The Future of Beauty: Sally Beauty’s Carolyne Guss On How Their Technological Innovations Will Shake Up The Beauty Industry
Don’t be afraid to experiment and try different things. That is the fun thing about beauty, it’s not permanent, but changing your look, even a slight change, can be uplifting. We have tons of ideas, inspiration, and education through our platform, DIY University at Sally Beauty, which you can find on our website, social media channels, and through the DIY University Podcast, with topics ranging from the latest trends and tutorials in hair color, styling, textured hair, and nails.
As a part of our series about how technology will be changing the beauty industry over the next five years, I had the pleasure of interviewing Carolyne Guss, Group Vice President, Marketing — Sally Beauty Holdings.
As Group Vice President of Marketing, she leads marketing for Sally Beauty Holdings across both the Sally Beauty and Beauty Systems Group divisions. Her focus is on specialty retail and distribution of professional beauty products, within the over 5,000 store locations, e-commerce and a large network of direct sales consultants. Carolyne directs a team of over 70 marketers and creatives within brand and category marketing, field, content & media and creative.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My first job out of college was for another beauty company, Avon Products, and now I’m at it again for many of the same reasons. When I started out, I was inspired at work, not just because I liked the beauty products we were selling, but because I felt like we were really helping women. I went to work every day excited to know that the company was providing jobs and flexible income, often for women in developing countries where flexible jobs were not easy to find. Fast forward to recently, when I interviewed for the role at Sally Beauty Holdings, I was recruited to work on the professional business, Beauty Systems Group, and saw many of the same parallels. For me, it was all about helping stylists, many of whom are female small business owners, to grow their businesses. That was exciting to me because I knew I had to be inspired by the mission of the company, there had to be a bigger purpose for me. Shortly after I came to Sally Beauty Holdings, I began working on the consumer business as well, Sally Beauty, to help our customers embrace self-expression and feel confident doing so. Again, the mission aligned with my values and has made the job so much more enjoyable.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
My personal life has shaped a lot of my career so it would have to be when my husband and I met at the airport in SFO. He just sat down next to me at the gate. He is an executive in the tech industry, and at the time we met, we were living on opposite coasts, he in San Francisco and me in NYC. Since we have gotten together, we have made a lot of decisions on where to live and opportunities to pursue based on managing both, not just one career. At times it can be challenging finding the right sweet spot for both of us, but it’s opened us up to a lot of changes we might not have made on our own. We’ve been on this exciting journey together from NYC to Los Angeles, to San Francisco and now to Dallas because we’ve both been open-minded about supporting each other at different times.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?
I wouldn’t say there was a tipping point, but when I was younger, I thought and tried to do most things myself. You don’t get very far doing that, and I certainly didn’t. Over time, I realized you get much further by partnering with people who have different perspectives and ways of tackling problems than you do, particularly my partners in Sales and Store Ops who are closest to the customer and consumer. I also started to hire people who have very different skill sets and experiences from my own. If you surround yourself with people who think just like you, you won’t learn as much, you won’t challenge yourself. I learn from my team all the time, and it makes the work better and more fulfilling.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person to whom you are grateful who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
So many people helped me and gave me great advice. What stands out about some of the great CMO’s I worked for are the ones who were really passionate about the industry we worked in, whether it was entertainment/sports, health food, or beauty. They were the ones who were the most inspiring because you could tell they loved what they did. Too many people take new jobs because they want to learn a skill set or get a promotion, which I understand has its purpose, but it’s ultimately more important to find something you can really be passionate about and get behind. It took me a while to realize how important that was, but my career has come full circle, and I love that we are inspiring people to feel confident about self-expression at Sally Beauty and that we are helping stylists, especially women small business owners, grow their businesses at Beauty Systems Group.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. The beauty industry today has access to technology that was inconceivable only a short time ago. Can you tell us about the “cutting edge” (pardon the pun) technologies that you are working with or introducing? How do you think that will help people?
Consumers can check out Sally Beauty’s revolutionary ColorView AI technology and try on 100s of hair color shades virtually, all available to buy at Sally Beauty in-store and online.
