How Revieve’s beautytech AI helps to choose the right product

Revieve, a Finnish technology company specializing in delivering personalized digital brand experiences for skin, health, beauty, and wellness, has continued accelerating its partnerships by launching industry-first digital skincare advisor experiences with brand and retail partners in the Middle East, Europe, India, and Australia.

Revieve powered global beauty retailers to deploy an AI-powered skincare solution,” Digital Skincare Advisor,” a state-of-the-art personalized brand experience that allows customers to purchase the right products for their skin from the comfort of their homes. 

We sat down with CEO and Founder Sampo Parkkinen to understand more about their solution.

What is the AI component of your solution? 

Our computer vision technology leverages deep learning to continuously improve and deliver more accurate facial recognition results. This applies to our skincare & upcoming haircare products. 

Secondly, our AI powered product recommendations take into account the selfie results, user preferences, & geodata and cross references it with the partners’ product database to provide personalized recommendations for each unique user. 

What is the patent on? Is it your own or someone else’s? 

Our patent is on Revieve’s Selfie Mobile Skin Diagnostics – an automated computer-vision system trained using an extensive data set of images to uncover and measure 120+ different metrics from the user’s face. The proprietary computer-vision technology consists of several dozens of different expert algorithms specifically trained and designed to analyze distinct skincare and beauty-related facial features from specific areas of the user’s face.

The solution focuses on the capability for in-depth analysis of mobile-quality selfies, delivering accurate results with non-perfect quality images. In addition, our computer-vision solution is trained to provide real-time feedback to the user about the quality considerations present in their selfie, including information about inadequate lighting conditions, the presence of eyeglasses, incorrect positioning of the user’s face, etc. This transparency towards the user helps receive accurate results across various light conditions and inform the end-user about factors influencing the quality of the analysis they are to expect.

The solution has been independently evaluated by Revieve’s multiple global partners in terms of accuracy and repeatability with excellent scores when compared both to leading in-dermatologist office skin analysis solutions such as the VISIA Complexion Analysis -system or the in-house rankings of individual dermatologists, and it works with any smartphone or tablet from the latest 3-4 years across any operating systems. In the background, we use an extensive 30,000 image database as the basis for all CV development.

You also list Makeup, Nutrition and Suncare Advisors, can you tell a little bit more about these?

Beauty retailers (department stores, mass merchandisers, e-commerce, brands, drugstores, and beauty specialist retailers) cater their offering to all/some beauty categories: skincare, makeup, haircare, nutrition, and suncare. 

 However, in retail, a big consumer pain point is product discovery – how do you select the products that best fit your concerns and needs? That’s where the “The Revieve Digital Health-Beauty-Wellness Platform” comes in – to ease product discovery and provide personalized product recommendations across all beauty verticals.  

How does the partnership work with a beauty retailer? How does the end-user get access to the Advisor in a retail store environment? And how does it work with a beauty product brand?

To clarify – we refer to our customers as partners. Contrary to our main competitors, we help our partners implement, deploy, and constantly improve their solutions. Moreover, we have a network of service partners who come on board to add complementary functionalities to our existing productized solutions. 

 For example, in the in-store retail environment, we have partners such as GLC and ActiMirror that provide smart mirrors. We can implement our advisory solutions to deploy in-store. 

 What we do at Revieve is fully omnichannel – we can deploy across any brand touchpoint and both offline and online environments. However, as e-commerce gains momentum even for hardcore brick and mortar players, deploying online (website or in-app) has thus far been the preferred choice. 

While we can’t yet talk publicly about it, we have deployed a prominent in-store solution for one of Japan’s leading beauty brands. 

What are the plans for next steps for Revieve? Which markets do you see the most traction with or gaps where you could enter?

 In the last 12 months, we’ve seen Revieve’s growth soaring, and we are aiming to secure more impressive partnerships with brands and retailers across the globe. 

 We have a number of the world’s leading US, LATAM and APAC retailers currently under implementation and set to go live this year. With e-commerce gaining a solid foothold globally, the opportunities for us are endless location-wise. However, key markets for us are Japan, China, and of course Europe and Latinamerica.  

What new products are you developing? How do you choose the direction for the development?

 When you work with the leading brands and retailers, you get a holistic overview of their future challenges around beauty and wellness because some of them are trendsetters, others early adopters and the rest are followers. For example, we are now seeing that the hair care segment is growing rapidly. By 2025 the size of the global haircare market is estimated to be 105 billion dollars. For that reason, we are currently developing with a prominent niche haircare brand, the digital haircare experience of the future, to help its customers understand their hair type and purchase the right haircare products. 

What are some of the beauty trends you see from the data you have collected? Any bigger surprises?

 To provide an example: 

 If we look at the usage of our solutions during Q3 2021, we see that it is most prominent among women between ages 35-54 with top skin concerns such as wrinkles, sagging skin, and visible pores. However, when you break the general scenarios into more niche ones, such as Generations, you see different behaviors. For example,  we confirmed all suspicions about how Gen Z experiences beauty – we often read how this generation spends more money on skincare than any other generation and how much research they do when buying skincare products. During Q3 of 2021 in the US, we saw that Gen Z was more engaged with the AI Skincare Advisor, wanted to learn more about the recommended products, and took more purchase actions than other generations. 

What’s also very interesting to see on a general level is that consumers report specific skin concerns that our computer vision says they don’t have. So there is a knowledge gap between consumers’ own “skin concerns” and reality. This means that the industry has to better educate consumers around different skin types and concerns. 

We know beauty focuses on the outer layer, but what’s the impact of your products on the person, beyond the surface?

 We want everyone in the beauty industry to feel represented when they utilize beauty technologies. The products we develop are to help consumers understand themselves better and build greater confidence in their skin by purchasing just what’s right for them. The beauty industry has always emphasized a very “one size fits all” message and we want to help deconstruct that. Beauty is personal because everyone is different. Our commitment as a company is to build the most inclusive, realistic and representative personalized digital experiences in beauty and wellness.