EVOLVh is a high-performance clean hair care brand and one of the original pioneers of the clean beauty movement. Selling both to professionals and consumers through Shopify, they've built an omni-channel business that serves salons, hairdressers, and retail customers across the country. As they expanded into more states, their manual sales tax process became impossible to sustain. In 2025, they switched to Kintsugi's AI-powered tax automation, and now spend just 5% of the time they used to spend on sales tax compliance.

When Manual Processes Become Unmanageable

EVOLVh's growth came with consequences they didn't anticipate. As they reached nexus in state after state, the complexity of sales tax compliance multiplied. What started as a manageable task quickly became an overwhelming burden.

"Before using Kintsugi, we were still doing our sales tax compliance manually," said Boris Oak, EVOLVh’s founder and CEO. "So you can only imagine that over time it became super time consuming, very burdensome, and just one big giant headache."

The problems ran deeper than that: EVOLVh had fallen out of compliance in certain states—not through negligence, but simply by triggering nexus without realizing it. The notices from state tax authorities started arriving. Late fees began piling up. The company knew they needed to act quickly. 

Managing compliance across multiple jurisdictions manually was, in Boris's words, "a real bear." It was time to find a solution.

The Solution: Technology You Can Trust

EVOLVh evaluated multiple platforms, including industry veterans like Avalara and newer competitors. But Kintsugi stood out for reasons that went beyond just features.

"When we were evaluating which solution to go with, what was most important to us were really two factors," Boris explained.

 "One was our confidence in the technology in the platform where we felt like it had real true end-to-end automation, the best possible integration with the different tax entities to make sure that the system was always in compliance or was applying the most current tax rates to our filings."

The second factor was equally critical: people. "The other part is the customer support and the human part—making sure that we had access to real people who could help us when we needed help. And we found that Kintsugi really had the best-in-class of both in comparison to every other platform that we looked at."

During implementation, Kintsugi's team proved the value of that human touch. They had to perform significant backwards-looking work to address the areas where EVOLVh had fallen out of compliance. The data was challenging to work with coming from different systems and spreadsheets, but the team persevered.

"What really impressed me was just the perseverance of our Kintsugi team and their willingness to go above and beyond even when it was challenging and the data was hard to work with," Boris said. "They really powered through and we really appreciate that."

After getting Evolvh fully compliant , Kintsugi's prebuilt Shopify integration handled everything automatically from there. "Kintsugi's integration with Shopify is essential," Boris noted. "It allows the process to be automated. It allows us to basically let Kintsugi do its thing in a pretty hands-off kind of way from our side."

Peace of Mind and 95% Time Savings

The transformation was significant. EVOLVh went from drowning in manual tax work to barely thinking about it at all—as most brands would prefer.

"The top benefits of using Kintsugi are, first of all, the time savings. We probably spend about 5% of the time that we used to spend on sales tax compliance," Boris said. That's a 95% reduction in time spent on tax compliance—hours that can now go toward growing the business and pioneering new clean beauty innovations.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. For Boris, the most valuable outcome is harder to quantify: "The peace of mind of knowing that everything is current, up to date—that is pretty priceless. So I think those two pieces of just knowing that we're doing it right and we're having to spend very little time on it now, that combination is pretty remarkable."

The platform itself delivers on EVOLVh's criteria for technology they can trust. Boris finds it "very intuitive, well-designed, easy to use," with everything "laid out in a very clean way." But his favorite feature is simple: "The ease of filing at the end of the day—to actually complete the filings and know that everything's there while being mostly hands-off—that is an amazing feeling."

For accuracy—which Boris calls "super paramount"—Kintsugi ensures the data is handled correctly, preventing issues like overpayment or double counting that can easily happen with manual processes.

As EVOLVh prepares for international expansion, they're confident Kintsugi will scale with them. The platform will automatically monitor their global footprint and alert them when they trigger nexus in new countries—taking the guesswork out of compliance as they grow.

"So [we realized] it was definitely time to automate the process," Boris reflects, "which is when we found Kintsugi, thankfully."