Why Gen Z Knows More About Beauty Products Than 25-Year Industry Veterans | Douglas Group CCO

Bonjour, and hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm Anne Mazinga.

And we are coming to you live from the Vuzian Group's podcast studio at NRF's big show in Paris.

And we are pleased to introduce to you today Philippe Andre, the Chief Commercial Officer at the Douglas Group.

Welcome to omnitalk.

Thanks for having me.

It's great to be here with you.

Yes, same here.

Well, let's start by getting a little bit of your background, Philip, and then if you don't mind, for some of our audience who might not be familiar with Douglas Group, just tell us a little bit about the organization.

Yes.

So the Douglas Group is the biggest premium retailer in Europe.

So we are operating in 22 countries in Europe.

We are in most of the markets, number one.

Sometimes we're number two.

But across Europe, we are by far the market leader.

Okay.

And the interesting thing is that we are market leader both online and offline, which is quite rare because usually you have either one or the other.

Right.

I personally actually don't know any company globally in any vertical, to be frank, who is market leader in both channels.

So that's quite exciting.

In our industry, just us or probably just the one.

I know.

Nice job.

Yeah.

And tell us a little bit about your role there.

Yeah, I'm Chief Commercial officer, so I'm part of the management group of the board.

Management board.

And I'm basically responsible for everything the customer sees, let's say, and touches along the customer journey.

So marketing, CRM, retail media, E. Com, store experience, store operations, and tech.

So quite a broad, let's say, role, which is interesting because then you can really integrate everything.

That's the idea behind it.

Because Omnichannel for us is actually the name of the game.

And having a real Omnichannel experience as much as possible.

That's why we also organizationally have organized it like that.

Right, that makes sense.

That makes sense.

And then for those back home, too, what product categories do you mainly sell?

What lines of business are you in?

Yeah, so it's everything around premium beauty.

That's mainly fragrances.

It's haircare, it's makeup, it's skin care and accessories.

Those are our core categories.

And then we have some adjacent categories online in our partner program.

But that's our core, are these five categories.

Got it.

Great.

Thank you for that.

All right, so you're on stage.

You were just on.

Did you just got off stage?

Right.

Literally.

Correct.

Like, literally just got off stage.

Literally.

That's why I was a bit late.

Oh, no, you were fine.

Hey, you're on time.

Most people.

Yeah, no, you were great.

Hey, this is retail.

You showed up on time.

You're on time.

So talk to us about what did you share with the audience?

And then also I'm curious, how does what you shared fall in line with what you're thinking about strategically at Douglas Group?

Yeah, I think our industry is really exciting, I have to say.

I'm like three years now in the industry and in the role, and it is really exciting because premium beauty is so much about emotions and innovations and people just love our products.

And this is, let's say, a great opportunity to just, you know, have a great experience online and offline.

And that's actually what we try to do.

And what I find fascinating and actually didn't know before I joined the Douglas Group is how much people, especially the young generation, how much they really interact with our products.

And they know so much about our products, about the ingredients, how to apply it.

They spend days and hours a day on TikTok, but they also love also the, I don't know, 15, 16 year olds that they, they love to enter our stores in groups of 10.

They just want to try the product.

Yeah, they take it over, but in a good way because they are just so into the products.

Right.

And that is actually great.

And the cora, and that was why I was talking a bit about is how do we actually use this to make this great experience and also to do it online.

But omnichannel, how does tech help us?

That's, that's.

Yeah.

And what do you do?

Like, how do you do that?

Yeah, a lot.

Yeah.

Right.

I think, first of all, I think it starts with a mindset.

Okay.

How I'm thinking about it is omnichannel means omnipresence.

I actually don't care if a customer does a purchase right away and if they do it online or offline, for me, it's more bringing customer into our ecosystem first and then having complementary services and channels.

That's how I think about it.

So in stores we have beauty advisors, actually 19,000 beauty advisors.

They can help so much.

They have so much expertise and knowledge.

You get beauty services, you can touch and feel the products, you can sell, smell your new fragrance.

That is very important.

Premium beauty.

So the majority of our customer journeys, also the one that, including the one that the purchase happens online, have a store included.

Right.

But then everybody's also online today.

So how do you translate this experience online?

So I always Say internally to our people, we are more than a place to buy products.

Right?

We are, yeah, we are about inspiration, curation, advice.

