In a recent Cart.com Thought Leadership Series webinar, Madeline Heartt, Senior Director of Sales Operations at ILIA Beauty, joined Cart.com's Chief Logistics Officer Joe Barth and CMO Jack Ulrich for an unfiltered conversation about what scaling fulfillment actually looks like from the inside.
ILIA is one of the most compelling growth stories in prestige beauty. Founded in 2012 as a clean makeup brand, ILIA expanded from a garage operation into one of the most recognized names at Sephora and Ulta — managing multi-channel operations across DTC, wholesale, retail, and international markets simultaneously. Madeline has been inside that journey since 2019, and her perspective on what breaks, what works, and what she'd do differently is the kind of operational honesty that rarely makes it into a conference keynote.
Here are the biggest takeaways from the conversation.
When Madeline joined ILIA in 2019, the brand was already in Sephora — but fulfilling orders out of a two-unit storage facility with a makeshift plywood second floor and folding tables below. Their BFCM that year generated 4,000 orders. They could fulfill about 400 per day. It took 10 days to clear the backlog.
"That really made it crystal clear," Madeline said. "We had outgrown that setup. We could no longer continue the way that we were."
What made it more instructive was that the same thing happened again in 2020, even after moving to a larger 3PL. ILIA saw 500% order volume growth year over year that Black Friday — and it took 18 days to clear. The lesson wasn't just about capacity. It was about what Joe Barth describes as the consistent pattern he sees when brands hit these inflection points: the problem isn't headcount, it's systems.
"It isn't necessarily capacity," Joe said. "It's really around reliable systems that enforce a source of truth for inventory and order execution."
Brands at this stage, he noted, typically have Shopify acting as the inventory system, a 3PL bolted alongside it, spreadsheets filling the gaps, and a team of people working around the clock to hold it together. It works until it doesn't — and it stops working exactly when order volume and channel complexity increase simultaneously.
One of the most direct moments in the conversation came when Jack asked what retail demanded that DTC didn't. Madeline's answer was unambiguous: discipline.
"D2C is a very fast-paced, flexible fulfillment channel," she said. "Retail has radically different requirements."
For ILIA, the journey through Sephora US, Sephora Canada, Sephora at Kohl's, and ultimately Ulta involved repeated hard lessons about inventory allocation strategy, shelf life management, and what happens when you're a small team stretched across an expanding wholesale footprint without the systems to support it.
The Ulta expansion — which Madeline described as the most significant achievement of her professional career — was the payoff of learning those lessons the hard way. They began planning over 18 months in advance. Every product was forecasted. Every EDI process was tested. They started inventory reservations with Cart.com six months out. The launch went smoothly. More than a million units staged for pickup, on time, compliant, and uneventful.
"When you do things correctly, no one really notices," she said. "But it was an incredibly rewarding day."
Joe described the operational shift required on the fulfillment side: omnichannel isn't just more orders from more places. It requires entirely different pick strategies, packing and labeling stations, QA processes, and physical facility zones — each optimized for the specific requirements of DTC speed, wholesale compliance, or marketplace prep. You can't force one channel through infrastructure built for another.
When Jack asked what Madeline wished she'd known three years ago, her answer was pointed.
"As leaders, sometimes we think about if we can get 95% of the way there, it's good enough. But from an operational perspective, that 5% is going to absolutely kill you in terms of time, bandwidth, errors, money."
Her specific example: during the 2020 BFCM, ILIA had planned a gift with purchase — but the product arrived without a barcode. At their old storage unit partner, they would have improvised. At a sophisticated DTC 3PL running at scale, there's no improvising. The lesson is that moving to a larger fulfillment operation requires moving away from on-the-fly problem solving toward planning every detail in advance. Forecasting. Buying ahead. Spec'ing everything before it arrives.
"We really had to learn how to shift from doing just about anything on the fly to being able to plan every detail."
Her advice for brands at the inflection point: invest in automation earlier than feels necessary, and take the last 5% of operational gaps as seriously as the first 95%.
ILIA now manages DTC, Sephora, Ulta, dozens of additional wholesale partners, and is expanding internationally. When asked whether she thinks of those as separate operational systems, Madeline's answer was instructive:
"I always try and simplify as much as possible. It's one business with different channels."
Everything flows through the ERP as the record of truth, then downstream to Cart.com for fulfillment. The result is a system where inventory can be reallocated dynamically — day over day — based on where it's needed most. When Sephora and Ulta drop orders on the same day, ILIA runs them through an allocation workbook that analyzes sell-through, shelf life, and forecasts to determine which retailer gets priority.
"We don't prioritize one channel over another permanently. It's always an ongoing conversation."
Joe reinforced this from the fulfillment side. The key, he said, is that each channel requires processes that diverge where needed — different workflows, different compliance requirements, different physical zones within the facility — while the inventory that feeds them remains unified.
One of the most practically useful moments in the conversation came during the Q&A, when an attendee asked what tech stack Madeline would build from scratch today.
Her answer: a linear stack with the ERP in the middle, order inputs on top, and the 3PL at the bottom. Every order channel — DTC, wholesale EDI, marketplaces, B2B portals — flows into the ERP as the single source of truth. From there, everything flows downstream to fulfillment.
But her more pointed advice was about timing. In 2020, while growing extremely rapidly, ILIA changed nearly every system in their tech stack in three months — moving to a top-tier ERP, upgrading integration partners, adopting leading EDI tooling — all while the business was accelerating.
"It was tough. It probably took a couple of years off of my life. But it really meant that when the growth hit, we already had the tools to scale with us."
The mistake she sees brands make is choosing technology that fits the current moment rather than the next two years. Implementing a cheaper ERP or a basic integration partner feels prudent. But when you outgrow it 18 months later, you're rebuilding the foundation while simultaneously trying to scale on top of it — and that's where the real cost shows up.
Perhaps the most quotable exchange of the webinar came when Jack asked about the relationship between fulfillment and customer experience.
"In my view, there's no divided line between fulfillment and customer experience," Madeline said. "Once the customer clicks buy, everything that follows is an extension of your brand."
For a prestige clean beauty brand like ILIA, that means the unboxing moment has to match the premium nature of the product. A dented box, items poorly packed, a delayed shipping notification — any of these create trust erosion that marketing can't recover.
Joe echoed this from Cart.com's side, noting that "being brand-obsessed" is a core value embedded in how the team approaches every client's fulfillment operation. The fulfillment center is, for many customers, the only physical touchpoint with the brand. It has to be treated accordingly.
The webinar closed with a question from Jack: for brands that are DTC-only today and thinking about Sephora or another major retailer in the next 18 months, what's the one thing to get right operationally before that conversation?
Madeline's answer was immediate: "Can your fulfillment partner do DTC and B2B successfully?"
Not in theory. Not on a slide deck. Go to the warehouse. Talk to the person on the floor managing your major retail partner's orders today. Validate that they know exactly what they're doing. If they don't — or if your partner hasn't scaled B2B for a brand at your complexity level before — that's the gap to close before you sign a retailer agreement.
Joe added: get your inventory compliance process in order. Retail is unforgiving about missed ship windows, non-compliant labeling, and routing guide deviations. The relationship damage from those errors compounds quickly. Getting that discipline in place before the first purchase order is far easier than fixing it after chargebacks start.
This recap covers the highlights, but the full conversation — including the Q&A — is worth watching in full. Madeline and Joe go deeper on peak season planning, the mechanics of managing allocation across competing wholesale partners, and how to think about when to move from in-house to 3PL fulfillment.
If something in this conversation is relevant to where your brand is right now, our team is happy to talk through the specifics.