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When demand for your products starts coming from businesses rather than individual consumers, how do you scale without losing what makes your brand special?
For Mooncup, the demand for wholesale came naturally. Offices, universities and councils were already placing bulk orders through its consumer website. The challenge was finding a way to support that growing B2B audience without creating more administrative work or losing the personal relationships that made customers choose the brand in the first place.
At sync, we welcomed Paulina Szklarek, Managing Director at Mooncup, alongside Neil Kuschel, Executive Chairman at SparkLayer, and Alex Weston, General Manager at SparkLayer, to explore how businesses can build the infrastructure to scale their B2B operations, and where AI fits into that journey.
From manual processes to scalable infrastructure
Mooncup didn't set out to become a wholesale business. But as demand grew, it became clear that the processes supporting individual customers weren't necessarily suited to business buyers.
Managing bulk orders manually can create unnecessary friction for customers and internal teams alike. Traditional wholesale processes might involve printing purchase orders and physically delivering them to the finance department. What works at a small scale quickly becomes inefficient as order volumes increase.
The answer isn't simply to work harder. It's to build systems that can handle additional demand.
Digital infrastructure and self-service tools allow wholesale customers to place orders, access the information they need and manage repeat purchases independently. This reduces routine administrative enquiries and frees up teams to focus on more valuable work, from product marketing to customer engagement.
For Mooncup, the opportunity is to support a growing B2B channel without allowing the operational demands of wholesale to distract from its wider mission.
Making space for the human relationship
Automation doesn't mean removing people from the customer experience. In fact, when implemented well, it can create more opportunities for meaningful interactions.
By taking repetitive administrative tasks off their teams' hands, businesses can spend less time processing orders and more time understanding their customers. For a brand like Mooncup, where relationships and purpose are central to its identity, that distinction matters.
The goal is to automate tasks that don't need a human touch, rather than the conversations that benefit from one.
This becomes particularly important as AI develops. Neil believes businesses need to understand how quickly the technology is changing, even if they aren't ready to implement every available feature.
“The way that you as retailers will be using AI in a year is entirely different from how you are using it today,” he explained.
His advice is to get familiar with what's possible while remaining thoughtful about where automation belongs. AI can help businesses operate more efficiently, but that doesn't mean every customer interaction should be handed over to a machine.
Using AI the right way
For Paulina, access to AI tools would have made a tangible difference when she first started looking at how to scale Mooncup's operations.
The traditional approach involved asking industry contacts for recommendations, researching providers online, sitting through sales calls and discovering that supposedly ideal solutions weren't quite right. Looking back, she believes AI could have significantly shortened that process.
When asked how she might approach those early decisions differently today, Paulina explained: “I think that it would have took me probably 6 months less.”
She went on to describe how tools such as Claude could help her ask more targeted questions about software, integrations and ways to improve existing processes.
Rather than spending months going back and forth between providers, businesses can use AI to narrow down their options and arrive at more informed decisions. Human judgement remains essential, but the research process can become much quicker.
The same principle applies once systems are in place. Routine customer service enquiries, for example, can be good candidates for automation, provided the process is clearly defined and appropriate human oversight remains in place.
Looking ahead, AI could also help businesses move beyond simple automation towards more proactive support, such as recommending reorder quantities based on purchasing history or identifying customers who have abandoned a checkout.
Start with the problem, not the technology
For businesses considering where AI could make a difference, the starting point doesn't have to be a major transformation project.
Instead, identify the processes that frustrate your team, take too long or create unnecessary work. These are often the areas where automation can have the greatest immediate impact.
Neil encourages businesses to think beyond what today's tools can do and consider what might become possible if they were prepared to trust systems with more of their operations. Understanding that potential helps separate the hype from practical opportunities for improvement.
For Mooncup, the wider lesson is that scaling successfully isn't just about handling more orders. It's about building the right infrastructure to support growth while protecting the values and relationships that made that growth possible.
AI and automation can help businesses create that space. The real opportunity lies in using technology to make operations more effective, so people can focus on the work that matters most.
