Cosmetics giant L'Oréal turns to Databricks for cloud data-led customer personalisation push

Cosmetics giant L’Oréal has turned to Databricks to help pull together all of the data stored in its disparate cloud platforms to help support its push to personalise the customer experience.

The company is pursuing a multicloud strategy in support of its Beauty Tech Data Platform, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and company data to develop personalised services to its customers to make it easier for them to find products online and in-store best suited to them.

Databricks has been providing its data lake-building expertise to L’Oréal in North America since 2019, and is now building on this to bring together all of the data stored within the various cloud platforms the company uses across the globe.

The centrepiece of the deployment will be the Databricks Lakehouse technology, which the company claims is capable of providing a comprehensive view of the journey a L’Oréal’s customer data goes on as it progresses from initial inquiry to purchase to shipment and delivery.

Naveen Zutshi, CIO of Databricks, said Lakehouse is a unified platform capable of handling all the data, analytics and AI use cases that L’Oréal could need to keep up with changing consumer demands and preferences.

“It’s never been more challenging for major retailers to keep up with a 360-degree view of the customer to ensure loyalty and growth, but data-forward organisations like L’Oréal are at the forefront of turning this challenge into an opportunity,” said Zutshi.

According to Databricks, the L’Oréal tech team has already experienced significant benefits from working with the company, such as enabling it to accelerate the time it takes to process and analyse its real-time consumer data.”

“In just two years, L’Oréal North America saw a 20% improvement in productivity through reduced maintenance effort, improved runtime and cloud consumption,” said the company in a statement.

Etienne Bertin, group CIO of L’Oréal, said the aim of the partnership is to position L’Oréal as a leader in the burgeoning “beauty tech” field. 

“L’Oréal operates in 150 countries, selling over seven billion cosmetic products to more than 1.2 billion consumers every year, so having a data architecture that is unified, open, cloud-agnostic, interoperable, secure and scalable, is integral to our success,” said Bertin.

“Leveraging the Databricks Lakehouse is enriching our global Beauty Tech Data Platform, and we are excited to see the partnership evolve in the years ahead.” 

Samuel Bonamigo, senior vice-president and general manager for EMEA at Databricks, added: “Our open, cloud-agnostic enterprise data platform is already demonstrating a clear impact and we are eager to see this partnership evolve in EMEA in particular, this year and beyond.” 

Bonamigo added: “At Databricks, our commitment is to help organisations solve some of the world’s toughest problems with data and AI and we are proud to support L’Oréal on its journey.”