Introduction: In this guest column, L’Oréal Travel Retail Chief Digital Officer Sam Crossman highlights its most exciting beauty tech innovations, their applications in travel retail and its mission to become a beauty tech powerhouse.
For many years, we’ve considered ourselves a beauty tech company, and envisaged a future where our incredible brands, products and services are augmented and improved through the use of beauty tech.
We’re focused on inventing the future of beauty and becoming a beauty tech powerhouse. To enable this, we must always innovate. We are doing this through diagnostic services such as SkinDr by Kiehl’s; using the most advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to recommend the perfect match for your skin.
We do this through intelligent tools such as Lancôme’s Hapta that help those with limited wrist mobility apply makeup, or combinations of both physical and data-driven diagnostic tools such as YSL’s Scent-sation. The Scent-sation is a headset that captures how different scents stimulate your neural activity and analyses this data using AI to recommend the perfect YSL fragrance for you.
Not forgetting Skinscreen by Lancôme; a skin diagnostic tool powered by brand-specific algorithms and used in-store by our Beauty Advisors to provide expertise and recommendations to our consumers.
The duty-free store is the place to experience the latest and best in beauty, and to take the time to discover the perfect products for you – helped by these types of innovation.
We believe that our beauty tech capabilities enable consumers to find that perfect match. This can happen in-the-moment, in store, but we are also focused on capturing the rich data created as part of these services – to enable consumers to revisit their recommendations online, create a virtual profile for future purchases and comparison, and to ensure we speak to them in our communications about the most relevant products for them.
We are working with our partners to roll out our beauty tech tools and services globally, and to train our Beauty Advisors to use these in-store. This is where the magic happens; the combination of the best in beauty expertise through the years or through brand and product training, powered by data and the latest in beauty tech, always focused on providing the best consumer experience and helping consumers discover the perfect products for them or their loved ones.
What’s more, when we get this powerful combination right, we create real business value.
This is not forgetting the tech we’re developing to drive a more responsible beauty industry; from the L’Oréal Water Saver, an intelligent shower head cutting water use in salon hair washing and rinsing by -60%, to our partnership with LanzaTech and Total to create the world’s first sustainable packaging made from captured and recycled carbon emissions. Beauty tech can be seen and experienced at every level of our business.
Our job at L’Oréal Travel Retail is to adapt and tailor these L’Oreal innovations for travellers and travel retail, and to find and create specific tech opportunities to innovate within our industry – from using the power of UV index data to recommend the perfect La Roche Posay Anthelios suncare for your destination, with our partners Tripadvisor, to the power of AI to ensure our brands can be experienced in the right language for any traveller.
With the right combination of incredible brands and products, and human expertise, powered by the latest tech and data innovations, we can continue to transform the beauty experience and ensure beauty for all travellers. ✈
