L’Oréal, Because You’re Worth the Tech
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for having me okay so first of all you have an awesome title managing director of augmented Beauty and open Innovation what does that actually mean at L'Oreal well I've been at the group now for 16 years it's hard to believe it's 16 years now and I run two entities within the research and innovation of the group The First is all of the tech and services that go around the combination of science technology and Beauty together so all of that kind of what we're coming to the CES for every year and we started that back in 2012 and I'm also running all the Partnerships with startups which is what the open Innovation piece is which is all the way from biotech to synthetic biology all the way to technology itself like deep Tech so I have it's a long title but with a really cool job and this is interesting because I think it is significant that L'Oreal is giving a keynote address at CES L'Oreal has been very successful at CES for many years is that you're saying and it hasn't you know some of it's been behind closed doors but certainly it's had a public-facing success at CES I still imagine there might be people who hear about this keynote address and scratch their heads and think what's a beauty company doing at CES but uh how do you kind of contextualize and explain that to people who are really just kind of coming to this idea of beauty tech for the first time how do we kind of get grounded in what this means as best way to explain it to you is to tell you about the story about L'Oreal and our vision of beauty I mean we started as a company over 110 years ago by a chemist it was a chemist that created the first hair color dye in the salon and over time you know the appetite for Innovation and Beauty and the consumer for Beauty has just grown no matter what the economic world is like what Society has shifted Beauty has always been something that has become more and more essential and on top of that we're the largest beauty company in the world today we have over 35 Brands brands that you may not know are L'Oreal like Keels Maybelline Garnier Lancome kerastos all of these are brands that are actually part of the L'Oreal portfolio and so about 10 to 12 years ago we had Steen that more and more of this kind of dynamic shift in the in society in the world around individuality hyper personalization the need to understand my beauty habits and needs things to data so that I can have the best product over time we're all going to be powered by technology and so we took this bet like around 2012 to come to the CES to try and be part of the tribe but to try and understand what it would really mean for the future of our industry and our consumer rather than taking just a tech Trend approach to it and over the last 10 years we've been coming every year with a new service that combines the the kind of beauty product with digital or physical technology but to ultimately serve a need to serve attention that our consumers have that have been around for age for ages so I know it seems like it's something that's unique and different but actually Beauty and Technology come together so well because in the end um the the needs of consumers around Beauty are so deep and um and technology is a real way to solve them I did actually not know that that Keels was a L'Oreal product but I was applying that Moisturizer in Las Vegas for my on-camera interviews that I was doing uh there earlier this year in January and I think it saved myself a lot of dry skin so I appreciate that the chemistry Works uh but we're here to talk about a lot of these but it's so interesting that you can kind of combine nowadays obviously there is this kind of Baseline of chemistry there's physical products that are out there that people are buying and applying and we can talk about some of the digital ways that people choose to buy those and apply those but I think what people might you know stand out from your from your title for example is this idea of augmented Beauty it seems to kind of hint at digital kind of augmented reality so it's this it's it's hard to even know exactly how to start articulating this question but even since 2012 the world has dramatically changed in the way that people think about their online presence the way that they represent themselves on social media the way that they might use you know filters and editing to change their appearance the way they see themselves the way they want others to see them so how does L'Oreal a company that has a storied history of making these physical products start to think about operating in this increasingly digital world yeah I think you think the number of points that are really important I mean when we say augmented Beauty for us it means taking Beauty to the next level and this idea that more and more we're going to need to be more individualistic when it comes to our relationship with our consumers we're going to need to let them shop and diagnose their beauty in different touch points whether it's virtual or physical we're going to connect those so that they can have the most seamless experience and ultimately it all comes down to you know the big tensions that people have around their beauty and I'll give you some examples in 2014 we launched the first virtual makeup mirror which allowed people using AR be able to virtually try makeup and be able to then physically buy that product the tension is that you have thousands of choices when you go to a point of sale or a retail environment and you can't physically try all of them and so what we wanted to do was to allow people to have this kind of virtual way to choose the best product for them and that ultimately allows people the freedom to be able to DARE and try but also to be able to buy the right product and over time what we've done is we've brought new services that combine physical digital but also the formula sometimes we find that we we needed products where for example 50 percent of people can get the right shade of foundation today and that's primarily because you don't have enough shelf space to have the same amount