Reporter | Xu Yue
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One round tube lipstick of YSL are quickly turning off the assembly line, and the quality inspection conducts the final inspection, and then the lid will be covered and the packaging box will be put. The hollow logo is wrapped around the golden lipstick tube, which is filled with women's fantasies about beauty. Dreams will be like a model with a fashionable poster outside the factory, with a full tint lips on her delicate face.
The production process of lipstick is much more "scientific and technical men" and is not that romantic. This is the L'Oreal Lassigny factory near Paris. In 2016, a flexible production line that relies on computer management and combines multiple production models was put into production at this factory. L'Oreal Group has more than 10 brands selling makeup, while the Lassigny factory mainly produces high-end cosmetics such as YSL and Lancome .
According to sales feedback, the flexible production line can change the production mode within 20 minutes, from producing one lipstick brand and lipstick color number to another brand and color number. Before that, it took 3 hours to change the production mode.
has been in China for 22 years. L'Oreal has 23 brands selling in China - makeup include YSL, Lancome, Maybelline , etc.; skin care products include Skin Spring, Coyan and Biomeochun , etc.; and hair salon brands, such as L'Oreal professional hair salon and Kassi.
Over the years, makeup products have been constantly refreshing China's social media popularity list. The time that impressed L'Oreal's French employees was the popularity of "Star You Color" in 2014. The emergence of flexible production lines can solve the problem of how to quickly keep up with the supply after popular products like "Star You Color". The obvious consequence for beauty companies is to miss a wave of sales opportunities.
"For makeup, hot products often come from popular elements such as color and packaging. With market competition, the popularity time of cosmetics and the pace of competitive product strategies are greatly accelerated, and consumers are very likely to find alternatives or change their interests in a short period of time." Li Xi, senior manager of management consulting company Roland Berger , told Interface News.
According to sales feedback, the Lassigny factory production line can change the production mode within 20 minutes, from producing one brand and color number to another brand and color number - before that, it took 3 hours to change the production mode. The transformation of the
flexible production line is part of L'Oreal's reform from a traditional beauty company to a beauty technology company. In 2017, the reform was proposed by Paul Angung, the current global CEO of L'Oreal. L'Oreal emphasized that this is not just a beautiful public relations slogan, and digitalization will be integrated into the marketing, sales, and supply chain production of various brands of the group.
In fact, almost all beauty giants have shown their importance to new technologies, and L'Oreal is one of the most active ones, and they are increasingly investing and marketing. In an analysis, Euromonitor Consulting believes that technology is becoming part of the core strategy of beauty companies.
The competition in the beauty industry is entering a new stage.
In the mid-1960s, France became the country with the most vigorous development of the beauty industry, and intensively opened 430 companies that produce cosmetics and toiletries. Since then, the United States and Germany have risen one after another.
"Beautiful War: A History of Global Contest for Cosmetics Giants", Professor Jeffrey Jones of Harvard Business School described that although London and Stockholm once wanted to follow Paris, Paris had never met an opponent. They not only export products to the world, but also export aesthetics through mass communication tools. Looking back on the competition over the past hundred years, the competition among beauty companies is mainly focused on formula improvement and channel development.
After World War II, with the improvement of various technologies such as "solvent extraction", beauty companies were able to bring innovative products with odor, texture and formula to the market.
On the other hand, from hair salons, supermarkets to pharmacies, and perfume stores, beauty companies creatively launch brands targeting specific customer groups based on the characteristics of each channel, and then greatly expand the mass market through the magic of advertising.
However, to this day, doing this alone is not enough to make beauty companies stand out in the cruel competition.Technology makes consumers' voices amplified, and the dissolution of information asymmetry makes it harder to make an effective advertisement.
Also, mobile Internet such as Instagram and Weibo can easily create millions of small brands. At the Women's Clothing Daily Beauty Summit in 2017, an industry executive gave a set of data: sales of traditional beauty companies fell by 1.3%, but sales of independent brands increased by 42.7%. How can consumers actively discover your product?
L'Oreal is trying to get up and seek change, but it needs to overcome all kinds of difficulties. First of all, for a 110-year-old multinational company, it takes great determination and action to break existing thinking from the inside.
Lubomira Rochet, L'Oreal's global chief digital officer, said that this means that the company's internal processes and procedures will change, and the IT system will also be reorganized to make it more open and share information and technology with L'Oreal's partners. Five years ago, L'Oreal established a new chief digital officer position, and Rochet, who was 36, began to take the role.
For luxury goods companies including beauty and fashion, technological reform not only faces a technical threshold, but also a psychological threshold. How can we achieve a good balance between a cold and scarce image and better adapting to the times? Compared with the two, the beauty field has a more proactive and positive attitude towards technology.
"When it comes to e-commerce, people always think that this may be a price issue, but in fact it is not. It is not only a price issue, but a convenience issue. You can get what you buy at any time, whether it is an hour or a week. So it is a choice issue." Rochet told Interface News.
In addition to the flexible production line technology used in the Lassigny factory, L'Oreal has carried out technical transformations in every link from R&D to sales. L'Oreal presented them in a concentrated manner at the technology exhibition VIVA TECH in Paris in mid-May.
In L’Oreal, the reform of technology is driven by point to surface. In 2017, a custom liquid foundation service called Le Teint Particulier was released.
Its principle is to use a handheld detector to scan the skin, then design the nature and concealment of the foundation according to the parameters, mix 8 basic materials in the machine on the sales site, and complete the production of the customized foundation in about 15 minutes. Compared to conventional foundation products, Le Teint Particulier’s custom system can make thousands of colors.
