Shaping global business transformation

L’Oréal is the worldwide leader in beauty. Yearly revenues top €25 billion and nearly 100,000 employees work across 30 brands that span the spectrum of skincare and beauty products. Eager to become the "#1 Digital Beauty Brand" in the world, L’Oréal was ready for a business transformation.

L’Oréal knew it needed a partner to accelerate innovation across digital brand experiences, new digital products, and services. To achieve this, they needed a cost-effective, scalable solution that could bring all 15 brands onto one platform. That need led them to Valtech.

After a worldwide search, L’Oréal chose Sitecore to provide the digital marketing platform and Valtech as its business transformation partner. The company had 1 billion customers interacting with their 3,000 different websites every day. There was a desire to improve the consumer's online experience while delivering a consistent branding message across 60 country subsidiaries. L’Oréal also had opportunities to develop new e-commerce channels, personalize the shopping experience, and increase revenue through cross-selling.

Valtech was an obvious choice, for many reasons. They have this huge blend of digital marketing knowledge, technology forte, agile strength, and this change management that they bring to the whole project because it's a very complex project. It's 15 brands and 60 countries. They also bring global-local flavour to the project and again, when you're a big company like us, you need to be able to both support the brands centrally without neglecting the local needs. Because consumers in Thailand are very different from consumers in the U.S., obviously, so this knowledge of Valtech and the fact that they are this big global footprint helped us a lot on that.

- Lubomira Rochet, Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal.

With multiple websites across so many countries, it was important to be tuned into the specific brand needs in each location. In the APAC region, for example, L’Oréal wanted to build a digital commerce platform that demonstrates high reliability and availability across APAC whilst providing a strong process-driven operation for sites to support local business teams in each country and allow consumers to explore products and buy online across multiple brands.

Salesforce was the chosen solution to meet those needs. Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides a strong process-driven platform operation for sites to support local business teams. Through this, we were also able to deliver on more than just a fully functional shopping cart. Instead, we developed a commerce platform with high performance capabilities on mobile, 24/7 support, and with Agile operations that will allow for swift upgrading and the rollout of new features in the future. The platform also aids with better managed marketing campaigns and stronger follow-up for abandoned carts, helping improve sales.

Valtech and Sitecore worked together to provide L'Oréal with a customized solution that would allow the beauty brand to quickly create new sites using a site cloning tool. Best described as a toolkit, the solution includes multimedia content and allows each country’s editor to build pages that meet local needs but still adhere to company branding and objectives.

Design and delivery centers were set up in the Americas, Europe, and Asia to ensure the application and design works at the local level. From the start, Valtech recommended the move to an Agile delivery model and L'Oréal agreed. Valtech provided Agile training for 80+ L'Oréal employees and guided the company through the new process, providing a comprehensive user guide, training, change management solutions, and global governance initiatives to support the transition to the new platform.