You want to have the best selection content but also want to give the best advice and inspiration.

How do you do that online?

Right.

There are actually a couple of elements.

So one is of course everybody tries to do content.

We started quite early on the social commerce side with generating a lot of user generated content.

Not only to do a purchase in a live stream, but we have a creator program where the content of the creators is on our platform.

So we have our own kind of social network.

Right, okay, interesting.

Based off the traffic that's generated from their content to our pdp.

So product detail pages.

Right.

And that is a great independent content for our customers actually.

And they really engage a lot with this content.

And you see some customers, they don't care, they don't want that.

But the one that interact with this content, they come back so much more often.

So they're not only buying more, but they are just coming back more often for inspiration.

That's really a big element to create this experience online.

And then we also using now of course AI a lot to have tools that help you to find your right products.

Just to name two, we have a beauty mirror so you can virtually try on makeup that's also AI based but we've introduced already two years ago so you can try different shades of a lipstick or other makeup products.

And we also have a skin analyzer in our app so you can just take a picture of your face.

It's analyzing your skin, it tells you what skin type you have, what you need to do, what kind of routines you need, but also what kind of products.

Because sometimes you also want to sell something kind of products you need and that you can do online or you can just go to a store and purchase there.

So Philip, you filled us in on quite a lot that's happening and a lot of I think very engaging ways to talk to your customers.

What technologies right now are you personally interested in as you're kind of thinking about the next iteration of connecting with and providing a Douglas experience for the next generation of customer.

Yeah, I think at the moment, of course everything is about AI and gen AI.

So I mentioned already two tools we use but I think on the customer facing there are two big topics or projects we are working on with AI.

One is our virtual shopper assistant.

So basically also other companies are working on that, a chatgpt kind of interface for our website, but it should be the Douglas way.

What Do I mean by that if you just have an AI based interface, then what's the difference?

Not for luxury.

So what we of course include all our knowledge about products and, and how to apply products and we use our beauty advisors, how we call our, our staff in stores to train the bot, how to actually engage with our customers and also what are the sales tricks to make a purchase?

Because if you look at a typical AI agent today and ask them about products, you get like a search results kind of function where you get.

That would never happen in a store.

Yeah, you would get one product or a backup for the product.

That's it.

And, and then you get something like.

And you know, the customers who use that, they are so happy because this and that happens and they also apply by the way you use this tool for it.

So that kind of more human interaction is something we try to bring in.

That's something I'm very excited about.

It is we have it already in a proof of concept life internally and we yeah, plan to bring that to customers.

Like how are they like actually doing interactions with the AI then to train it so that it's.

Is that how it's learning or how does that even work?

The training part you mean?

Yeah, for the like how are you training your chat, your, your Douglas like chatbot.

Yeah, especially they use it and then, and then they give the feedback and then the, the, the tech folks they train, then the bot.

Let's say that's probably okay.

Got it, got it.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

Okay.

And then, and the other part where I think AI is really exciting is in personalization for two elements because I mean we always went a lot into personalization already for the last years because we have actually the biggest loyalty card program, Premium Beauty with more than 60 million.

I think today it's 62 million beauty card customers.

That's how we call our loyalty card system.

So we always worked a lot about personalization, how to activate customers.

That's a huge database.

That's a massive database.

But AI is really helping a lot and I think on two ends, one, of course it helps even to find more trigger points for your customers.

And what's the next big best offer?

A bit smarter.

What we already did the last couple of years, so to speak.

But the second part is for me more exciting actually is the content generation because the more you personalize, the more content you need.

And that's quite costly usually.

So if you are able that the machine basically does all the personalization, does different text for different customized, different pictures.

Or videos or whatever assets you have.

That's really amazing because that opens up personalization at scale, at lower cost.

Right.

And you have to do that in a brand.

Right.

Way too.

To your point.

So one thing, because you meant.

You said you have stores too.

Right?

Stores.

You oversee stores too.

I'm curious, because a lot of what we've been talking about is digital, but yet you also talked a lot about Omni Channel and Omnichannel approach on the technology side in terms of improving stores and stored up productivity and the happiness of the workforce.

What types of things are you looking at there?

Yeah, so most of what I was talking about is actually Omnichannel.

Yeah.

So any skin Eliza or beauty mirror you can also apply in stores.

Yeah.

And the shopper assistant.

