Goodiebox sends monthly collections of beauty products to thousands of customers across Europe. Choosing what to send depends on available inventory, expiry dates, and creative decisions. The team knew that relying on complex spreadsheets was ultimately unsustainable, and looked urgently for a better way to curate, assemble and deliver their precious monthly boxes.
Subscribers to Goodiebox look forward to discovering the latest beauty products, delivered to the door in a stylish box every month. To surprise and delight recipients, the Goodiebox team selects a mix of products and brands for inclusion, based on trends and the season.
Staff at the company head office in Copenhagen, Denmark, plan out each month’s box contents, organize stock, and arrange packing and dispatch to tens of thousands of consumers. With multiple brands and categories competing for inclusion in each pack, the team worked from shared spreadsheets to map out the best possible combinations. In addition, they would use the spreadsheets to manually track stock levels, new product arrival times, and expiry dates.
As Goodiebox grew, it became clear that spreadsheet-based working would not scale, with too many factors impacting creative decisions.
“It was challenging to manage inventory, taking into account the shelf life of the products. Since market trends change so quickly, it was tough to balance stock with minimizing waste—which is a big priority for us,” remarks Juliette Giraud, Senior Partnerships Manager (Global Planning), Goodiebox. “A lot of logistics and warehousing tasks were time-consuming and error-prone.”
Annemette Bruhn, eCommerce Project Manager, Goodiebox, adds, “We were using a lot of spreadsheets to manage a lot of business rules and complex parameters every month for all the Goodieboxes.”
on each monthly box.
to accelerate choice of Goodiebox contents each month.
To address the immediate challenges and to embed a strategic solution that would support future growth, Goodiebox engaged Integrator, an IBM Business Partner, which recommended IBM Decision Optimization CPLEX® solutions.
Before deploying any software, the collective team started with a business framing session to align on the business opportunity, understand the current status, and design the desired outcome. Taking an iterative approach, Goodiebox targeted co-creation of a minimum viable product (MVP). With a working solution in place, the team then applied its experience to improve the data model by adopting new modeling approaches and considering new data sets to yield better outputs.
To facilitate tangible interaction with the data model, Integrator developed a mockup of the user interface and presented the user experience to Goodiebox, which enabled rapid MVP creation.
Juliette Giraud comments, “Integrator has been a key part of the project from the start. One of their data scientists worked with the IBM Client Engineering team during the co-creation phase of the MVP. They produced a data model that automates product recommendations, optimizes existing inventory, and optimizes parameters to maximize customer satisfaction.”
The solution utilizes several IBM Decision Optimization CPLEX components, combined with IBM Watson® Studio Heritage, IBM Watson Machine Learning, and IBM Cloud. As Juliette Giraud adds, “IBM and Integrator worked closely with us to understand our needs and came up with a solution tailored to our business. It was a collaborative effort, and we were very pleased with the outcome.”
After completing the MVP, Integrator and Goodiebox were able to use real-world data to adjust the data model and fine-tune performance. Using stock data and expiration dates, the system suggests possible product mixes for the boxes, enabling Goodiebox to edit the selections, assess the impact on inventory, and reserve items for current or future boxes.
With the solution in place, Goodiebox has transformed its operational efficiency. The Goodiebox team reports improvements in sourcing and designing the monthly box, and estimates that over time the data model has become 20 times faster.”
Juliette Giraud adds, “The process is now less manual and it is around five times faster to plan our boxes every month,” and Annemette Bruhn adds, “We achieved much better alignment with our business rules, and we were able to reduce inventory based on all the product expiration dates. We saved costs of between 5% to 10% per box.”
With streamlined planning, the Goodiebox team has more time available for the essential creative process of designing attractive beauty packages for each box, tailored to appeal to different audiences. Powerful data analysis enables Goodiebox to understand which products are popular by country and market segment, and which products lead to subsequent online purchases.
With the solution in place, Goodiebox is using what-if scenario capabilities to make better business decisions. With a relatively short development and deployment period, Integrator and IBM have enabled Goodiebox to cut costs, improve productivity, and – most importantly for commercial success – enhance the customer experience.
Founded in 2012, Goodiebox offers beauty and cosmetics brands as a subscription to consumers, serving thousands of people in 13 countries. Every month, the company sends product samples in a GOODIEBOX, which members test and judge, and in many cases then purchase from the Goodiebox webshop.
Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, Integrator provides business optimization and analytics solutions, helping its clients use data to reach better decisions and achieve better results. Integrator offers strategic business intelligence advice, consultancy, and a range of self-service solutions from finance and sales through production to distribution.
Legal
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2024. IBM Corporation, New Orchard Road, Armonk, NY 10504
Produced in the United States of America, December 2024.
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, IBM Cloud Pak®, IBM Decision Optimization CPLEX®, IBM Watson® are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at www.ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.
The performance data and client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.