“Propelling L’Oréal into the future with Beauty Tech ”

In 2018, L’Oréal announced its intention to become the Beauty Tech  champion and embarked on an acceleration programme putting new technologies at the heart of its strategy—its ambition being to create the beauty of the future by becoming the company of the future.

As well as extensively restructuring its IT assets, L’Oréal has accelerated the global deployment of new technologies to everyone involved in the company and also to consumers. These technological innovations combining augmented reality, real-time data algorithms, cloud  solutions and more allow us to meet new beauty aspirations, invent new personalised products, offer unrivalled quality of experience and provide consumers with new augmented diagnostic tools. They also enable us, within the company, to transform our working methods and boost our capabilities with tech solutions based on real-time data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

During the Covid-19 health crisis, L’Oréal Technology and Beauty Tech teams have played a decisive role in ensuring business continuity and supporting the needs of employees, suppliers and consumers. As lockdowns started to spread in the span of a few days, more than 55,000 employees worldwide have been able to work remotely and access all the Group’s applications from home, and over five million online meetings, virtual townhalls and broadcasts were held in 2020. After the first wave of the pandemic started in China in late January, Technology teams worked tirelessly to anticipate the effects of the crisis in each affected country and adapt systems extremely quickly to allow the switch to new ways of working.

Technologies have also enabled us to rise to the challenge presented by the acceleration of e-commerce, with demand increasing at an unprecedented rate. In just a few weeks, orders were sometimes close to +800%, online platforms being the only accessible distribution channel for many consumers during lockdown.

While the coronavirus crisis is above all a tragedy, it has undoubtedly accelerated the uptake of new technologies by our consumers, our beauty advisors and our employees. To this end, in 2020, our teams were organised around Beauty Tech “accelerators” in Paris and Shanghai, and soon New York, bringing together teams of data scientists, data analysts, UX  and IT experts, along with an ecosystem of startups and major tech suppliers to enable agile development of new technological solutions through successive sprints  in collaboration with the business. Examples include products “augmented” by a serialised QR code  , predictive beauty trend detectors and real-time analysis of what consumers say about our products.

Thanks to the development of its Beauty Tech programme, L’Oréal provides its customers with highly personalised, “augmented” products and services that offer unmatched experiential quality while inventing a new way of working with its employees.