A Beauty Company Enables Always-On Brand Acceleration

BeautyCo*, a global leader in beauty and personal care, had already experienced powerful results from working with us to launch the Bain Brand Accelerator (BBA), which enabled the company to harness data and insights to drive growth and strengthen its competitive edge. As the next step in its journey, BeautyCo set its sights on digitizing the BBA. The goal was clear: Evolve from a manual, project-based growth model that relied heavily on outside support and had limited in-house digital and analytics capabilities to a fully digitized, AI-enabled engine. This shift promised not only faster and more scalable growth but also a system that was always on, more cost efficient, and fully owned in-house.

It was critical to design for AI, automation, and scale from the start. In the initial 10-week design phase, we assisted in mapping BeautyCo’s current end-to-end BBA processes and clarified ownership, introducing new roles where needed and flagging upskilling requirements. We prioritized automation opportunities and defined the target delivery model, specifying what should be automated vs. manual, the operating cadence, and the governance. We also outlined the target architecture—from systems to workflows to data pipelines—and built a proof of concept to de-risk the approach. Throughout, we collaborated with the client’s business and IT teams and began handover planning early so that they would be fully prepared to own and scale the solution confidently and independently.

To kick off the six-month build phase, we supported the development and launch of the BBA suite, a web application that included a database and workflow engine. A business intelligence platform powered dynamic dashboards while a harmonization engine cleaned and merged the multisource data into one model, creating a single, trusted view for reporting across the business. The establishment of a new cross-functional core product team, including a dedicated analytics team, streamlined communication and goal alignment. A one-week pilot conducted on-site in local markets accelerated early adoption, while a two-week user acceptance test involving 30 users and a dozen live use cases ensured go-to-market readiness. Together, these efforts helped facilitate a seamless transition to the enhanced BBA.

BeautyCo’s digitized BBA turned a high-touch, analog growth model into an always-on digital engine. Core analytics are now fully automated—from data ingestion to output. It enabled an annual net sales uplift of more than $75 million as well as 80% projected cost reduction by 2027. BBA digitization also reduced the manual workload and error rate through automated data checks. Most importantly, its scalable architecture set the stage for global expansion and future AI use cases and advanced applications.