Challenge:
This family-owned natural beauty-care brand struggled to understand which products and colors resonated most with customers or why.

Solution:
Thanks to Domo, everyone from the sales team to its product developers and marketers can drill into the sales data to understand color trends at a glance.

Impact:
Natio can now leverage its data to see what impacts their business at the channel, category, and color level.

Natio finds beauty in its data with the help of Domo

Natio is a proudly Australian, family-owned natural beauty-care brand that can be found on bathroom countertops in millions of homes across the country and around the world. Founded in 1993, the iconic brand has grown to encompass premium products ranging from lipstick and mascaras to moisturisers and room scent diffusers.

As Natio’s national sales manager for Australia and New Zealand, Paul Gascoigne is responsible for ensuring the personal care products that people rely on for their daily routines are always available on the shelf. Thanks to Domo, Gascoigne and his team can make data-driven decisions that allow them to keep in-demand products in stock while helping them anticipate the next breakout color.

The foundation for success

Before Domo, the fast-growing beauty company struggled to make use of the limited data it could access. While it received sales data from its top retailers, this data only provided high-level information that left the company blind to the nuances of which products and colors were selling and why. Because data was so difficult to collect and process, it was often stale by the time it was presented to the board, while static documents left company leaders unable to dive deep into the data to get answers.

“Except for a top-line number by channel, I felt like I was steering the ship without literally any idea what was driving our business from a category perspective, let alone at the level of different colors,” Gascoigne said. “Now we’re in a space where the data is absolutely amazing to work with.”

Thanks to Domo, Natio is now able to collect data more frequently from all its retailers, distributors, factories, and internal staff for a holistic view of the business in real time.

Creating a new look

With approximately 340 SKUs across dozens of channels sold at retailers around the world, Gascoigne uses Domo to quickly see what the numbers are trying to tell him and his team. “I love data, but I don’t necessarily like to sit there all day and do the grunt work on data. What I’m excited about is actionable insights.”

The sales team uses Domo on a daily basis to understand which products are hits, which products aren’t selling as expected, and the reasons why. In addition, other key stakeholders are able to use sales data to inform their work. “A wider level of the business than sales is now looking at data,” Gascoigne said. “Product development is using it, marketing is looking at it, management and finance are definitely looking at it. We’ve been able to make decisions based on real-time data about what is resonating with customers.”

In addition to using data to drive decisions across the organization, everyone is using the same source of data to ensure that they’re in alignment on the colors and products to feature to inspire customers. “Across the entire business, we’re now all on one page in terms of understanding what the insights are,” Gascoigne said.

Predicting the latest in lipstick

Thanks to Domo, Natio now has the data it needs to not only react to trends, but to create them. For example, each year the marketing team puts out a ‘color story’ that highlights the top colors for the coming year. By using data about which of their products are trending, they’re able to use Domo to select the small handful of colors it will most heavily promote.

Natio also uses Domo to inform their annual Christmas campaign, which accounts for a significant portion of the company’s sales. Natio gift sets are an extremely popular present; Gascoigne estimates that one in 35 Australians find one under their tree each December 25th. Natio uses Domo to track sales throughout the holidays and inform their marketing campaign.

If Gascoigne and his team see that certain popular products are at risk of going out of stock, they’re able to proactively contact retailers to share the data and encourage them to increase their orders. Not only does this help Natio and its retailers increase revenue, but it helps ensure customers are able to buy the products they want without going home disappointed.