Available on the Sally Beauty app and at SallyBeauty.com/colorview, ColorView uses advanced artificial intelligence technology and deep learning to help identify the unique movement of each individual hair strand to display accurate gradient coloring on hair for a hyper-realistic virtual effect!
The precise color-matching detection also ensures that the hair shades are adjusted depending on the base color. Meaning it’s not a stickered color that appears the same on everyone; all shades are accurately adjusted based on the user’s individual hair color to ensure a true-to-life try on. It came in so handy when salons were shut down and consumers didn’t know what colors their stylists used.
Customers have also really shifted their needs and expectations for how to shop. A big focus for us in the last year and going forward is on providing more convenient shopping experiences for our customers to meet them where they are and how they want to shop, which has been enabled by technology improvements. We launched Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS) orders that are ready in 2 hours, mobile app ordering, e-commerce ship-from-store capabilities, and soon we will be offering 3 hour delivery straight to the customer’s door. We are continuing to test other shopping options that make it easier for customers to find what they need quickly and conveniently wherever they are.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
We have a responsibility to our customers to protect their data, and now the types of data we have access to are expanding significantly. It’s something that is a top priority for us but one we and other companies have to be really mindful of when it comes to privacy and security.
Can you share 3 things that most excite you about the “beauty-tech” industry?
The continuing trends towards customization and personalization are exciting to me because the more the industry recognizes consumers’ unique differences and caters to those differences, the better. We are working on some exciting developments in these areas, including across educational content and commerce. Stay tuned!
Can you share 3 things that most concern you about the industry? If you had the ability to implement 3 ways to reform or improve the industry, what would you suggest?
While there has been progress made to accept unconventional views of beauty, there are still lots of stereotypes and barriers. Consumers can now use technology to recreate looks and completely transform themselves, and while this is mostly to positive effect, it can have negative consequences in terms of unrealistic standards of beauty.
You are an expert about beauty. Can you share 5 ideas that anyone can use “to feel beautiful”? (Please share a story or example for each.)
1. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try different things. That is the fun thing about beauty, it’s not permanent, but changing your look, even a slight change, can be uplifting. We have tons of ideas, inspiration, and education through our platform, DIY University at Sally Beauty, which you can find on our website, social media channels, and through the DIY University Podcast, with topics ranging from the latest trends and tutorials in hair color, styling, textured hair, and nails.
2. If you are not a DIY’er, ask your stylist for new inspiration. The top reason people leave their stylist is they’re bored with the same look. But many people don’t proactively ask for something new. So ask your stylist a week before your appointment to suggest something new so they can find something to inspire you, and you can get excited about it before you sit in the chair.
3. Remember that beauty is also inward, what you put in your body matters. The best beauty product is free and available everywhere — water. It helps your skin, nails, hair, it even can improve your mood because when you feel healthy, you are.
4. You don’t have to go it alone. I just dyed my hair a bright color for the first time, as did some of my coworkers, because we challenged each other to try it at the same time, and it was so fun to experience it together. I used ion Brights Semi-Permanent Hair Color, and I must say it was so fun trying something new. Beauty is such a social endeavor and meant to be shared, it was kind of nostalgic for me as I remember trying different looks with my friends when I was young. You should find that joy and fun in beauty.
5. Make it a ritual. Many consumers embraced at-home self-care more this past year. Don’t race through your beauty routine, if you’re coloring your hair, take the time to relax through the process, turn on some music (I have a new favorite song I can recommend by Heather Chelan titled, “Colored Hair”), make your home feel like a spa and just enjoy the experience and the time for yourself.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
Well, I’m honestly really excited about the movement we are trying to inspire at our company with our YOU by Sally campaign and that has been at the heart of the company overall –to normalize self-expression and make people feel comfortable about being themselves, not just at work but anywhere. We encourage employees to show up how they want to show up, and that goes beyond hair color, we don’t require uniforms, we don’t ask people to conform to a specific look. We have already gotten feedback from consumers that they wish their companies would be more accepting of how they want to express themselves. It’s clear that it has been an emotional journey for many, and one I hope we can help to impact.
How can our readers follow you online?
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.
