Shiseido Professional delivers beauty worldwide

Introduction

With operations in Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North and South America, Shiseido Professional’s digital estate is complex. The company offers beauty salon owners and stylists a wide range of products on its site, including styling and trend tips, an e-learning platform, digital tools for stylists to use with their clients, and treatment recommendation engines. The company needs to address its customers in their own languages, and in culturally appropriate ways.

Before its digital platform initiative, Shiseido Professional lacked both a consolidated platform and a centralized solution for content management, which made content management and content publishing a lengthy and costly process, involving several external partners and vendors. This also created brand inconsistencies across different markets and digital properties. With Shiseido’s scaling, this wasn’t preferred or sustainable.

A solution partner implements a perfectly-curated content platform

Shiseido Professional sought a centralized, unified platform that would help keep its content and brand consistent across its digital ecosystem, which included social media and digital advertising. The new platform had to enable internal content creators to do their work quickly and easily, in the language and manner appropriate to their specific markets. Most important of all, Shiseido Professional wanted to increase site traffic and engagement, drive more revenue, and lower development costs.

Rather than pulling internal developers away from ongoing projects, Shiseido Professional sought support from an experienced digital agency. R/GA created a “Lean Experience Stack” for Shiseido Professional to meet their aforementioned needs. R/GA decided Contentful was the best content management solution to join this customized stack for Shiseido Professional.

“In the first week, we created a proof of concept replicating some of Shiseido Professional’s web experiences and demonstrated how, with Contentful, the content could be easily edited and published in 30 seconds. Our client was very impressed,” shared Anthony Baker, Executive Technology Director of R/GA Tokyo.

“We believe that lean, open, and modular technologies are critical for future digital success. Contentful proved able to deliver best-in-class disruptive content infrastructure solutions that fit our architecture and experience principles,” he added.

Contentful helps agencies get their clients up and running fast

R/GA built a complete modern content platform for Shiseido Professional in just five months. Shiseido Professional’s new platform provides a modular structure for centralized content management and includes four customer-facing digital experiences, seven microservices, and administration tools. The platform enables Shiseido Professional to customize for each of its 12 regional markets, in eight languages, and it’s fully scalable for future expansion.

Contentful offers important advantages for agencies — for example, the ability to do rapid prototyping. “We were able to create proofs of concept that demonstrated the value and benefits. This was vital to getting the project approved,” noted Baker.

R/GA found the implementation of Contentful “quick and seamless. The engineering team took just a few weeks to integrate Contentful into the architecture R/GA had designed, iterating in consultation with Shiseido Professional during the production process.

A modern content platform streamlines content creation, translation, and collaboration

Shiseido Professional marketers and other content creators can now easily collaborate on the creation, publication, updating, and management of all content internally, without reliance on outside vendors. Content development costs are half what they used to be. Publication is faster too — a process that used to take a month or more now takes just minutes. With Contentful as part of the stack, content and brand are easily kept consistent across all of Shiseido’s digital properties, as well as across social media and digital advertising. And Shiseido Professional can address its customers in any of eight languages across its 12 different regions.

“Today we’re more connected. We work faster and everything we do can be updated instantly,” shared Claudia Kim, Vice President and Global Brand Director at Shiseido Professional.

Best of all, site traffic and engagement metrics have significantly increased since Shiseido Professional began using their Lean Experience Stack. The company was able to start small, measure success and then scale up across its regional markets as its new content platform and working methods proved successful. R/GA designed Shiseido Professional’s new platform to scale for future needs, and now the company can confidently project monthly, rather than yearly, timelines for new digital properties.