PURITY COSMETICS
Creating Consistency in Cosmetics Education
Founded in Napa in 2005 and now based in Silicon Valley, 100% PURE is an organic cosmetics beauty firm focused on providing healthy skin care, color cosmetics plus bath and body products. Completely free of all harmful toxins, 100% PURE is a healthy and pure line of nourishing personal care items made only with the highest quality ingredients. With unique ethical ingredients and a variety of fruit pigmented cosmetics, Purity have been using Myagi to educate staff in their vertically integrated stores. Using the Myagi platform, Purity have helped to ensure their customers receive consistent and correct information about their products, combined with amazing buyer journeys delivered by educated staff members.
Brand Educator Larisa Reinegger spoke with us about the history of training at Purity Cosmetics and how taking a lead within the Myagi platform has enabled her to deliver training more frequently across their nationwide stores, ensuring staff have a consistent and equal understanding of all their products and the benefits they provide for each individual customer.
"A few years ago our training wasn’t really that well organised. I recognised that there was a need to provide our employees with more resources and guidance if they were to deliver the best knowledge and experiences to our consumers. At the time I was the Manager of Customer Service and so I set about creating a training manual that contained guidance around not only our products, but their key selling points and the upgrade opportunities to best serve a customer."
- Larisa Reinegger, Purity Cosmetics Brand Educator
Distributing the manual in both hard and digital copy, the document proved a great first step for Purity in terms of formalising their training and giving new and existing member of staff a place to learn about each product.
"It was a useful tool for us to have, but the problem was getting our staff to engage with it. It may just have been printed off somewhere in the office or available as a PDF, and it was hard to track how much return and value it was adding to each store." Whilst the manual was a great asset to Purity, like so many other retailers across the globe the issue turnover was beginning to undermine the value the manuals were having - something which was also evident for Larisa when she delivered her live training sessions. With new staff and so many new and innovating products being released, there was a real concern that training materials were not reaching front line associates and that knowledge was leaking out of the business;
"The live sessions are great! Staff ask questions about things that aren’t necessarily in the manual and about the wider business. They can get a lot more informal information as well. The issue is I could only get to certain stores maybe once a year, and if certain staff weren’t in on that day or later left the business, it was becoming harder to ensure all the information was staying in the business, and new staff maybe wouldn’t receive a formal session for months. With so many new products and ranges being launched by our team, it also made it difficult to get the latest information to everyone at once."
''Myself and the store director started to feel like there were clear differences in how much understanding around our brand and product the teams had. The problem was some teams knew all the information and how to present the product, but then we would have emails from customers saying a store associate told them this or that, and it was not the same information."
With Purity being positioned as one of the most innovative and trustworthy cosmetics companies on the market, Larisa and founder Ric Kostick knew that their staff needed to be giving the most accurate and personalised advice to consumers if they were to continue being a key player in the category - this could only happen if their teams had much better access to training.
"We felt like for a really long time the stores were not all on the same page. We realised we needed a place where everyone could log in, at any time, and see the same information. Whether that be around product, company updates or shoutouts to staff members etc. We tried that with the digital manual and also the companies Google doc access, but we didn’t really have an engaging way to deliver the content and then track the performance of stores or individuals in order to help those who needed it."
BUILDING A CONNECTED COSMETIC COMMUNITY THROUGH MYAGI
It was in 2017 at a Retail Next event that Myagi founder Simon Turner met with Ric Kostick and introduced him to the Myagi platform. After talking to through the features of Myagi with Ric, Larisa was introduced to the platform and took to the idea straight away;
"When Ric showed me I said, 'This is awesome, let’s do it,' 'cause it was exactly the kind of thing that we were looking for. Simon and Alex [Alex McLeod, Myagi CTO] then came to one of our retail stores to get a better understanding of Purity and we could tell straight away it was going to provide everything we needed. They even asked the store manager a couple questions, and it was so funny 'cause she told them, 'Yeah, one of the biggest things I’d like to see is more product training and product information,' and we just thought, 'Amazing. This the answer we were looking for.'"
With the ability to upload all their training materials into one online location that staff could access any time of day through their smart device, Larissa knew Myagi would help her to create a more engaging training experience that delivered a more consistent and constant flow of knowledge to the front line. Being able to quickly and easily upload video, PDF, presentations and web pages to staff meant every sales associate was getting the latest information all at the same time.
As brand educator, Larisa takes the responsibility to produce content for Myagi and distribute it to Purity’s own stores. By taking a role in front of the camera and controlling the messaging and training modules that get delivered to staff, Larisa ensures she still has that personal relationship with her sales associates. Even those who potentially only meet with her once a year can engage directly with her through the apps feedback system.
Creating that new and direct line of communication between front of house staff and brand educator has been implemented perfectly by Larisa. Distributing company updates and getting founder Susie Wang on camera has helped to build a cohesive company culture.
"I figured we could probably use it for other things too. I post notes from our CEO, and I even get our founder Susie Wang on camera. We do that just so they know more about what’s going on with the company as a whole, not just their area, their store, their personal sales - Purity is a lot bigger than that and we want them to feel a part of it."
Larissa’s variety of content types (videos, slides, PDF) and constant willingness to ensure staff have the knowledge they need before product releases has lead to a content quality score (rated by sales associates) of a whopping 9.9/10!
Myagi looks forward to continuing to support Purity Cosmetics’ training needs as they look to open three more stores in the coming year.
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