Cosmetics Retail: A No-Code Tech Transformation Story

This realistic story is based on Scandit’s experiences and insights from partnering with major cosmetics and beauty brands to transform their operations. This story showcases an example of a journey integrating Scandit Smart Data Capture, as seen through the perspectives of product and innovation teams.
Let’s imagine a product manager at a growing European beauty brand. We’ll call her Olivia, and she works for Cosmetics Co. Olivia is passionate about creating outstanding applications that benefit her company. Cosmetics Co was looking into ways to differentiate from the competition by delivering a wow experience to its customers across channels and understood the key role of colleagues and smooth operations to achieve this.

Challenge

Olivia knew the value her store colleagues brought to the business. Their expert advice and assistance were key factors in customer experience and loyalty.

However, as store visits and online orders increased, so did the demands placed on her colleagues. Inventory management and order fulfillment tasks absorbed too much of their time, impacting the wow experience Cosmetics Co aimed for.

Olivia decided to take action. All Cosmetics Co colleagues use a smart device app to manage daily tasks. Olivia and her team provide the app and offer ongoing support and new features. 
She wanted to understand how their provided tools could make their colleagues’ lives easier. She surveyed them to understand their pain points and guide them to where they should make improvements. The results:

• Time-consuming scanning: Colleagues spent an eternity scanning barcodes, leading to slow store operations and frustrated customers.
• Data disaster: Inaccurate product and inventory information made personalized recommendations and informed sales pitches impossible.

This led Olivia to look at their scanning engine.

Solution

Olivia enlisted the help of Cosmetics Co’s small development team to test scanning engines. But, the codes in cosmetics are challenging. Tiny, curved, low-contrast, and glare all presented problems, affecting the speed and accuracy of data capture.

After speaking with a Product Manager peer, she discovered Scandit Smart Data Capture.
Olivia was amazed. Scandit’s powerful scanning technology offered lightning-fast performance, even on curved and tiny barcodes.

It also could equip her colleagues with real-time product and inventory insights that assist with customer interactions and daily store tasks.

After exploring the different barcode scanning solutions with a Scandit expert, Olivia opted for Scandit Express for two reasons:

• She was excited by the advanced scanning capabilities. It made it easy for her store colleagues to tackle daily tasks such as cycle counting and order picking quickly and intuitively, allowing them to focus on wowing customers.
• Scandit Express’ no-code integration meant Olivia could add advanced scanning capabilities with an app download in just 3 days. Sparing her limited development resources from app redesign or customization efforts

 Olivia also wanted to ensure a consistent scanning user experience across employee apps, supported by a product roadmap that regularly offers performance improvements and new features.

Results

Olivia witnessed a transformation in the productivity of her store colleagues. Scandit Express, containing the multi-scanning and counting capability in MatrixScan Count, reduced inventory cycle counting time by 50%. 
Challenging codes are no longer an issue. Reducing wait times for customers during mobile point-of-sale checkout.

Equipped with real-time product and customer information, store colleagues deliver expert and personalized in-store customer experiences.

Overall, Cosmetics Co saw a surge in customer satisfaction and sales, all thanks to Olivia’s strategic investment in Scandit.

For the future

Olivia sees Scandit as a key innovation partner. She is now exploring customization opportunities with Scandit’s Barcode Scanner SDK, such as using augmented reality in their app. She believes that surfacing different product information at the point of data capture will help her colleagues make better decisions throughout their working day.