Automated, Sustainable, Scaled: Baggu’s implementation story

Challenge: Baggu managed leaves across spreadsheets and slideshows, leaving People Ops managers anxious about their accuracy across more leaves in more states as the company began to grow.

Solution: Implementing Cocoon in just three weeks, Baggu can scale leave management, automate their compliance, and offer employees flexibility and visibility into the leave management process they never had before.

Results:

• Reduced leave management time from 3+ hours to 30 minutes per leave.
• Automated employer compliance features pay calculations and compliance, reducing human error.
• Improved employee experience with self-serve leave planning and automated pay calculations.
• Fast implementation—live within three weeks to support an upcoming leave.
• Centralized documentation for easy access and fewer lost files.

Meet Baggu’s People Ops team

As a small company trying to make a big impact, Baggu began crafting durable, reusable bags in 2007. Though that vision has expanded across more products and the teammates who bring them to life, Baggu is still committed to minimizing waste, maximizing delight, and long-term sustainability. 

For Baggu’s People Ops team, long-term sustainability meant rethinking their processes and tooling to offer a scalable employee experience as Baggu continued to grow. One day, as Senior Director of People Ops, Ben Seltzer, began to train up People Ops Manager, Patricia Do, on Baggu’s in-house leave management process across slideshows and spreadsheets, all Patricia could think was, “I hope I don’t actually have to use this,” and began looking for a leave management solution.

Choosing a leave management solution

It wasn’t just the manual processes making Patricia wary. “Ben created valuable resources for employees taking leave, but when it came to calculating pay, taking state benefits into account—and in which state—actually mapping it all out was confusing. I was worried I would make a mistake,” Patricia says. “Plus, Baggu is growing and scaling. It’s hard enough doing this manual process once a year, but when it suddenly quadruples, there’s so much that can go wrong. Messing up someone’s leave would be the worst.”

Though Baggu had just implemented Rippling as their HRIS—which has an exclusive integration contract with a Cocoon competitor for leave management—Ben still encouraged Patricia to evaluate her options and check out Cocoon. He’d looked at them in the past and wanted to see how they had evolved in the years since. 

Ben’s hunch proved to be spot on. On the surface, it would have been easy to keep everything inside Rippling, but as Baggu actually evaluated Cocoon vs. Tilt, Patricia and Ben realized that Tilt lacked a key feature that put a damper on the seeming convenience. “We realized that Cocoon was the only solution that would handle and automate the employer compliance portion. Even though Tilt’s integration with Rippling made certain pieces more convenient, worrying about continuing to file physical paperwork, and not taking on certain compliance pieces on our behalf, we thought Cocoon was the better route to take in the long-run.”

Cocoon’s fast and simple implementation process

Baggu began conversations with Cocoon in late 2024, and signed in January of 2025. By early February, Cocoon’s implementation went live. “We had someone taking leave very soon, so I asked to expedite the implementation timeline, and our reps, Dom and Victoria, delivered in just three weeks. Having just implemented a new HRIS, we were prepared for a lot more time and complexity, so it was a relief that we just had to fill out a few forms and checklists and Cocoon took care of the rest.” 

An automated solution for a people-centric future

Though it’s barely been a month with Cocoon, Patricia already sees there’s a lot to love. “It’s so nice to be able to trust in a platform that’s already wired to calculate and automate complex stuff—and not rely on manual, human calculations,” Patricia explains, relieved. “It’s also a relief that all the documents live inside of Cocoon, so everything employees submit is already there and nothing gets lost.”

Patricia estimates that Cocoon has reduced the time People Ops has to dedicate to the leave management process down from 3+ hours per leave down to 30 minutes. “It will allow me to focus more on my work around hiring practices and compensation packages, and ultimately just reduces a lot of the anxiety I had around managing leaves in-house.”

Cocoon is also proving to be a hit with employees. “We did a walkthrough with an employee using Cocoon, and she loved that she could visualize her leave, tweaking it as she went to make the best decision, and getting things estimated before even officially requesting leave. That was never possible before.” “Plus,” Patricia adds, “as we hire more People Operations managers, and grow the team in general, I think Cocoon will be a huge selling point to show that we’re not only investing in software that makes our work better and our lives easier, but also committed to providing the best employee experience possible.”