L’Oréal WSF Program wins the 2020 Brand Experience Award

Client
L’Oréal
Industry
CPG Manufaturers (Beauty)
Capabilities
Global website platform (Sitecore), headless CMS, personalization, and multi-market localization
Key outcomes
300+ localized sites, master sites launched in an average of 6 months, load times cut from 10s to under 3s

Overview

L'Oréal, the world's largest beauty group, needed a way to deliver consistent online brand experiences across thousands of websites and dozens of brands worldwide. As a founding partner of L'Oréal's Website Factory (WSF) Program, Photon helped design, build, and service a standardized global framework that supports each brand's flagship website, which is then localized to each market across the globe. With more than 300 websites on 11 brands, WSF is the largest Sitecore program in the world.

The Challenges

L'Oréal's Global Web Presence Faced Several

Website Sprawl
In 2016, out of 3,000 live L'Oréal websites, only 20% were driving the bulk of daily traffic from 1 billion global consumers.
Fragmented Technology
Many sites had decentralized or inactive technologies.

The solution

As a founding partner in the WSF Program, Photon helped L'Oréal build Website Factory, a digital experience platform that could rapidly deploy websites across all brands, zones, and countries.

Platform

A Global Website Factory

A digital experience platform with a headless content management system (CMS) and personalization capabilities, built to rapidly deploy websites across all brands, zones, and countries.

Localization

Global Framework, Local Execution

A standardized global framework supports each brand's flagship website, which is then localized to each market, maintaining the core marketing model while providing cost-effective localization.

Operations

Centralized Partner Model

Multiple country-based external partners with varying technology capabilities were consolidated into a centralized, best-in-class platform.

Personalization

Content-as-a-Service

A Content-as-a-Service layer enables personalized communication.

Technical stack

Sitecore
More than 300 websites on 11 brands, making WSF the largest Sitecore program in the world.
Headless CMS and Content-as-a-Service
The platform pairs a headless CMS with personalization capabilities and a Content-as-a-Service layer.

Results

L'Oréal achieved the following key outcomes with the WSF Program

Through its partnership with Photon on the Website Factory Program, L'Oréal standardized a global framework that supports each brand's flagship website and localizes it for markets around the world, delivering faster launches, faster load times, and an award-winning brand experience.

Speed And Agility
300 localizations launched by the end of 2019.
Faster Time-To-Market
The average master site goes live in 6 months.
Faster Load Times
Average loading time decreased from 10 seconds to less than 3 seconds.
Award-Winning Experience
Won the 2020 Brand Experience Award for E-Commerce Site Optimization, selected from more than 90 nominations.

Awards

Winner: Brand Experience Awards
L’Oréal Website Factory (WSF) Program, E-commerce site optimization, 2020

Conclusion

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“Photon is proud to have supported L’Oréal in designing and building the WSF Program. The Brand Experience Award is a testament to their culture of continuous digital innovation to consistently enable meaningful, hyper-personalized experiences for their customers all over the world.”