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Startups, by nature, are on the cutting edge. Without established customers or name recognition, it’s imperative that new entrants within a product category dazzle with emerging technologies that give consumers a feel for their brand and their products. This fact is particularly true in the beauty industry, where game-changing tools like virtual try-on (VTO) give customers a hands-on pre-purchase experience.
Brand disruptors have reshaped the landscape of the beauty industry. Now, these technologies — tools like augmented reality, artificial intelligence, VTO, and more — are essential for brands big and small. Integrating these new technologies into legacy brands with global footprints, name recognition, and devoted customers is no simple task, however, but can transform the customer experience.
At the 2023 Global Beauty and Fashion Tech Forum, Perfect Corp.’s Chief Growth Officer and President Wayne Liu sat down for a fireside chat with Salima Popatia, Chief Digital Officer of Orveon, a collective of premium beauty brands including bareMinerals, Laura Mercier, and Buxom, to discuss how legacy brands are taking a startup approach to technology, and what these emerging technologies mean for the future of beauty brands.
Watch the full conversation below
Thinking Like a Startup
The beauty industry is fascinating, because it’s in a constant state of evolution. While industry leaders have large global footprints and billions in global sales, there are thousands of smaller brands that command dedicated segments of the market. What’s more, large global brands are constantly evolving themselves, launching sub-brands for specific product lines that target specific consumers.
Orveon represents three distinct brands, each of which requires its own unique strategy and positioning, and each takes a different approach to technology. Though Orveon contains two legacy brands — bareMinerals and Laura Mercier — it also includes Buxom, a bold, emerging name in cosmetics. By combining these distinct brands under one collective banner, Orveon, it enables the company to operate with a startup mindset.
Adapting Legacy Brands to Changing Times
One of the major challenges of operating a legacy beauty brand is meeting existing customer expectations while pushing the boundaries to appeal to new customers. While startup brands are able to build everything from scratch, legacy brands are saddled with legacy data, technologies, and systems that can be hard to change.
“With legacy comes a lot of legacy tech and tech footprint that you always inherit,” Salima says. “We got the opportunity to rip all the tech out. And we had to actually rip all the tech out as we restarted these brands, and we had to establish a new tech platform. And that is so empowering because if you think about what empowers the AI, the AR, any kind of machine learning is the data. And if you don't have good data going in, you're going to have bad data going out.”
By starting from scratch, Salima explains, it enabled Orveon to focus on the future of customer experience and build the platforms and technologies that will drive sales and engagement going forward.
“It really is an interesting place because now we can leapfrog and we're not stuck with these old ways of thinking, or working, or data that's siloed or stuck in a different way,” Salima says. “We can think about how do we want these experiences to be portable, where could they go, how do they go?”
How Beauty Tech is Transforming Customer Experience for Orveon
bareMinerals was one of the earliest adopters of VTO technology, and it’s continued to be a major driver for customer engagement. VTO for cosmetics is a relatively straightforward proposition: customers are able to use their phone cameras and AR engines to see what they would look like wearing certain shades of makeup. For skincare, however, AR represents a new form of engagement.
“We think about VTO almost being the promise of, ‘This is how good your skin will look,’ and use that AI to say, ‘This is what your skin will look like in 7 days, in 10 days, in 14 days.’ So they don't have to wait and use photography, like every day kind of take the picture and see how it improved,” Salima says. “And then they have a litmus test that they can test again. ‘Am I seeing the actual results? Is the efficacy there of the product?’ And it makes the brand really responsible to make sure that it is a good product.”
Evolving technologies like AR and AI are creating different ways for customers to experience products and engage with brands in ways beyond a purely transactional relationship.
“Now you're connecting some of the product benefits to the VTO, and you're actually telling the consumer how they can see it right now, which I think is super meaningful,” Salima says. “And there's so many examples like this and how we think about where the brands are going to go. But education is an important one.”
The Constant Evolution of Brands and Technology
Working with both startup and legacy brands with diverse audience segments, Orveon is in a unique position to experiment with the current technologies that are transforming customer experience, but also look to the technologies that will define the customer experience in the future.
Specifically, emerging technologies like generative AI and the metaverse present a new frontier of opportunity for customer engagement, Salima says. “To me, before there was e-commerce when everyone thought e-commerce wouldn't be a channel that took off, now we're seeing the same thing about Metaverse. And everyone thinks about it at this cartoony, crazy place. But it really is going to be those connected experiences. And all of the media companies, the sites are all going to get connected at some point where Metaverse is going to be all around you.”
As beauty tech continues to evolve, it’s clear that the next five years will be defined by digital experiences that put the consumer first, personalized to their unique needs.
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