Tailored for Growth: How AS Colour Reimagined Tax Exemption

Quality is in the details

For AS Colour, quality has always been more than the finished product.

Since 2005, the brand has built its reputation on premium apparel blanks, growing from a supplier for the music industry into a global business serving screen printers, embellishers, corporate buyers, and other wholesale customers. Today, AS Colour operates five warehouses across four countries while continuing to grow its direct-to-consumer business.

That growth never changed the company's philosophy.

"From the very beginning, doing the right thing was really important for us as a brand," said Joe Sharplin, Head of Ecommerce at AS Colour. "We've always tried to do the best that we can, whether that's through production, the materials we use, auditing factories."

As AS Colour expanded, that same commitment to quality reached beyond the products it sold. It also shaped the experience customers had every time they did business with the brand.

Working with BigCommerce, Avalara, and Cadent Commerce, AS Colour reimagined one of its most manual wholesale workflows, transforming tax exemption into a faster, self-service experience for wholesale buyers while reducing administrative work behind the scenes.

When "good enough" stopped being enough

Growth has a way of exposing the processes that no longer work.

For years, AS Colour's tax exemption process got the job done. But as its U.S. wholesale business grew, so did the number of new customers, certificates, approvals, and moving pieces.

Getting a new wholesale account ready for tax-exempt purchasing meant manually:

• Collecting exemption certificates

• Reviewing customer information

• Verifying tax status across applicable states

• Uploading documentation into Avalara

• Confirming every exemption was tied to the correct customer account

None of those steps were unusual on their own. Together, however, they created days of back-and-forth before a customer could place a tax-exempt order.

"It wasn't a very nice experience for our customers. There was a lot of back and forth, collecting the correct tax certificates, loading them in, checking all the details. It was a very manual job."

— Joe Sharplin, Head of Ecommerce, AS Colour

Then the challenge grew.

AS Colour wanted to give wholesale customers the flexibility of multiple buyers under a single business account. But the company's existing tax exemption process wasn't designed to extend tax-exempt status across every authorized user. Solving that challenge would require more than improving an existing workflow. It would require rethinking it altogether.

A stronger experience, built together

The answer wasn't another manual workaround. It was a better process.

Working with BigCommerce, Avalara, and Cadent Commerce, AS Colour redesigned its tax exemption workflow from the ground up. The goal wasn't simply to digitize paperwork. It was to create a self-service experience that made onboarding easier for wholesale customers while reducing the administrative burden on internal teams.

Built on BigCommerce's flexible B2B architecture and Avalara's Exemption Certificate Management platform, the custom integration gives wholesale customers more visibility and control over their tax exemption status. Customers can now:

• Upload and manage tax exemption certificates directly from their account

• View their exemption status across applicable states

• Maintain tax-exempt status across multiple authorized users within the same business account

• Complete onboarding with fewer manual touchpoints

The integration also improves the experience behind the scenes. Customer information submitted through the new workflow is more complete, helping AS Colour's finance team review and approve certificates more efficiently.

"The support from BigCommerce and the agency was great, and the whole thing was pretty smooth."

— Joe Sharplin, Head of Ecommerce, AS Colour

From bottleneck to breakthrough

The impact was immediate.

What once took multiple days of emails, paperwork, and approvals could now happen in a single session. For AS Colour, that translated into measurable improvements:

• Reduced tax-exempt wholesale onboarding from days to minutes

• Achieved a 90%+ accuracy rate on submitted tax certificates

• Delivered the custom integration from kickoff to production in approximately six weeks

The rollout also revealed just how much demand existed for a simpler process.

"All of a sudden, people were going: 'I can upload a certificate now.' It was like there was an unblock on our customers, as well," said Sharplin.

The benefits extended beyond wholesale customers. With cleaner customer data and fewer manual touchpoints, AS Colour's finance team now spends less time managing certificates and more time supporting the company's continued growth.

The final word

Every growing B2B business reaches a point where manual processes start getting in the way of the customer experience.

For AS Colour, rethinking tax exemption created a faster, more intuitive onboarding process for wholesale buyers while reducing administrative work for internal teams. What began as a custom solution is now available in the BigCommerce App Marketplace, making it easier for other B2B businesses to simplify tax exemption management without building a custom integration from scratch.

This story is just one piece of AS Colour's ecommerce journey. Read the full case study to see how the brand uses BigCommerce to power both wholesale and direct-to-consumer experiences, support global expansion, and deliver the same attention to detail across every customer touchpoint.