CASE STUDY
Shiseido
How a global makeup brand
found product market fit
CHALLENGE
Shiseido digital makeup app needs tuning
In 2017 the makeup giant Shiseido launched the MADE 2 FIT beauty app, which delivers custom make-up.
It was a bold move. Customers loved the idea of getting makeup customized to their skin color
But existing brand teams weren’t familiar with the realities of tuning & iterating a digital app. And the product was performing below expectations.
STRATEGY
Talking with customers
The Shiseido team coud see the dropoff points in their UX flow. But they didn’t know why it was happening.
So Shiseido’s Innovation Lab brought us in to talk to individual users and probe deeper.
We created a 3-phase plan to tackle this challenge:
INSIGHTS
Interviews reveal the reason for dropoff
We walked both active & lapsed customers through storyboards that of the product in action, & discovered that our customers were struggling with trust issues around our app’s face-scanning feature.
To feel confident buying an expensive bottle of custom foundation from an app, customers needed to know 3 things:
RESULT
Dropoff problem solved
Using these insights, we created a new app flow to address these issues, & showed storyboards to our users. Storyboard mockups let us quickly test the customer experience without having to rebuild the whole app.
Once we validated this approach, the app team built & shipped the changes – with great success.
By gathering targeted insights from exactly the right people, the team was able to identify & fix their retention & conversion problems, & see their numbers improve with each new release.
COMPANY-WIDE ADOPTION
Shiseido adopts our techniques
Shiseido was so impressed by our results that they adopted our techniques across the company, and replaced their outdated Customer Panels for marketing with curated Superfan Communities for ongoing design feedback.
