Lancôme's Flagship On The Champs-Elysées: Where Technology Meets Beauty

Lancôme's new prestigious address, the flagship store at 52 Avenue des Champs-Élysées in Paris, not only pays homage to the values of the brand – joy, happiness and generosity – but it also showcases how digital technology can enhance beauty.

With the launch of its new flagship store in December 2019, the world's leading luxury beauty brand is exemplifying the enhanced customer experience it envisaged. Luxury codes are combined with services and entertainment inspired by other sectors such as sports and games.

BeautyTech's experience available to all to rethink the consumer experience For visitors of Lancôme's Parisian store, the experience begins with the discovery of the latest innovations in-cluding the brand's Beauty Tech. Across the store's 3229 ft2, visitors are able to try out new ser-vices and beauty products made unique by technology. The aim: offer a personalized and immer-sive experience. "This new location is a true haven of beauty and happiness where our visitors can discover and explore our offer of cosmetics, services, personalized products, gifts and technolo-gies," explains Françoise Lehmann, Lancôme Global Brand President.

Personalization is at the heart of the services offered by Lancôme in its flagship store. From artifi-cial intelligence to image recognition and augmented reality, the development of Beauty Tech brings beauty into a new era: more flexible, more digital and more personalized than ever before. The result of these innovations: the Shade Finder. Thanks to artificial intelligence and an algo-rithm capable of identifying more than 20,000 potential skin tones, this technology makes it pos-sible to recommend the right Lancôme foundation shade best suited to each person's skin tone. After analyzing skin color in three different areas of the face, a selection of suitable foundations is recommended.

Youth Finder is a skin diagnostic tool. Connected to an iPad app, it analyzes the face to provide a personalized skin care routine according to the needs identified by the scanner.

The combination of artificial intelligence and face recognition is also behind Lancôme's Le Teint Particulier, a patented custom foundation technology that can create up to 72,000 different for-mulas depending on the desired shade, coverage and moisture levels.

Animated walls, videos, a digital catalog of fragrances and even a robotic arm that adds fragrance to a rose before offering it to each visitor... digital technology makes the visitor's experience ever more immersive and unforgettable. Digital mirrors, which enable the virtual testing of the brand's make-up range, use augmented reality technologies and face recognition developed by the Cana-dian company ModiFace, acquired in 2018.

A new approach to retail

Digital technology is also at the heart of the inner workings of Lancôme's Parisian flagship store. In order to optimize the customer experience, the performance of stores, their functionality and security, our IT and marketing teams work in constant collaboration with different brands.

These IT solutions are a perfect example of the catalytic role that digital technology can play in serving the entire value chain: from the formulation of a product to its distribution.

Solutions like Retail Next and Retail Dashboard improve the monitoring of key indicators in the management of stores, such as the number of visitors, logistics, sales volume or the quality of customer relations. MyStore enables the daily management of stores to be digitalized by improv-ing stock monitoring, improving the role of beauty consultants and providing multi-channel ser-vices to consumers. And finally, MARS streamlines the payment experience.

While Lancôme's Parisian flagship store is among the first to benefit from these innovations, they are intended to be deployed in more than 3,500 points of sale in 36 countries for our 15 brands.