KUALA LUMPUR: L'Oréal Malaysia aims to double down on social commerce in 2022 to help salons affected by the pandemic.
Following its social commerce success, L'Oréal Malaysia aims to roll out 250 salons partners nationwide in 2022.
Currently, this initiative is processing over RM1 million monthly in sales and is growing.
Social commerce revenue in Thailand and Vietnam has already overtaken traditional e-commerce sales, and Malaysia and Indonesia are expected to follow suit in the next three to five years.
L'Oréal Malaysia chief digital officer Edward Ling said the company has constantly explored new ways of marketing products and helping L'Oréal's Professional salons do business in-store and online.
As most of L'Oréal's salon partners are new to digitalisation, Ling said that the company wanted to reduce the technical complexity and enable the digitalisation of stores on their behalf.
"This allowed them to focus on the social selling aspects.
"We saw AVANA as the ideal partner to do this as they enable the commercialisation of social media and messaging platforms that business owners use to engage with their customers.
"We have set the stage for post-pandemic business growth via online sales," he said.
Tapping on Southeast Asia's E-commerce potential, L'Oréal, in collaboration with AVANA, a social commerce enabler, have introduced social commerce to L'Oréal Malaysia salon partners.
The company said the aim was to help bring these brick-and-mortar businesses into the digital world, starting with eight participating salons, which quickly increased to about 100 hundred salons by December this year.
"This unprecedented initiative in Malaysia allowed salon owners to quickly generate buzz and hype for their new product launches, often resulting in viral news and higher conversion rates from interest to sale.
"This social commerce initiative, which essentially enables e-commerce transactions on social media, also helped maintain the personal touch between salon owners and customers," it said.
AVANA founder and chief executive officer Luqman Adris said the services sector was severely affected by pandemic restrictions, with hairdressers among the hardest hit.
Luqman said salons needed to maintain customer loyalty and brand engagement despite not providing in-person hairdressing services.
"AVANA was able to help hundreds of salons on our social commerce platform quickly, enabling individual salon owners and their team members to sell hair styling and treatment products directly to their customers.
"This has been done via multiple social media channels as an additional income stream while keeping customers engaged long-term," he said.
By September, less than four months since the initiative's nationwide launch, the top five performing L'Oréal Professional salons managed to rake in a quarter of a million ringgit in revenue.
Using this service, Code 88 Hair Studio, one of the salons, generated tens of thousands of ringgit worth of sales in just under two hours utilising AVANA's Facebook Live Shopping solution.
AVANA's platform is easy to use, guaranteeing a seamless experience for salon owners and their customers.