How Niche Beauty Onboarded 100 Suppliers in a Week
About
Founded in Hamburg in 2011, Niche Beauty has become a leading destination for independent and emerging luxury beauty brands, built around a simple idea: discovering exceptional brands before they become mainstream.
Today, Niche Beauty has served more than 1 million customers across 100+ countries and is part of the DOUGLAS Group, Europe's leading premium beauty platform.
Niche Beauty takes an automation-first approach to scaling the business. As it advances its technology stack, the company is systematically redesigning how work gets done across purchasing, logistics, finance and master data, using automation and AI to eliminate repetitive workflows rather than scaling them with headcount.
Challenge
Before Procuros, Niche Beauty saw a significant opportunity to digitize its supplier network, with less than 5% of processes digital at the time.
Its roughly 350 suppliers range from global beauty groups to small, founder-led niche brands, many without EDI capabilities. Orders were exported from their ERP SelectLine as Excel files or PDFs, while confirmations, delivery information and invoices came back through email in different formats.
As the assortment grew, so did the manual work behind it. Teams had to chase missing confirmations and delivery notes, reconcile around 600 goods receipts every month, and validate invoices line by line. Missing or incorrect supplier data created further work across purchasing, logistics and finance.
But Niche Beauty couldn't simply require every supplier to adopt EDI or a new portal. Its ability to discover and onboard niche brands quickly is fundamental to its business model, meaning connectivity had to adapt to suppliers, not the other way around.
To keep scaling its assortment without scaling operational complexity alongside it, Niche Beauty needed a way to digitize every supplier from day one, regardless of their technical capabilities.
Solution
Niche Beauty chose Procuros as its AI-native supply chain infrastructure, connecting its ERP (SelectLine) with its entire supplier network, regardless of how each supplier operates.
Instead of requiring hundreds of suppliers to adopt EDI or a new portal, Procuros adapts to their existing setup. Smaller brands can continue sending PDFs and emails as before, while Procuros' AI-native Document Understanding automatically extracts, structures, enriches and validates the data. EDI-capable suppliers connect through the same infrastructure.
Through a single API connection to SelectLine, maintained by Procuros partner Viebrock, Niche Beauty can digitize the full document flow across orders, order confirmations, shipping notices, invoices and credit notes. The Invoice Verification Agent automatically reconciles invoices against orders and goods receipts, identifies discrepancies in prices, quantities or tax information, and surfaces only the exceptions that require human attention, shifting finance from manually checking every invoice to managing pre-defined exceptions.
Crucially, supplier digitization is no longer dependent on supplier IT maturity. Whether onboarding a global beauty group or a small emerging brand from anywhere in the world, Niche Beauty can bring suppliers into the same digital process without turning every new relationship into another integration project.
Our edge is discovering brands before anyone else does – that means our selected supplier base never stops growing or changing. Procuros allowed us to migrate 100 existing suppliers onto the platform in a single week with no friction. Our team can spend more time where it creates value: discovering the next great brands and focusing existing supplier relationships on growth, opportunities and joint priorities rather than chasing PDFs and email confirmations.
Results
Today, Niche Beauty runs a digital network of 300+ active suppliers, up from an almost entirely manual operation, with 100 suppliers brought live in a single week and full onboarding completed in 4.5 months.
The impact goes beyond connectivity. Supplier communication that previously generated around 400 emails every two weeks is now structured and automated, reducing the administrative workload for the buying team by around 90%.
At the same time, purchasing has greater visibility into confirmations and deliveries, while finance can focus on invoice exceptions instead of manually reconciling every document line by line.
Next, Niche Beauty and Procuros are looking beyond document automation toward increasingly agentic supplier operations, from master-data validation and price changes to customs and deeper invoice automation. The ambition is to move from digitizing transactions to AI agents increasingly validating data, resolving exceptions and coordinating supplier workflows autonomously.
Procuros enabled us to automate 70% of incoming goods invoice processing from the start, significantly reducing the required manual capacity and headcount dedicated to this task. For us, modern Finance is about building reliable processes that fit the business model and are designed to scale. Invoice Verification runs in the background, flags the cases that truly need attention and lets the team focus on resolution rather than reconciliation – making us more efficient internally and a reliable partner for our suppliers.