of products as you do skin tone and so we created a machine called the Tom particular that allowed people to get that perfect shade out of twenty two thousand options powered by data in the end they get the physical product but it's powered by Tech so we've done many things all the way from digital touch points to measurements Sciences to be able to measure your skin tone and your hair to also making your life easier when it comes to using those products that people have had sometimes challenges in terms of mess like hair color that now our products like color Sonic salt so I think we start with what people need which is hasn't changed and we try to backfill it with the right technology that allows people to get to that augmented level of performance that they want making some big news uh your company did with disability Tech with the ability to apply makeup for folks who might have challenges you know physically applying it to their face can you speak a little bit more to that yeah this is this kind of um real uh exciting project that we unveiled last year which is um what we call assistive Beauty Tech and this idea that um today I'll start with kind of the the issue which is that one in seven people in the world today have a disability one in ten people in the world today have a limited hand or arm mobility issue meaning that things like Parkinson's or stroke or rheumatoid arthritis or you know brain injury paraplegia all of these I could list them forever can create a challenge where people can actually experience Beauty with their own hands and their own arms and that's a huge Community one in seven so what we wanted to do was to find a way to allow people who have these kinds of Mobility challenges to experience the products that we have and to experience any of the kinds of ranges of products so we started with lipstick and we partnered with a startup called verily which is part of alphabet that had created a really ex cool spoon for people that had these kinds of Mobility challenges where it will follow using AI it will follow your mouth and allow you to eat with your own hands and we just will try to find a way to create a version for makeup that we now call capta which is um really the the it brings back my point about kind of this essentiality of Beauty and the fact that this community should have the accessibility to our products as much as any other community how do you think about the balance between this idea of hyper individuality and people getting precisely what they need for themselves with obviously you know beauty is a really we can get super philosophical and I think I read some you know Victorian poetry about the nature of Beauty in high school right and I'm still trying to figure out what essentially is this thing that we're talking about but when we talk about beauty it is hyper individual but it's also a societal thing right I want to appear beautiful obviously because I usually because I think someone else is looking at me right there's some element of this is the I may be using the wrong term but like this is the correct way to apply makeup versus not but so how do you kind of live in that tension and how does technology kind of uh help you kind of navigate through that tension well I think you know first we have to start with the right values of what people really want to achieve for example when you look at AR and the ability to use AR to find the right product the tension there is that I want to virtually try something before I apply it not to add a filter to my face or to do these kinds of things that is a different type of thing for me the the point of you know Beauty being something essential and about bringing confidence is about people being able to achieve their desired result no matter their skill level no matter who they are no matter where they live and if you think about it this is the perfect problem to solve thanks to technology I mean I'll use some concrete examples today I don't know what is the right skin care for me that means that I need to have um online Diagnostics that allow me to understand what my skin type is what what kind of um you know products would be um uh be tailored to it but even deeper like our recent project with Veron which was around running a huge clinical study to understand biomarkers and the proteins and microbiome in the skin today thanks to Tech we're able to get measurements like that quickly so if we can unlock those we can help people have the ultimate hyper personalization or how do I achieve the perfect makeup result like my eyebrow where recently we launched brow magic allowing just thanks to a little applicator we showed it at CS last year you see with ar what shape of brow you want you just move it and it shapes it for you and then skill level doesn't become a barrier to me achieving what I desire understanding my skin or hair doesn't anymore become something of a mystery of making me audition in a way that is not as effective and now Tech will allow us to kind of solve all of those more and more that we will see Society shift more we will need to be individualistic with our relationship with people when it comes to their beauty needs and technology allows us to do that so I think you know we have to start with that and then we find which ones are the ones that are the the best scenarios to solve thanks to Tech and how has uh how have recent advancements in generative AI altered your roadmap or you're thinking about what's possible if at all I for example I've seen a technology where you can upload a picture and it gives you you know dozens of different self-portrait options you know portraying you in different lighting for example and one can easily imagine this kind of Technology being applied to to Beauty as well in some of the ways that you're already talking about I suppose but maybe pushing the boundaries further in terms of the the suggestions that the AI is giving you or maybe giving you different combinations of things that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of is that is that the kind of thing that you might think about with generative AI absolutely I mean if we use