When a billion people use your skin care & hair care products and your cosmetics range, you need to consider innumerable textures & colours. All these consumers want products that are tailored to their needs. For L’Oreal, delivering personalisation at this level of scale meant thinking about innovation in a different way.

It would no longer mean a one solution to one problem approach. It meant tailoring the solution for individual consumers who experienced the same problem in different ways.

Leveraging industry 4.0 to achieve personalisation at scale

Industry 4.0 includes robotics, IoT, data, blockchain, VR, AR & AI. All these technologies have a place in the modern industrial framework. They can be combined and can be deployed to make manufacturing more productive and efficient.

L’Oréal not only leveraged e-commerce and recommendation engines during the pandemic, but the company also tested and implemented technologies to deliver personalisation at scale.

Initiatives and solutions

We’ve already covered L’Oreal’s Modiface in a previous blog. Some of L’Oreal’s other various initiatives are:

• Le Teint Particulier, under the brand Lancome – a product which allows consumers to have their skin tone ‘measured’ at point of sale. A personalised concealer is then manufactured for them right there in the store. The concealer is a combination of one of each of 8,000 shades, 3 coverage levels, and 3 hydration levels. Even the packaging is personalised with information including the customer’s name. It also includes a reference ID for quick and easy reordering.

• Custom D.O.S.E by Skinceuticals, a L’Oreal UK brand. According to L’Oreal’s tech incubator, “Custom D.O.S.E by SkinCeuticals is the first ever automated system that delivers highly concentrated combinations of SkinCeuticals’ most potent ingredients on-the-spot. Addressing the concerns of over 250 skin types, the D.O.S.E technology is first-of-its-kind because it’s able to mix active ingredients into a single serum at the point of service specifically to target the appearance of skin aging issues, like wrinkles, fine lines, and discoloration.”

• Agile production lines – by leveraging several industry 4.0 technologies, L’Oreal has been able to manage final product differentiation later in the value chain. Stéphane Lannuzel says, “We can produce the base and then choose the colour for a lipstick right at the very last moment”.

• Perso, this gadget personalises and customises make up for your every need. Perso relies on an AI derived diagnosis of a photo (corresponding phone app by BreezoMeter) of a user’s face to highlight imperfections ranging from fine lines to dryness. Perso then creates a final product formulated for the user’s skin, pulling from a library of ingredients.

The results speak for themselves

For the year ended 31 December 2021, L’Oreal’s brands grew by 16.1%, nearly twice that of the global beauty market. Sales was up 15.3% vs prior year, with profits up 29% vs prior year.

The group reported double digit sales growth in H1 2022 at 20.9% increase YoY.