As this technology becomes more mature, L'Oreal wants to use this to promote its e-commerce business and launch a service that can achieve large-scale production of customized foundations. After obtaining skin information through the detection machine, consumers can order customized foundations through the My Little Factory website and ship them directly to their homes. The skin information can be used repeatedly in future orders.
At the booth of VIVA TECH, L'Oreal showed how customized liquid foundation is fused and manufactured in the factory through robotic arms through physical objects and videos. It is expected that by the end of 2019, My Little Factory will open 1,000 sales points around the world. How to carry out top-down reforms in
, the considerations of single-brand companies and multi-brand companies are different. For L'Oreal, Rochet has repeatedly mentioned the importance of learning from each other between its brands, which may be the practice of making trial and error the lowest cost and being able to quickly find a breakthrough.
"After one of our brands has a good idea, we can copy it to other brands," Rochet explained this approach. "We cover about 150 markets in the world and 36 brands, so we can share this good practice among brands."
L'Oreal did not disclose how much cost it has invested in its plan to transform into a beauty technology company. But it can be seen that L'Oreal has hired more than 2,000 new data experts, and in 2018, 22,000 employees participated in the large-scale digital skills cultivation program; it acquired Modiface, a Canadian company that applies virtual reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to the beauty industry.
In addition, L'Oreal also incubates beauty technology startups in the French technology accelerator Station F. L'Oreal provides 6-month tutoring these beauty startups to assist them in solving various production and R&D problems.
In the industry related to beauty, consumers will choose whatever brands once gave. But social media disintegrated this old relationship, and Instagram, which was established for the past 10 years, transferred part of the decision-making power of the trend to the public and created it.
So L'Oreal also developed the corresponding tool to pull data on Instgram. This tool is called Deep Vision and also appears at the VIVA TECH site. Through Deep Vision, L'Oreal can export 1 million pictures related to beauty from Instgram, and divide these pictures into various types of picture types such as lips, eyes, lipstick and arm color test, to identify the current beauty trends and serve as a reference for product development.
In the L'Oreal booth of VIVA TECH, in addition to the display of new technologies such as My Little Factory, 3D customized printing perfume bottle body, and Deep Vision, the sharing of Chinese market experience in the exchange session also attracted the attention of visitors. L'Oreal has only been in China for 22 years, but it has gone through two stages of China's beauty industry and has developed China into its second largest market in the world.
Roland Berger senior manager Li Xi believes that the development of China's beauty industry can be roughly divided into 2010. Before 2010, it was the popularization stage, and from 2010 to the present, it was the upgrade and subdivision stage.
The market growth before 2010 comes from the consumption base. As more consumers begin to use beauty products, mid- and low-end brands have developed rapidly at this stage and have undertaken the market pioneering mission of "from nothing to something". After 2010, the mid-to-high-end market developed rapidly, and the market growth rate of these two types of brands was almost 2-3 times the mass market growth rate, and many overseas mid-to-high-end brands entered the Chinese market.
As consumption upgrade progresses, the focus of competition in the beauty industry in China has changed from basic categories such as BB cream and CC cream to fashionable and popular categories such as lipsticks - lipsticks are also a popular category on Chinese social media in recent years.
The person responsible for sharing experience on VIVA TECH is Hagen Wülferth, chief digital officer of L'Oreal China.
Wu Hanwen can speak fluent Mandarin, but he has only been studying Chinese for ten years. Language ability can help Wu Hanwen better understand China's beauty consumer market - China's mobile Internet is uneven, which has become quite different from the European and American markets. In addition, 35% of L'Oreal's performance in China comes from e-commerce, and L'Oreal needs to tailor more new methods for China. There are many factors that drive the popular
in China, which may be because of TV series, a circle of friends of unknown origin, or an internet celebrity. What is important is how the brand can capture the formation of hot products in advance, and arrange production and stocking in the future. Wu Hanwen and his team developed a set of monitoring tools, such as " Black Gold Lipstick". When it started to be discussed as a topic, the search doubled on the first day and continued to double the next day, which may be considered as the popularity is rising.
Black Gold Lipstick is an example of L'Oreal China taking the initiative to find consumer needs. In fact, not only cosmetics, but also skin care products have the same goal. The recent attempt to achieve this goal is Effaclar Spotscan, an online oil-acne muscle detection system developed by L'Oreal's active health skin care brand, and Tmall. This detection system was also released at VIVA TECH. The detection ideas of this system are similar to those of a dermatologist. Turn on your phone’s front camera and the system detects the distribution of acne, which is divided into 0-4 levels according to the severity. After the test is completed, the page will jump to recommend the corresponding skin care products based on your acne. Due to the differences in mobile phone models, the accuracy of the front camera is also different, but the demonstration staff of Lifuquan said that the accuracy of iPhone 6 and above can reach 95%.
"Efica" will be a targeted marketing - find personalized product combinations in standardized products according to personal needs.Chen Min is the vice president of L'Oreal China and the general manager of the active health cosmetics business unit. He feels that in the Internet era, with the fragmentation of time and the fragmentation of information channels, old-style marketing can no longer have the crushing and large-scale influence of the industrial era.
"Our new marketing also lies in the fact that through the Internet, we discovered that Chinese consumers' pursuit of acne (care). Last year, we ushered in the fastest growth in the past few years." Chen Min told Interface News.
According to the plan, Efica will be officially launched in the Tmall store of Lishuiquan in June, and the target consumers are China's huge oil-acne skin population. The remaining question is to what extent will the Lishuoquan capture customers through this AI technology.
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