Help Shiseido Professional create a new global brand identity and bring it to life through a modern digital ecosystem.
The Brand needed to revamp their global website to focus both on business partners and end consumers. It wanted to create an online learning experience to foster stylists craft and provide useful tools for in-salon customer service.
The Brand lacked a consolidated solution across the region that could empower teams to work together. Since teams and digital properties were isolated, it impacted the brand’s ability to keep a cohesive brand identity across a range of fragmented digital properties, depending on a long chain of vendors and providers without any incentive to modernize their solutions.
We wanted to enable the brand teams to easily work on a single platform, without losing the independence to create content, features and campaigns. We wanted to make it easy to leverage brand identity and design guidelines across 6+ languages and 8+ countries.
We needed to create a platform that could maximize content across multiple experiences and channels, allowing brand admins and content creators to create once, but use across different digital services.
We followed a radically lean approach created and led by Anthony Baker (later called ‘Lean Experience Stack’, which would be later productized as a digital transformation offering).
The approach focuses on creating thin integration layers that combine best-in-class disrupting solutions like headless content management platforms and smart asset management, with cutting edge managed cloud services like serverless functions, distributed databases and secure authentication and access management.
The strategy allows small, core teams to implement big digital platform projects, following a ‘low code’ principle, and focusing on modular service blocks that rely on standard technologies and programming frameworks.
Because of our lean approach, we had a core tech team working alongside a talented experience designer, a brand strategist and a couple of designers. With an experienced, and tech savvy digital producer and executive tech oversight, this core team managed to tackle a new global digital platform with four different user experiences, a whole range of micro-services, in 5 months of production.
We enabled the brand to unify the region with a flexible new content platform, deploy a global online e-learning portal and create a new platform for stylists and salons to serve consumers according to their needs.
The platform offers services for end consumers, stylists, salon owners, and brand ambassadors, while at the same time providing better connected tools for brand admins and content creators.
All parts of the platform are connected, and as users move between different services, the brand adds value to the platform in the form of better content, better events, e-learning material to support rising stylists, brand value for salon owners and more personalization for end consumers, including tailored treatment and product recommendations, salon history, color recipe tracking and more relevant content across the board, with enhanced communications.
With a short timeline and limited resources, the lean experience approach allowed us to leverage best in class services across the board, and only focus in thin, tailored integration layers that provided Shiseido with only what they needed.
First, we leverage managed cloud services from Amazon AWS, leaning heavily on serverless architecture, which enabled us to cut off dependencies with legacy infrastructure, maintenance and outdated security monitoring vendor dependencies. We integrated Amazon’s highly scalable services including CloudFront CDN, API Gateway, API Gateway cache, S3, Route53, SMS and RDS. We leverage CloudWatch for enhanced monitoring, and AWS Cognito for authentication across the board.
Then, we integrated Contentful, a modern, decoupled, best-in-class solution for content management. Contentful is natively a headless solution, which makes it easier to consume, update and manage content via data-driven APIs. It has a user-friendly interface and allows content flow management and publishing to be done in minutes.
We created a modular layer of micro-services, which then allowed us to create multiple interfaces and experiences on top of it, maximizing resources, content and consolidating metrics and customer data orchestration across the whole system, across all countries and services.
New global website, consolidating brand identify and design guidelines across markets, providing content for all business customers, from end consumers, to stylists and salon owners.
Beauty consultation and hair care diagnosis engine, which takes people through an intuitive and simple set of questions to find out concerns and routines and recommend tailored treatments and products, which they can follow straight to their preferred salon and stylist.
Salon Finder tool, which was a new addition to their online services, allowing salons across the globe to be listed in the brand’s platform, allowing any customer to find salon details with an intuitive map search tool. Users can easily search for salons and find them on an interactive map.
E-learning portal to support rising stylist stars across the region. The portal provides a bespoke learning management system with bite-size content in modules, which stylists can study on the go across any device, and salon owners can leverage to support their employees.
In-Salon consultation tool was a foundational service we created to connect online and in-salon activity from customers with stylists and salons. Stylists can pull previous consultation information from customers on the spot, review previous treatments, people’s concerns or previous recommendations. The stylists can add comments during the treatment, and even record detailed color recipes. Customers can then get summaries and keep an ongoing history, which they can leverage across Shiseido’s partner salons across the world.
Revamped product catalog, which was re-architected into a micro-service in the platform, which then allows product information to be leveraged across all properties across the ecosystem, current or future, maximizing content as much as possible.
Admin tool, which allows brand admins to register salon owners and information, manage internal and external user access, register stylists, and control the entire system in a connected, secure and efficient way.
The Shiseido Professional digital platform created four new best-in-class, consumer facing service experiences. It provided a consolidated, efficient and flexible connected platform for content management, publication workflows, partnership management, aggregated metrics and analytics, and more importantly, customer understanding.
We created seven new micro-services that will allow the brand to leverage content and functionality across future services, and enabled support for more than 6 languages across more than 8 key countries of operations.
We reduced content creation and publication times from literally months, to minutes, and enabled the brand admins to manage their own platform, cutting off several vendor dependencies and drastically reducing content creation and content management ongoing costs.
The digital platform leverages modern and efficient content management and infrastructure management solutions that radically reduced up-front investments and took away long-term contracts, as well as considerably reducing operational and maintenance costs.
Finally, since the platform’s thin integration code leverages open standards and doesn’t rely on any proprietary technology frameworks or programing languages, development or ongoing development maintenance doesn’t require proprietary tech or specialized teams, enabling the brand to source better, modern and more competitive talent across the board.
The timeline for the project took 9 months end-to-end. However, the first three months were focused on research, prototyping, and strategic consultancy. The actual production time of the entire platform took the team 5 months, which is an absolute record compare to any other enterprise platform implementation.
Client relationship management, executive leadership, pitch process lead, business strategy consultancy, technology consultancy, solution proposal architect, prototyping oversight, competitor analysis, technical architecture, feature mapping, scoping and estimation, consultancy workshops lead, IT and vendor liaison, process oversight, agile/scrum oversight, team casting, production oversight, visual and experience design oversight, end-to-end team leadership, technical team lead, technical oversight, technical partnerships management, client success oversight, implementation and production oversight, cloud architecture oversight, daily-oversight, case study and script oversight, PR and thought leadership.