Her own words brings clarity to global spending with Airwallex AI

Introducing Her own words

Her own words was founded on a clear conviction: women deserve clothing that doesn't compromise on comfort. What began as a Hong Kong-based lingerie brand has since evolved into a full women's lifestyle label: loungewear, activewear, and everyday essentials, all sold globally.

As the brand scaled, so did the complexity of its back-office. Managing trade show travel, hotel bookings, and global ad spend across HKD, USD, and other currencies became a significant operational bottleneck.

The challenge

Her own words' rapid international expansion exposed three critical gaps in the brand's financial operations.

Issuing and managing cards for business use was painfully slow

As the team grew, so did the need for dedicated spending tools. Whether employees were travelling to overseas trade shows, running regional ad campaigns, or purchasing materials, spending was constant and coming from all directions. But the traditional process of requesting, approving, and issuing corporate cards was manual, slow, and difficult to scale, particularly when the team needed to equip dozens of employees across different markets at once.

Overseas transaction fees quietly eroded margins

Every time an employee swiped a card abroad at a trade fair, a hotel, on transport, on an online ad platform billed in a foreign currency, even for everyday purchases like SaaS tools or team subscriptions, hidden foreign transaction fees were silently added. Across a growing, globally active team, these micro-costs compounded into a significant and largely invisible drag on profitability.

Multi-currency expenses created a reconciliation nightmare

With advertising spend flowing through platforms billed in USD, business travel expenses, and team expenses incurred in HKD, USD, and other Asian currencies, Her own words faced a tangle of fragmented financial records. Receipts were collected manually, currency conversions were opaque, and reconciling month-end statements consumed hours of administrative effort. The finance team lacked a single source of truth for global company spend.

The solution

Airwallex gave Her own words a unified, AI-powered financial stack to manage global spend with precision and speed.

Instant card issuance at scale with AI Assistant

Using Airwallex AI Assistant, Her own words has replaced slow, manual requests with an agile, agentic workflow. The finance team can now issue dedicated Airwallex Corporate Cards for specific departments or individual employees in seconds. By simply stating the intent, the AI Assistant autonomously configures the card, sets the parameters, and activates it instantly. This allows the brand to scale its spending tools as fast as it scales its team, ensuring every employee has the exact resources they need without the wait.

Multi-currency Corporate Cards with zero foreign transaction fees

While each card is issued for a specific role, they all share a powerful underlying feature: native multi-currency settlement. Every Airwallex Corporate Card allows Her own words to spend in local currencies, drawing directly from their corresponding Airwallex balances. By bypassing the hidden foreign transaction fees and unfavourable conversion rates, the brand protects its margins on every swipe. Whether a card is dedicated to a global ad platform or a local supplier, it ensures that international growth never comes with hidden surcharges.

Automated receipt matching and approval with Spend AI

Airwallex Spend AI transformed how Her own words handles expense management across business travel, global advertising, and day-to-day operational purchases. The tool automatically reads and extracts data from receipts and invoices, regardless of currency or language, and matches them to the corresponding card transactions, and categorises them automatically into spending types such as ground transportation, entertainment, meals, and marketing. Approval workflows are streamlined by built-in Policy Agent that automatically checks each claim against company policy, so managers can review, verify, and approve expenses in just a few steps. This replaced a manual process that previously required hours of cross-referencing spreadsheets and chasing paper trails.

The results

By adopting Airwallex's AI-powered financial tools, Her own words turned a fragmented, manual expense process into a streamlined, intelligent system, unlocking time and margin for global growth.

• AI-powered card management at scale: The team can now issue Corporate Cards instantly through AI Assistant, eliminating weeks of manual processes and equipping every team member for global operations. A single platform now provides a consolidated view of all global company spend, giving leadership the data clarity to make faster, more confident decisions on market expansion.

• Zero foreign transaction fees on global spend: Multi-currency Visa cards removed the hidden surcharge on every overseas transaction, preserving margins as the brand scales its international presence.

• Automated expense reconciliation: Spend AI reads receipts, matches transactions, and routes approvals automatically, replacing hours of manual data entry and dramatically reducing month-end close times.

Her own words' journey reflects a reality facing every brand that outgrows its home market: the operational complexity of global expansion hits finance teams first. By replacing manual processes with an AI-powered spend management stack built on unified infrastructure, the brand reclaimed time for its core mission - building products customers love.

For SMEs scaling internationally, Jennifer has straightforward advice, "The teams that invest in intelligent, integrated financial infrastructure now won't be scrambling to rebuild their stack when the pressure is already on."