If you often feel incredibly busy but not always productive, the data proves you are not alone. 

Brightpearl UK retail research shows that the average eCommerce team spends 5 hours and 42 minutes every week on manual admin. That is nearly 300 hours a year spent on work that doesn’t actually grow the business.

The human cost is even higher:

• 75% of retail teams feel overwhelmed by admin tasks.
• 69% find themselves doing this work in the evenings or on weekends.
• 29% have actually taken time off just to catch up on the backlog.

Most brands don’t have too much work; they just have too many disconnected systems. Here is how bbhugme fixed it before it broke them.

How bbhugme manages a global brand even with a small team

When a single product turns into a global brand almost overnight, the biggest challenge is usually keeping the backend operations from collapsing under the weight of the demand.

That is exactly what happened to bbhugme, a premium pregnancy pillow brand created by three chiropractors. 

What started as one hero product quickly grew into a massive Shopify business selling across the UK, US, Scandinavia, and Europe, alongside wholesale partnerships with major retailers like John Lewis.

During the pandemic, demand surged. But behind the scenes, the manual systems began to creak.

As Finance Manager Andrea Sundby explains: 

"We suddenly had a fast-growing DTC business across multiple regions plus a growing B2B operation… We were trying to manage four global warehouses using Shopify and spreadsheets. It was becoming impossible."

For a core team of just ten people, the constant firefighting, checking orders, invoicing retailers, and manually copying data between systems was unsustainable.

Automating the boring stuff

bbhugme knew they couldn't just hire their way out of the spreadsheet chaos. They needed better visibility, stronger forecasting, and fewer manual processes.

They implemented Brightpearl as their central Retail-First ERP, going live in just eight weeks. 

By connecting Shopify, Amazon, their four global warehouses, and their finance tools into one hub, the manual work disappeared.

Instead of humans pushing data around, the system now runs the rules automatically:

• Smart Routing: They set up simple rules ensuring UK orders are always routed to and shipped from the UK warehouse automatically. No human intervention needed.
• Instant Invoicing: All B2B and DTC orders and invoices are now processed centrally and automatically.

The result? bbhugme now saves around 40 hours a month purely through automation. That’s almost 480 hours a year.

 "We’re easily saving 5 to 10 hours a week that we can now spend on more important parts of the business," Andrea notes.

With real-time data across stock, orders, and sales channels, the small team can spot issues early and make informed decisions about where to expand next, without the operational chaos.

Stop pushing data around

The brands pulling ahead in 2026 are the ones automating the repetitive tasks, so their teams can focus on customer experience and growth.

When your tech stack is centralised, incredible things happen across the industry:

• AYBL saves 100 hours a month through automated forecasting.
• TBCo successfully automated 82 manual workflows.
• Bond Touch eliminated the need to make three full-time operational hires.

If your team is spending their weekends reconciling inventory or manually routing orders to 3PLs, your infrastructure has become a ceiling to your growth.

Ready to get those 300 hours a year back?