Success Story
Doonails:
Building a Financial Foundation
for Omnichannel Growth
Doonails set out to reinvent the at-home manicure – professional nail results without a salon, without waiting, and without compromise. Headquartered in Larnaca, Cyprus, the company has grown from an idea into an international beauty brand: today, Doonails serves more than one million customers across multiple markets, both online and in drugstores, with a team of 50+ people.
Fabian Ahrens, VP Finance & Operations, has led the function for two and a half years – including the company’s move from a fragmented legacy setup to NetSuite.
About Doonails
Table of Contents
The Challenge
A Fragmented Setup That Couldn't Keep Pace With an International Group
Before NetSuite, Doonails ran on a patchwork of legacy tools – separate accounting systems, with some covering only the operational side of the business. The fragmentation made it hard to get a clear read on the business at month-end or year-end; pulling together a company-wide view took hours, and teams often worked from disconnected information.
By the time Doonails began evaluating an ERP, the company was already operating internationally, which ruled out smaller, local-market systems. As an international group, Doonails needed to accommodate different accounting standards, different local GAAP requirements, and warehouses across multiple countries.
“It was so fragmented, it was so hard to get a clue by month and also by year end. To get a clue of the whole company took hours, and there was a lot of disconnection between different teams.”
Fabian Ahrens, VP Finance & Operations, Doonails
Those gaps, combined with the demands of an international footprint, made clear that Doonails needed a system covering the full finance and operations infrastructure – one built to scale with the company instead of being outgrown by it.
The Solution
Choosing a Platform That Could Grow Without Being Over-Engineered
Doonails shortlisted Tier 1 ERP providers with a proven track record supporting e-commerce and retail businesses across Europe and the US. NetSuite stood out as a strong entry point: a foundation that didn’t strain the budget out of the gate, with the flexibility to add modules, functionality, and users as adoption grew.
An MVP, Not a Mega-Project
Doonails and Alta Via Consulting defined a clear minimum viable product and a fixed go-live deadline – the end of Q1. The project ran for about six months, deliberately scoped to the essentials: core accounting and core operational processes. Rather than building out every capability up front, the goal was to reach a functioning “Level One” as early as possible and let the system prove itself in production.
“What I can always recommend is setting really low MVP standards – the level one you want to get to – with a short migration phase, keeping the whole implementation lean, and going ahead with an MVP that’s already making relevant business impact… not overcomplicating the whole implementation project.”
Fabian Ahrens, VP Finance & Operations, Doonails
From the advisor side, Parth Virkud points out that “minimum” didn’t mean narrow. As a fast-growing scale-up, Doonails operates with agilitiy built in, which made it all the more important to define the minimum requirements clearly, even where that minimum was still ambitious:
“It is critical to clearly define what the minimum requirements are, and that minimum can still be quite ambitious.”
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
In Doonails’ case, that ambitious minimum spanned:
- E-commerce across multiple geographies
- B2B sales with select partners
- Centralized purchasing
- Global supply chain and logistics
- In-house accounting and taxation
Getting the core ERP platform live across all of that within six months came down to close alignment between Doonails and Alta Via on priorities, focusing on what was truly essential rather than trying to solve everything at once.
Because Doonails wasn’t replacing a previous ERP but introducing one for the first time, the team could focus purely on capturing the immediate gains, without the added complexity of untangling legacy ERP data.
The Real Learning Curve: People, Not Process
The technical build wasn’t where the project got hard – pacing the organization was. The main challenge was sequencing when to bring different teams into the project, and how to capture what those teams knew without pulling them away from day-to-day operations for six months.
That meant making deliberate trade-offs about what belonged in the initial go-live scope and what could wait – trade-offs Fabian says they got right.
Results: A Go-Live That Ran on Schedule
Doonails went live on time – a milestone Fabian doesn’t take for granted:
“I’ve never heard of a project – never owned a project myself – that went live in time. It was absolutely impressive.”
Fabian Ahrens, VP Finance & Operations, Doonails
What stood out most after go-live: momentum took over on its own. Once the team saw the new system and processes delivering real value, feature requests and process improvements began coming directly from end users – not from a top-down project roadmap.
“There’s no project manager kind of needed [now]. Once you have a good MVP that you went live with, and with that created trust into the system… it kind of gets going on its own. The end users will keep pushing, request features, ask for more in-depth knowledge, get to train themselves.”
Fabian Ahrens, VP Finance & Operations, Doonails
Today, a small group collects incoming feature requests and a steering committee decides what to prioritize, but there’s no dedicated driver behind adoption. Fabian estimates that virtually all current feature requests originate from the team itself, a sign of how thoroughly the new system has been embraced.
Looking Ahead: What Fabian and Parth Would Tell Other CFOs
Asked what he’d do differently, or what advice he’d give fellow finance leaders before starting an ERP transformation, Fabian points to two things.
Start with a clear destination. An ERP project shouldn’t happen “by coincidence.” Being explicit – with your implementation partner and your software provider – about the outcome you want makes it far easier to make the inevitable trade-off decisions along the way: what to prioritize now, and what can move to a later phase.
Build transparency into the relationship early. Fabian’s most candid reflection was about the human side of the project: implementation and customer teams typically don’t know each other going in, and it takes time to build the comfort needed to flag concerns openly.
“You always need to encourage people to speak out their concerns… to be transparent about where the white spots are. I think we needed a little bit of time to get there – and that’s really where the project lifted off.”
Fabian Ahrens, VP Finance & Operations, Doonails
He points to logistics integration as a concrete example: for several weeks, the team believed progress was on track, only to realize they were at roughly 10% completion. Recognizing that gap early enough to invest more time and involve the logistics partner more deeply made the difference. That payoff showed during hypercare, when Doonails ran its biggest sales event of the year without major technical issues.
Parth Virkud offers a similar starting point from the advisor’s side – define the goal before the scope:
“Start by defining your key requirements – and, more importantly, the goal you want the ERP to achieve. Once that goal is clear, every element of scope should tie back to it.”
Parth Virkud, Managing Director, Alta Via Consulting
That goal can look different from company to company – readiness to scale, revisiting obsolete processes, removing hidden inefficiencies, or simply better visibility into how the business actually runs. Whatever it is, keeping every scope decision tied back to it is what keeps an implementation focused – and what turns a new system into more than just a system.
About Alta Via Consulting
Alta Via Consulting is a specialized NetSuite implementation partner focused on mid-sized and growing companies in the DACH region. The team supports companies from initial system selection through ongoing optimization after go-live.
