Case Study: Merle Norman Cosmetics achieves streamlined sales tax compliance with Avalara

Merle Norman Cosmetics prevents sales tax wrinkles with Avalara

Merle Norman Cosmetics, a beauty and self-care company with more than 850 studios across the U.S. and Canada, faced a rapidly growing sales tax challenge after launching ecommerce. Moving from a legacy IBM mainframe and manual processes, the company suddenly had to manage complex economic nexus rules, multistate filing, and exemption handling across wholesale and retail sales.

Merle Norman chose Avalara products integrated with its SYSPRO ERP, including Avalara Returns, AvaTax, and Exemption Certificate Management, to automate compliance. With Avalara, the company streamlined tax mapping across about 800 stock codes, automated resale certificate collection, and simplified filings in 37 states; the result was major time savings, better data integrity, and a controller who could shift from manual preparation to review mode.

Merle Norman

Michael Cassidy

COO/CFO