Customer Stories – MEMEBOX

Established in 2012, South Korea cosmetic brand MEMEBOX was selected by Korea Economic Daily as “No. 1 on the Korean Consumer Satisfaction Index”(2015), and was continuously covered by Forbes, the authoritative American business magazine. Riding on its achievements, in 2016, MEMEBOX expanded into the Asian market and established branches in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Since its expansion, it has introduced many global brands, including I’M MEME and the PONY memebox co-branded series, PONY EFFECT, catering to the needs of consumers from different age groups. As a new type of Korean trend, MEMEBOX thrives on feedback from online consumers and collaborative advice from well-known makeup artists. It attempts to understand everyone’s needs first-hand and transform them into preferred beauty products. In order to provide the highest quality products, all of its brands insist on 100% R&D and production in South Korea. It has grown to become the leading fashion trend in the cosmetics industry, allowing consumers everywhere to enjoy Korean makeup.

Unlike its business model in the Korean and American markets that focuses on online sales, MEMEBOX has adopted a strategy of advancing both physical and online channels in the Taiwan market, given that Taiwan’s retail channels are very developed and consumers are also accustomed to selecting products in physical stores. This requires the company to monitor the needs of consumers from multiple channels in order to quantify sales by individual product and type of channel. Since its establishment, MEMEBOX has sought quality financial systems that can quickly generate analysis reports for reference by the operations team, marketing, and business departments, so as to facilitate subsequent real-time data analysis based on market conditions, and to formulate corresponding R&D and sales strategies.

MEMEBOX’s finance manager, Wang YuanChao, pointed out that there are many financial management products on the market, and each product has its own characteristics. Given that MEMEBOX only just established itself in Taiwan and did not have a full-time IT department, they evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of various products from the perspectives of import costs, report generation speed, and subsequent maintenance costs, finally deciding to subscribe to the FION-financial management reporting system by FlexSystem.

Traditional financial management systems usually need to be installed on expensive and high-performance servers, and follow-up maintenance often relies on the assistance of professional IT personnel, which is a very heavy burden on small and medium-sized enterprises. In contrast, FlexSystem’s financial management system provides cloud leasing models that other brands lack. Enterprise users only need to pay a small monthly fee to use the same financial system as medium and large enterprises, and there is no need to worry about equipment maintenance.

FlexSystem’s financial management system is a set of comprehensive accounting software that conforms to the current business environment, covering the general ledger, accounts receivable and accounts payable, and conforms to IFRS international accounting standards. It can be combined with an online financial reporting system (FION) to become a powerful financial management suite, which is well-suited for retailers with many sales locations. The FION Financial Management Reporting System is characterized by its easy-to-operate interface, perfect integration with Excel and excellent analysis functions. Users do not need to rely on the support of specialized IT staff to obtain important financial data and produce financial statements that fully meet the needs of the enterprise.

Wang said that the preparation of financial statements is a very complicated task. In addition to preparing fixed financial statements every month, the financial department also has to prepare various types of ad hoc financial analysis reports in response to the needs of the Korean operations team. Without the assistance of a dedicated information team, and taking into account their existing work, it used to take at least 1 to 2 days to manually prepare reports. However, with the assistance of the FION-financial management reporting system, they could quickly and automatically capture the data in a specific field through MS Excel, which not only avoided manual errors, but also shortened the time needed to compile financial reports to within 2 hours, giving the management team quick access to snapshots of sales in a given period.

On the whole, MEMEBOX believes that the introduction of the FlexSystem financial management system and the FION-financial management reporting system will greatly improve the company’s operations and efficiency. They regarded it as the smart procurement choice to make.

With the increasing popularity of Korean beauty brands among Taiwanese consumers, overall sales at MEMEBOX is likewise trending upwards. In order to win in the fiercely competitive beauty market, MEMEBOX continues to build on the timely analysis provided by the two aforementioned software systems. The company is also planning to possibly deploy the FlexSystem trading system to strengthen their overall competitiveness in the business environment.