Berkshire Blanket & Home Streamlines Tax Compliance With Avalara

In 1993, one man made a blanket. Almost thirty years later, Berkshire Blanket & Home Co. is the biggest company in its category, supplying more than 130 million premium-quality products - blankets, throws, soft home goods - to top retailers around the world.

For as long as Berkshire sold primarily to tax-exempt retailers, its sales tax obligations could be managed manually with a home-grown matrix. But when the company got serious about consumer ecommerce, it quickly found that its home-grown approach was a risky and inefficient way to manage sales tax.

Berkshire’s finance team was accustomed to dealing with wholesale transactions but the introduction of an online retail business a number of years ago, brought with it a new set of tax headaches.

Tax challenges:

• Rapid growth, increasing complexity
• Manual, time-consuming processes
• Increasing compliance risk

Emily Pfeiffer, Vice President of Marketing and Digital, who was brought in specifically to build the company’s online retail business. When the company switched to a new ecommerce platform, Emily knew the old sales tax matrix had reached the end of its useful life. “We had to find a new system to manage the tax,” she says.

It didn’t take Emily long to land on Avalara’s suite of products as the right solution. “AvaTax, in particular, is the Cadillac of its category, and has been for years,” she says. “It’s what you should be using if you just want tax handled.”

And what of the integration with the company’s ecommerce and order management systems? “It’s absolutely seamless. In fact, we recently changed our ecommerce platform system to Shopify Plus. A key factor in that decision was that it features built-in integration with Avalara’s software. We just set it up once and forget it. And Avalara was more of a partner than we expected during the transition, offering us the support we needed.”

Results

• Simplifying business complexity
• Confident tax compliance
• Enabling bold growth plans

“Having Avalara means I don’t have to hire someone just to monitor and adjust our tax settings,” Emily says. “None of us wants to be in that business, and we love being able to trust it to Avalara.”

To learn more, visit the Avalara Newsroom.

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