Growing Beauty Brand Goes Global

Launched in 2014, Revolution Beauty is a rapidly growing UK-based beauty brand with a global customer base. The company manufactures cosmetics, skincare, and hair care products for a diverse set of customers, and its products are beloved because the company has built a rapid product development process based on customer feedback and the constant desire for new products. That feedback, gathered via social media, influencer marketing, and brand ambassadors, helps fuel its frequent product releases.

While Revolution Beauty’s product development process was highly attuned to customer needs, its website didn’t offer the same responsive experience. The website was custom-made and managed by a third party, which presented challenges when Revolution Beauty wanted to drop a new brand or increase the cadence of product releases. With the beauty industry undergoing rapid, digitally led transformation, the brand preselected Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), a world-class platform that would enable it to scale, facilitate a flawless online customer experience, and allow the team’s internal business users to take ownership over their own processes.

The new platform also needed to integrate with several key internal systems, including Netsuite, which holds pricing and product information to allow for seamless order fulfilment and refunding when necessary. Revolution Beauty wanted to avoid using point-to-point integrations and custom code, which wouldn’t provide the ongoing flexibility it needed. Having learnt of Astound’s Mulesoft practice, Revolution Beauty selected the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform, allowing the launch and integration of its new ecommerce platform with other key systems while building a foundation of reusable APIs that would support the company’s growing global market needs.

Alongside the implementation of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Astound designed a three-layered architectural model to provide loose coupling, based on MuleSoft’s best practices. This approach gives Revolution Beauty the ability to replace any downstream systems without impacting the overall integration and to build a foundation of reusable APIs that can support Revolution Beauty’s growing global market needs.

In addition to implementing SFCC Storefront Reference Architecture with three separate sites, serving the UK, US, and other territories with a language selection for English, French, and German and currency selection for GBP, USD, and Euro, Astound integrated six connections between Salesforce Commerce Cloud via Mulesoft to NetSuite, which was used as both an enterprise resource planning (ERP) and an order management system solution. API calls from ERP included prices, product data, inventory, dates, refunds, orders, and order updates, as well as orders coming through MuleSoft and to the logistics provider.

Previously, when plugged into the contact centre platform, Robin HQ, Salesforce Commerce Cloud API couldn’t function properly because the company maintained separate sites for three different geographical regions. Astound reconfigured the integration between the customer contact centre platform, Robin HQ, and SFCC to ensure accurate customer data could be shared across Revolution Beauty’s sites. This allowed customer services staff to share information and collaborate to provide seamless customer care, provide a more consistent response to customer queries (resolving 60 percent more queries than before), and support Revolution Beauty’s core value of creating exceptional experiences pre and post order.

Astound also integrated Image Relay, the company’s asset management tool, into Salesforce Commerce Cloud via MuleSoft, which streamlined the process of assigning the right images to the right SKUs and surfacing them on the website at the right time.

Finally, Astound implemented progressive payment services Apple Pay and Klarna, along with Yotpo for onsite customer reviews and Swell for its loyalty program, enabling Revolution Beauty customers to interact with the brand on all social media channels and earn points by referring friends, while harnessing the power of user-generated content. This programme helped increase business and cement relationships as customers increasingly turned to online shopping during the pandemic.

With Mulesoft implementation finished in only five months, Astound was able to successfully complete the entire replatforming project in just 11 months, transforming Revolution Beauty’s ecommerce and customer service experience, resulting in a four times increase in web traffic, a considerable increase in online customer satisfaction, and 15 percent reduction in shopping cart abandonment. Now, integration makes it possible to surface inventory data in real time, helping the company prevent errors and seamlessly fulfill and refund orders. If any issues occur when inputting data related to returns, for example, the company can fix the problem in a matter of minutes. Images uploaded to the asset management system are pushed out and automatically assigned to the correct SKU in the right order, resulting in a reduced error rate and a more productive content team.

Since its launch in August 2019, the site has processed, on average, 1,100 orders per day, increasing 600 percent during the 2019 Black Friday and Christmas peak trading period. The platform’s scalability was further tested by the COVID-19 lockdown, with traffic to the site increasing by 200 percent year over year by the start of Q2 2020. With a solid foundation for the future, the company can now add new features and functionality quickly, customers enjoy a true omnichannel experience, and the customer service team has access to real-time customer data so they can solve problems more efficiently while providing the high-quality experience that Revolution Beauty customers expect.