L’Oréal enhances beauty tech using Azure, delivers customers more personalized beauty experiences

When French chemist and entrepreneur Eugène Schueller started meticulously formulating hair dyes in his kitchen to sell to Parisian hairdressers under the name “L’Auréale” in 1909, he had no idea that his spirit of research and innovation would ultimately catalyze the growth of modern beauty giant L’Oréal. He also didn’t know it would be embraced as part of the company’s DNA.

Today, research and innovation in the service of beauty drives all aspects of L’Oréal operations. It also supports the company’s vision of offering every person around the world the best of beauty in terms of quality, efficacy, safety, sincerity, and responsibility. L’Oréal continuously invests in scientific research and cutting-edge technologies to develop groundbreaking formulas for skin care, hair care, and makeup while keeping pace with global consumer trends. “We want to satisfy all the beauty needs and desires of our customers in their infinite diversity,” says Etienne Bertin, Chief Information Officer at L’Oréal.

Fueled by an increasingly tech-savvy customer base and growing expectations for personalization and rapid responses, L’Oréal is also focusing on to how to best use technology to serve beauty consumers. “We want to disrupt the way customers use technology to provide unique, evolving experiences,” says Bertin. “To do this, we are championing what we call ‘beauty tech,’ an approach to beauty that focuses on personalization of products and experiences by harnessing the power of our data and innovation.”

Beauty tech refers to the integration of leading-edge technology in the cosmetics and beauty industry. It encompasses a range of innovations that enhance the beauty experience for consumers, such as enabling users to virtually try on makeup products, hairstyles, and more. Other examples include using AI to analyze skin conditions and recommend personalized skincare routines or specific beauty products, or creating interactive experiences for consumers, like learning about anti-aging creams.

L’Oréal’s aim is to be the leader in beauty tech. With that, Bertin says his team’s objectives are twofold. The first is to create and develop unique, personalized, and inclusive experiences for L’Oréal customers. The second is to streamline the company’s internal operations and data processing to facilitate empowered employee experiences, including better access to data to help them make the best creative and strategic decisions. “My team is always looking for solutions—on a solid foundation—to help unify and simplify processes that can handle our needs today, and also prime us for innovations to come.”

Extending cloud capabilities

Bertin says his team wanted to find a comprehensive solution that could better harmonize the processes and data L’Oréal uses through its current infrastructure as a service (IaaS) implementation while also supporting more advanced technology. “We saw the need to enhance and streamline our internal operations, manufacturing, and distribution capabilities,” he explains. “We wanted to be able to create and support robust, secure, and compliant cloud solutions that could transform every part of our business.”

L’Oréal has a multicloud strategy in place, and Bertin says adding Microsoft Azure offered many benefits. “The choice of Microsoft was obvious for us, and we knew Azure would enhance our multicloud strategy, support us across operations, and help us stay agile and flexible when it comes to scale and geographical footprint, especially in China.” With Azure, Bertin says, L’Oréal has extended cloud capabilities when it comes to IaaS, and also platform as a service (PaaS) and AI, providing the solid foundation for innovation he and his team needed.

“It’s an extremely solid and secure platform that can be scaled quickly everywhere in the world,” says Bertin. “Azure provides a highly secure and robust stack for performance, cost efficiency, and scalability—all extremely important for a business based on innovation and shaping an industry.” He adds, “We also now have a full integration with the Microsoft ecosystem, including the centralized security of Azure Active Directory, which is critical to us and our customers.”

Currently, L’Oréal is using Azure across several key domains. Its customer relationship management (CRM) and its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are also hosted on Azure. “SAP on Azure helps optimize ERP in the cloud,” says Bertin. “Our SAP and the integrated Azure technology stack are helping us streamline manufacturing, supply chain, sales and distribution capabilities, empowering quicker market responsiveness to emerging beauty trends.” SAP on Azure is also supporting accounting, finance, controlling, purchasing, and almost all the back-office domains within the enterprise, facilitating more efficient process management and data flow across global operations. In addition, with more automated, flexible processes, employees can now focus on more value-added work that has a direct impact on customers.

Beauty for each, powered by beauty tech

The enhanced data management that Azure provides is also helping L’Oréal gain deeper insights into consumer behavior and preferences, says Bertin. This aids the development of beauty products that align with evolving consumer desires and trends—and gives L’Oréal the ability to tailor offerings to regional beauty trends. The power of this is underscored by one of the company’s taglines, “Beauty for Each, Powered by Beauty Tech.” Bertin says, “Through beauty tech, we’re leveraging over 100 years of amazing L’Oréal data when it comes to ingredients, biology, formulations that really connect with the consumer, and using this information to enhance the performance of our products and related services.”

L’Oréal is also using Azure to craft innovative consumer experiences, such as virtual try-ons and personalized skincare assessments, and seamless online-offline consumer experiences while using AI and data analytics for enhanced personalization. “We’re now better able to meet changing consumer expectations of wanting more—not just more unique products but real-time, anytime, anywhere services—and we’re able to do that at scale, connecting with customers in new ways that enhance sales and growth,” says Bertin.

Ultimately, L’Oréal beauty tech is not just changing the way it operates and engages with customers; it is changing the beauty industry as a whole to become more personalized, inclusive, and responsible. Concludes Bertin, “Our evolution has been driven by innovation since the beginning, and technology will help us continue to revolutionize beauty. When people think of L’Oréal, we want them to think beauty tech.”

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