Tech integration, customer experience, experimentation and asking the right questions. In our first Behind the Brand interview, Janis Thomas, managing director at Look Fabulous Forever shares her views on how brands can adapt and thrive in a fast evolving retail environment.
Thomas will be speaking at RetailX events Social Media Masters this May and is a member of the judging panel for the Spring Retail Festival Awards.
The retail industry is rapidly embracing digital transformation, from ecommerce platforms to AI-driven personalisation. How do you see these changes shaping the future of retail?
Ultimately, all technology decisions should be driven by providing a great experience for customers. It’s very easy to get distracted by the latest technology and what other people are doing.
What really excites me is using technology to make our customers’ lives easier. That might be making their experience on our site smoother, more instinctive or more delightful. It could be using data to provide a more personalised experience of our site that anticipates the products or content that will be most helpful or interesting to them.
As well as talking to our customers regularly, both formally and informally, we use a fantastic tool called Noibu. It tracks our customers’ behaviour on our site and identifies points of friction. That could be a technical problem or error, or an experience issue where customers are expecting our site to behave differently. It’s a great way of ensuring that we’re constantly working on improving our customers’ experience and not just chasing something shiny for the sake of novelty.
That’s the true future of retail, providing the best possible experience for our customers – wherever they are and whatever they need from us.
As an organisation, in what ways are you leveraging new technology and to what end?
For us, experimentation is really important. We have amazing products that our customers love. We want to have a positive impact on society, challenging the negative perceptions and stereotypes of older women. It’s also an infinite task that will never be complete. So we believe that growth is driven by continuously improving everything we do and trying new things every day. So we’re always trying new tools and technologies. Even when something doesn’t work for us, it’s a valuable learning experience.
One of our biggest, ongoing priorities is personalisation. Different content and products are helpful to different customers. For example, when potential customers first discover us, they want to know our Founder’s story, why our products are different and we give them help to apply their existing products in a flattering way. Over time we prove that they can trust us and they graduate to trying new types of products, like our primers, they want specific content that helps them use products they’ve bought from us or they’re considering buying. We’re continuously becoming more granular with our experiences on different parts of our site to anticipate what each customer will find most helpful.
As a company, what are you doing to adapt to changing consumer behaviours in the current economic climate?
Listening to our customers has been absolutely crucial to our success. We do that formally, through our quarterly customer survey, soliciting reviews and monitoring on site behaviour. We also have lots of informal feedback, in particular, we have a private Facebook community where our customers share the details of their lives beyond their experience with our products. It’s a great way for everyone in our organisation to deeply understand what’s going on in our customers’ lives, what’s important to them and even what language they use.
We ask our customers what they want, rather than making assumptions. Are they on TikTok? Do they want ‘buy now, pay later’ services? It’s especially important for our new product development. Before we start production on any new product, we ask our customers if they would buy it, what do they want it to do, how do they want it to work, what would they need to know about it before they decide to buy it, what price are they willing to pay? This ensures we’re designing every product to meet their specific needs, we know if there’s enough demand for it, at a price that we’re comfortable makes the right margin. It even inspires our launch content and marketing.
Customer research can’t give you all the answers. But a deep understanding of your customers lives, frustrations, needs and how they’re evolving will keep you heading in the right direction.
The rise of omnichannel retailing has blurred the lines between online and in-store experiences. As a brand, how are you enhancing the customer journey and what challenges have you faced in this process?
Focus is vital to success. Every day there are an infinite number of things we could be doing and success comes from knowing what’s really important to your business.
We’ve asked a lot of questions about the best way to grow our business. It would be straight-forward to sell in retail and through third-parties like marketplaces and Amazon. However, our purpose as a brand is about more than just selling makeup. It’s important for us to help older women use makeup to look their best. The techniques to apply makeup in a flattering way are very different as you get older. But most content isn’t designed for our demographic. So providing useful and helpful content is a crucial part of our business. We build trust with potential customers by helping them, even if they’re not using our products. We might grow more slowly by focusing on selling direct-to-consumer only. But by investing in building a relationship that benefits the customer first, we are rewarded with high repeat order rates and customers who passionately advocate for us.
In your opinion, can sustainability be balanced with profitability and what approach are you taking as an organisation?
Sustainability is a complex issue. Often changes can have unintended and even potentially more damaging consequences. For us, it always starts with thinking about what’s best for our customers.
For example, we’ve been looking into options for our product packaging for a long time. We switched to recycled plastics as a short-term improvement while we were doing our research. We weren’t happy with the overall environmental impact of plastic-free alternatives. While it was what our customers were asking for, it didn’t feel right just to make a plastic-free claim if it wasn’t materially better overall.
We’ve just started rolling out refillable compacts which feels to be the best option. It’s a much lower waste solution overall, it’s a beautiful looking product and while the initial compact is more expensive, the refills are much cheaper, saving our customers money long-term.
Hear more from Janis Thomas at Social Media Masters on 14 May 2025.
Booking.com, Cineworld, Heineken, Hugo Boss, John Lewis and The Very Group are speaking as part of the packed programme.
Meet with brand, retailer, agency and technology stakeholders to better understand this dynamic digital landscape, be inspired and maintain momentum.
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