just the idea of AI itself like you know a few years ago five six years ago we were already starting to embed artificial intelligence and how we look at finding the right molecules of the future for science in our Beauty science we looked at we it's inside a lot of our our projects today that are Beauty Tech around like the magic brow I just told you about was built with a deep learning model um but in the end it's usually a combination of technology and I think um in that's kind of the beauty of being able to do this for over a decade is we have a lot of kind of Assets Now that come together that allows to solve But to answer your question about gen AI I mean there's no doubt that that's going to have a major influence on the beauty consumer experience of Tomorrow the question is um in what places will it allow us to propel to do um and also the level of accuracy of how it does it is going to be very important so there are examples like you mentioned about lighting their potentials to be able to use it to be able to help us to develop the science of the future for beauty there is the ability of new services that could be powered by that there's way how marketing and advertising can be modernized and Hyper personalized I think right now what we're trying to do is really play in that field where where we were 10 years ago with digital 10 or 15 years ago we are now with Gen Ai and trying to see what are those right places to embed it in and do all roads eventually lead to you know you're you're in the digital world you're looking at your options and you're maybe you're you're using a lot of technology to generate this stuff but do all roads eventually lead to a physical product being applied to a physical uh you know human piece of skin or are you all are you thinking about things like the metaverse where you know if I'm a clothing brand I'm thinking about how do I sell my my clothing brand or my my brand of handbags in the metaverse to potentially you know people's avatars or do you think about uh playing in those kind of completely virtual spaces where the end product is effectively a digital one we think about both I think in the end of the day the way we look at it is to see how our consumers are experiencing Beauty so if you look at for example our most recent launch of Microsoft teams collaboration with Maybelline New York on Virtual makeup that's not a physical product it's a ability to apply digital makeup while you're having a you know a meeting and don't have the time to physically apply and we live in a world today where people want to have that kind of interaction virtually and don't necessarily need a physical product at that moment in the touch point I think that people there is a joy and Delight of people being able to physically use beauty products and that will continue but there will be an additional layer where people will be experiencing Beauty in the med of Earth and other potential touch points that we need to innovate on as well I think what matters is so to answer your question we're working on all of those different types of digital products physical all and what we call physical which is a combination of the two I think you know all of that together things in the end where our consumers want to shop where want to experience we have to innovate and hopefully Delight them with new Services is that is that an original the term fidgetal is that a L'Oreal original term because that's so perfect to describe this Nexus of the digital and the physical reality I'm not sure if we coined it I wouldn't be so uh so arrogant to say that but I think uh okay there you go it's the first it's the first time I've heard it and it fits so perfectly with the themes that you're talking about I I want to get back to that Microsoft teams example for a moment because we've all used you know Microsoft teams or Zoom or something and you get somebody does the filter where they've got a silly pirate hat on and it it kind of stays on their head and then they move around and it does it obviously if you're talking about something like like makeup it's obviously very personal and you're doing it in order not as a gag but to look professional how good is it what if People's experience has been with that is that is it is it truly a replacement for I'm just running between meetings like I gotta work out right after this so I'm just going to do the digital makeup thing can you can you go one level deeper on that product yeah I think you know um it's it starts with when we first launch makeup genius and which was the first virtual makeup mirror in 2014 so this has been almost 10 years in the making we acquired a tech company called modaface that's a leader in AR for makeup um and um over the last 10 years the way we've approached digital makeup has been the same way we approach our physical products in terms of testing and I'll tell you what it means today when we test the physical product we actually apply it on people from a very light to very dark skin tones in different countries and we test the accuracy of our products physically we did the exact thing digitally what we did was we had a whole bunch of different setups of cameras where people would with different skin tones would apply physically the makeup products and then we would compare them to what it actually looked like on the physical product and this is an enormous amount of Science and work that goes into it but but we took the approach from day one that we don't want to build filters we want to build a digital makeup experience and so by doing that we're now at a point where I can answer your question which is when you are on teams there's a very high level of accuracy that the product that you are actually using digitally will be the same when you actually physically apply the product later or very close to the same and so this has been over 10 years of work and and modeling that has gone into it it's one of the reasons why we're excited to bring this to hundreds of millions of people because we do believe very much in the accuracy of the technology I myself am a Scientist I'm sitting inside the research organization for a