What do Avon, Benefit and Nocibé have in common?

Beauty brands have been through quite a market rollercoaster these past years. Sales of color cosmetics fell by 33% globally, overall retail sales declined by 15% in 2020 (according to the McKinsey on Consumer and Retail podcast), and the overall market is shifting towards digitalization and e-commerce. 

Even with all the challenges this pandemic has brought to the beauty and cosmetics industry, as well as retail as a whole, many beauty brands have revolutionized their processes and embraced the digital disruption by enhancing their retail spaces and bringing a new focus on customer experience. This rapid digital expansion paid off, for both brands and consumers, as the beauty and cosmetics industry continues to grow from $483B in 2020 to $511B in 2021, maintaining an annual growth rate of 4.75% worldwide.

Let's dive into the three beauty brands that have chosen to include technology, more specifically the IWD Retail Software Solutions, in their daily merchandising processes and how it changed the game for them.

Starting off with NOCIBÉ, one of the French leading retailers in perfume and cosmetics. Their main pain point was managing an extensive network of stores and broad product offering. They were looking for a tool that was not only able to handle the size of its database but lighten and facilitate the associated teams' workload. 

"We have been using the IWD tools for many years now, and they are perfectly suited to the cosmetics sector because they allow easy data exchanges, especially photo databases, with certain brands. The IWD teams were able to satisfy our request for specific analyses for a retailer like NOCIBE. From the production of planograms, to the communication of guidelines and data extraction for our analyses, their tools are essential for us to make the right decisions."

ERIC MOUQUET - MERCHANDISING DIRECTOR, NOCIBÉ

Nocibé utilized IWD’s toolkit to uncover key insights regarding stock management, sales and margins analysis, and brand performance. This allowed them to optimize merchandising recommendations to the selective brands they work with. The team can now focus on improving its retail strategies, as they save countless hours on creating planograms.

A second player in the game of brand growth is BENEFIT. They wanted to be as agile, if not more, as the market to adapt guidelines in the fast-paced cosmetics world.

"IWD simplified our everyday work life. We save time when working on each update and the guidelines edited for in-store staff are now more clear! Also, this software is not just useful for merchandising team, but impacts the work of several other teams (KAM, field force…)."

MATHILDE OLIVIER - VM EMEA & PROJECT LEADER, BENEFIT

With the adoption of such a tool, the brand is no longer worried about wasting time doing repetitive or time consuming tasks, and can focus on answering to the market's needs. The teams now focus on the efficiency gained and the ability to send clearer guidelines that serve as a strong base for worldwide departments and teams. 

Everyone knows AVON, but did you know that such a big brand used to have outdated tools to create their planograms such as Excel? This makes it very complicated to visualize the implementation from just text-only, don't you agree? 

The AVON team saw remarkable benefits in 2021 when they introduced an improved planogram layout that was easier to read and use by branch staff. Their main objectives were to simplify visual merchandising processes while ensuring staff efficiency, help increase sales off-take in face care and fragrance products, and measure sales rep satisfaction & customer shopping experience.

This resulted in a 7.4% sales increase in May for the face care category. The staff now have many benefits to share and they even sat down with us to tell their story.

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