Brand Fuel saves approximately 65 hours weekly and $100,000 annually with Avalara

Founded in 1998 in Raleigh, North Carolina, Brand Fuel creates branded merchandise and promotional products for businesses throughout the United States and internationally. The company offers a mix of services including ecommerce stores tailored to individual clients, kitting, warehousing fulfillment, and custom order management. It is a proud Certified B Corporation.

Brand Fuel’s ecommerce fulfillment model shifted dramatically during the pandemic. Instead of shipping products to centralized trade shows and event locations, the company began shipping individual orders directly to customers. Those drop shipments created nexus exposure in numerous states and introduced significant sales and use tax complexity.

“It kind of kept me up at night on how I was going to figure out how to collect in all of these different jurisdictions and know what percent of tax went to this specific address. And how are we going to scale that and do the reporting? It just was a nightmare,” says Allison McLain, General Manager at Brand Fuel.

Brand Fuel relied on manual processes and single-jurisdiction tax calculations inside its ERP. The company had to come up with a workaround to calculate tax for multiple jurisdictions on a single invoice. Allison also discovered that calculating taxes based on ZIP codes alone could create inaccuracies because ZIP codes often span multiple tax jurisdictions.

The company hired a dedicated employee solely to handle tax breakouts. But with more dropship orders coming in, it wasn’t sustainable.

“It was a bottleneck,” Allison says. “We either had to wait on this one person to get the work done or we had to continue to hire additional people just to do this one thing.”

Brand Fuel has used commonsku as its ERP for approximately 15 years and was one of the platform’s earliest customers. Allison was heavily involved in helping shape commonsku’s functionality over the years and became a vocal advocate for deeper tax automation capabilities.

“I was kind of the squeaky wheel that told commonsku that you really need to start talking to Avalara,” Allison says.

After learning more about Avalara’s compliance expertise and rooftop-level geolocation capabilities, which calculates tax at the precise physical address location, Brand Fuel selected Avalara AvaTax and Avalara Returns a few years ago to automate sales tax calculations, returns filing, and remittance. Reliability, accuracy, and integration capabilities were key decision factors.

Brand Fuel played a direct role in helping develop commonsku integration for Avalara. Allison participated in the beta process and supplied real-world drop-shipment order data so the Avalara and commonsku teams could test complex tax scenarios.

Once Brand Fuel implemented the integration in 2025, many of the initial workflow and use cases had already been refined.

“The systems were already really well thought out, so it made our onboarding experience pretty simple,” Allison says.

She praised the collaborative relationship between Brand Fuel and the Avalara and commonsku teams.

“Both Avalara and commonsku are genuinely interested in helping us to improve operationally rather than just selling us software. That’s been refreshing to have true partners,” she says.