reason for that exact reason to not compromise the quality it's so fascinating to see how this work that you've been doing for a decade is now paying off in things like Microsoft teams call I'm not even sure the product Microsoft teams was around I guess Skype was around which Microsoft owns I don't know if they owned it in 2012 back then but the what's it's just interesting to see these kind of things come to fruition obviously you couldn't have known about the pandemic were you were you anticipating like there's going to be an explosion of video calls were you even building it for that reason and I guess what I'm getting at is what are some of the things that you're kind of playing around with now what are some of the assumptions that you're making about the next 10 years about how people are going to want to interact with each other and with your products because it seems like uh you made some some correct bets in the past so you want to hear what your bets are for the future well we've made some correct that's I won't say all of them have been correct because I've been doing this for over a decade so it would be a definitely not true if I told you that we haven't um done test and learn and one of them is learning um but I would say that you know when it comes to um to where we've done it right I think we didn't anticipate that at all what would happen in terms of a boom in video calls when we did uh makeup genus in 2014 but we did understand that the world was becoming more digital and that people um deserved the ability to virtually try something before they buy it and I think that then was propelled you know as a result of the unfortunate pandemic um and it keeps in and when you start with that I think that our technologies have and our Pro Services have lasted a long time and and I'll use the example of our recent bunch of color Sonic you know we were the first inventors of the hair color die in the salon over 100 years ago we were one of the first inventors of the hair color diet home 50 years ago for 50 years the formulas have gotten better but people have still had to mix it like they're a chemist at home it's messy they have to use gloves it's not easy to do it and so around seven years ago we thought well we have to make this process easier and we and invented in-house a technology that mixes the dye and the color and just applies like a brush um easy without any of that stress that people have and then when the pandemic happened it did give this kind of exhilaration to people wanting to have these kinds of more easy services at home to do these challenging things and so what I mean to say is like you know it's not like we're looking trying to foresee what will happen in the world in the future I think we're trying to solve some of these challenges that have been really hard to solve before and when you do that it usually you find that they last a long time if you do it the right way and so through all these years we've learned to you know figure out now I think better and better what those right challenges are so what's your current Cutting Edge what are the Technologies or scientific or digital or otherwise that you're kind of pushing right up against or that you're eagerly anticipating someone else having a breakthrough in an adjacent industry so that you can apply it in yours oh um well I think there are a number of them I mean now more and more we find that the future of beauty lies at the intersection of many new kinds of areas of of Science and one of them is like Health when you look at health and wellness today we have you know an exclusive and really important partnership with verily which is the health division of alphabet that allows us to build clinical studies of the future so we can understand the biology of of people related to beauty and give them the best product not just now but over time and to help us predict and to give people kind of a management system around their beauty we're looking more and more of that combination of AI and physical Electronics allowing us magical experiences like maybe one day you'll be able to achieve all your beauty or makeup results with just having a you know a pair of glasses that just does everything for you like we saw in the movie The Fifth Element you're 20 years ago for those of you that remember that I'm old enough to remember um and I think um you know thank you exactly and I think you know um this kind of hyper personalization which is what I was mentioning um there it's also just an example of this idea that we'll be able to um have a a two-way street kind of conversation with people around data around what they need and to be able to give them the right product faster and more effectively so I think that comes in in Industries like Ai and deep Tech so um and then even more like sustainability we've launched our projects around water saving today and how um you know our water saver project we unveiled at CS a few years ago which saves sixty percent of water in the salons without at all compromising the experience of of feeling that that pressure of water that you enjoy so all of these areas sustainability Tech Green Tech um AI in combination with electronics and health and wellness are going to build you know really exciting services that we believe will create great experiences for our consumers in the future well I don't want to ask you for any spoilers but I do really appreciate this potential preview of interesting ideas and themes that might come up in the CES keynote that your CEO will be delivering at CES 2024 and give we just really appreciate your time today thank you so much for joining us today on CES Tech talk thank you so much James it's a pleasure and thank you so much for having me well that's our show for now but there's always more Tech to talk about please subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss a moment you can get even more CES and prepare for Vegas at ces.tech that's c-e-s dot t-e-c-h our show is produced by Nicole vidovich and Mason Manuel recorded by Eric Kirkland and edited by thirdspoon I'm James kotecki talking Tech on CES Tech talk [Music]
2023-09-10 19:10