Okay.

We try this now for consumers, but eventually it should also help our beauty advisors in stores, make them better internal.

And there are also other ways where we use technology in stores.

But I also think you need to watch out not to use technology for the sake of technology.

Yeah.

So we have a lot of tools also for beauty routines, for skin analysis and all the beauty treatments we do.

And we also have, let's say a storm mode in our app for the consumers that they get different interface in the app when they are in the store.

So there's a lot we do.

Right.

But you also need to make sure you're not just using it for the sake of using it, but you really need to come from the use case, basically.

Right.

Because you're asking your store employees to use something new.

You got to train them on every.

New thing that you're deploying.

Right?

Correct.

Correct.

That's what you're saying you got to watch out for.

Correct.

But where we use it a lot, so we have a mobile employee device, of course, for our stores and that streamlines the processes.

So the more you have in there also for replenishment, for pricing, for whatever they need, if there's just one device with everything on there, makes it of course, way more streamlined.

It takes away this process time and gives them more time for the customers.

That's, of course something we all.

Have.

One more question for you, Philip, before we close things out here, I'm curious about the content part of what you talked about earlier and the influencers or content creators that you're working with.

As somebody who sits in a very top level management position, how do you justify those, those relationships with those content creators and the asset that they are to the business?

Because I think in a, in the marketing backgrounds, there's a lot of hesitation sometimes.

Like on one hand, yes, you need these influencers to help speak on your behalf about your products.

But on the other hand, like how much are you money?

Are you paying a 60 somebody with 60 million followers to talk about your product?

Like, how do you think about that as you're kind of proving that value or ROI to the rest of the organization?

I think first of all you need to distinguish between the big influencers that earn a lot of money.

Right.

But this is usually performance based.

So if they generate sales then it is justified.

Right.

But the majority of influencers we are working with and the creators I mentioned earlier for the user generated content of micro influencers or no real influencers.

So there are also store employees, our beauty advisors that do that.

They are basically natural influencers in the store all the time and they are just multiplying it now online.

Right.

But there are also really people that just have a couple of followers.

So it is really a wide.

The content we have on our website is supposed to be independent and not driven by some big influencer.

So that's why we have a big range of creators we use there.

So it's more important to have the content on as many PDPs as possible than it is about the level of influence that someone might have externally.

We are doing both.

But for the core part I was talking about, indeed it's more about having content that's also authentic.

It should be authentic content.

That's the point.

And I think, and consumers also understand if you have some top influencers there and they rate your products that this is not right on your website.

It is, it is different to.

Yeah, yeah, okay, thank you.

All right, yeah, no, I'll go back to you.

I just had to, I, I have an expert sitting next to Personal interest.

Personal interest.

All right, so let's get you out of here on this.

Like what do you, what are you most excited about?

Like is there, is there a trend in the industry and let's go broad here too.

Like is there a trend in the industry you're most excited about, something you're working on?

What are you most excited about to accomplish in the next year or to, to watch over the next year?

I think what I'm actually the most excited about, I mentioned a bit in the beginning how the younger generation really is into our products.

That's what I'm the most excited about because this is, I mean that's fence for life for the industry.

And, and they are so much more.

I met actually one of our partners of our brands.

And.

And he was telling me the same story.

He was in a store and he was watching two 15 year old boys trying very expensive fragrances.

Oh, I'm so.

Wow.

And it was of his brand.

So he said, yeah, he talked a bit to them and he was shocked afterwards because he said, I'm working in our company for 25 years and they know so much more about our products than I do.

Right.

That is, that is, that is really fascinating.

And this is such a boost.

That's why our industry is so strong in growth.

So natural growth trajectory with so much innovation coming.

That's what I'm actually the most excited about.

And given our position where we are number one across Europe, number one in both channels, we are the natural one to basically take advantage of that position of strength.

Yeah, that combination is what really excites me, to be honest.

Well, this was really, really fascinating.

Great job.

I mean, I thought you did a.

Wonderful job articulating everything too, especially the part that when Anne asked you about how you think about influencers and portioning out the money for those that drive revenue and then keeping in mind how do you keep a stable that is authentic and continuing to put out content that you want to drive your authenticity.

So thank you very much.

Thanks for, very much.

And thanks to Fusion Group for supporting our coverage here at NRF Europe in Paris.

And Anne, until next time, be careful out there.