40 years of expert beauty care

Digital transformation for the benchmark in beauty salons

The two brands of Guinot and Mary Cohr are much adored around the world. Franchises are synonymous with delivering quality skincare treatments in a professional and inviting salon environment. Skincare products for face and body cater for a wide range of beauty objectives, extending expert beauty care at home.

The challenge

While the bricks and mortar salon experience of Guinot Mary Cohr remains an integral focus, the time came for the brand to embark on a digital transformation journey. Its online savvy clients expect beauty inspiration at their fingertips, from browsing the full product range and finding the right skin match, to easily finding an institute nearby. But what would the business impact of a new global e-commerce website be? Emakina was asked to dig a bit deeper right as the pandemic struck and businesses had to evolve really fast.

Our solution

First on our agenda was to do a detailed needs analysis of the entire group. This involved many in-person meetings with various stakeholders, from marketing and finance to IT and founder Jean-Daniel Mondin himself. We conducted a number of functional and technical interviews to understand the business needs and how they envisage growth in the coming years.

Bearing in mind that the lockdown brought serious repercussions with the closing of salons, it was important for us to help them with a clear roadmap of their digital journey ahead with clear priorities, including the replatforming of current websites.

Visit Guinot website Visit Mary Cohr website

So impressed was the group with Emakina’s hands-on, pragmatic approach that we were invited to take care of the implementation process as well. During these uncertain times, the client was most comfortable with a phased approach to control their investment. Emakina responded with a buildable scope of work that can easily be executed through our agile way of working. Through a six-week design and development sprint, we collaborated with the client to create wireframes and user journeys for the new Guinot and Mary Cohr websites.

The company has never before offered clients the option of buying beauty products online – without a personal recommendation from a salon professional. Emakina wanted to lay the foundations for this expansion in future with an open source headless e-commerce platform built on modern MACH principles.

Sylius is a robust and very flexible solution that’s also supported by the PHP framework Symfony. The benefit of Symfony for the company’s technical team is the ecosystem that surrounds it, with support from a large PHP community.

With a large amount of content, Guinot-Mary Cohr needed the right content management system with a strong focus on SEO and findability. The sites also had to be made available in English, French and Spanish, across X countries. The API-led headless content management system Contentful Contentful was chosen for its ability to scale consistent and personalised user experience across various territories, cultures and languages.

Results

As firm believers in the flexibility of technology stacks, we used a MACH approach to give Guinot-Mary Cohr the right foundation to continually grow their digital presence. Salon customers can now easily find their nearest institute and book appointments online, read more about treatments, browse the product catalogue and get inspiration from the beauty blog. Potential franchise owners can join the network online, while franchisees get training, marketing and sales support online.

We continue to improve the sites with our test-and-learn approach, making adjustments where necessary to improve the overall user experience.

4
weeks design
6
months web build