Charlotte Tilbury – the namesake business of the British makeup artist – was currently available in more than 60 countries via its brand website and stocked in more than 550 stores worldwide. With 11 stand-alone stores across the globe, the first of which it opened in the UK in 2015, Charlotte Tilbury was on a mission to expand its global footprint further.
Earlier this year, it sold out a majority stake to Spanish fashion and fragrance firm Puig as part of this push and had now teamed up with Google Cloud’s business intelligence and analytics platform Looker to drive forward a tighter global omnichannel offering.
‘Creating consistently excellent customer experiences’
Charlotte Tilbury said the partnership with Looker would deliver “critical capabilities” as it worked with retailers adapting to new times post-COVID-19. The platform provided the brand with access to important, real-time data insights across its business – from e-commerce to supply chain and finance – that it could then use to apply to decision-making processes and expansion strategies.
“It’s an incredibly challenging time for retailers around the world. Now, more than ever, we need to focus, adjust, and invest in technology that will help us navigate the current climate by creating consistently excellent customer experiences across all channels,” said Dr Andreas Gertsch Grover, director of data at Charlotte Tilbury.
Speaking to CosmeticsDesign-Europe, Grover said: “Charlotte Tilbury wants its customers to have the best experience across the website, in-store and anywhere else.”
Asked what sort of data would be most useful in helping the company fulfil this, he said: “Any data that shows user actions, or the lack thereof, to anything we do. For example, click-throughs from ads, whether somebody spends a certain amount of time looking at a how-to video, or direct feedback we receive from our customers.”
Beauty behaviours ‘available to everybody’ to drive omnichannel strength
Grover said the overall goal of working with Looker was to make these data and insights “available to everybody in the company”. Whilst Looker was initially deployed to focus on Charlotte Tilbury’s e-commerce business, he said it was now also being used in physical retail stores to bolster the brand’s omnichannel integration.
Charlotte Tilbury said data would give the business a deeper understanding of customer behaviours and multi-departmental sharing of these insights would help “improve efficiencies throughout the company’s supply chain” – assisting with stock shortages and order volume management across different geographies, for example.
“Using one system like Looker makes it possible to ensure clear data and KPI definitions across the company while limiting bottlenecks to access data,” Grover said. “This aligns teams, reduces unnecessary friction and simplifies decision-making processes.”
John O’Keeffe, director of Looker EMEA sales at Google Cloud, said: “Due to the extremely competitive nature of the industry at the moment, retailers need to do everything they can to make both the online and offline experiences for customers as seamless and engaging as possible – to accelerate digital and omnichannel revenue growth. Retailers looking to innovate and empower should be using data as a digital influence across the whole business to better understand and cater to customers.”
L’Oréal beauty accelerator entrepreneur Nidhima Kohli, founder of Beauty Matching Engine and My Beauty Matches, recently described customer data as “the new oil” for industry.
