How Coty keeps its edge in high-volume beauty with Crisp

Coty’s Nail Care team manages nearly 1,400 active SKUs per season, and with Crisp they’ve sharpened AI-driven processes to drive 20% sales growth.

Beauty moves fast, but Nail Care adds another layer of complexity – driven by a color story that rewrites itself every season, and a multi-step routine that unfolds across multiple planograms. Coty, the leading multinational beauty company known for brands like Sally Hansen, CoverGirl, and Rimmel, among others, prioritizes automated solutions and clean data intelligence for fast decision-making across nearly 1,400 active SKUs in the Nail category alone. Crisp, the vertical AI company for retail, supports Coty’s Category Management model so the team spends less time managing modular data and more time acting on it.

“There’s an art and science combination to the way we create consumer shopping experiences around Nail Care,” shared Jordan Klosterman, Director of Category and Shopper Insights for Coty. “Crisp enables us with the data foundation to optimize the store experience.”

The foundation layer

The Nail Care category includes nail color, beauty tools, and press-on nail sets, each with distinct shopper behaviors, performance benchmarks, and trends. Coty’s approach is to break the category into five to six assortments built around the customer journey, giving the team – and their merchants – something digestible to work through at each stage of a reset.

“Your output is only as good as your input,” said Jordan. “Clean data is a necessary foundation. That’s probably true in everyone’s role, but especially in Category Management.”

Central to not getting lost in their data volume is the reporting architecture Coty has built with Crisp. From modular files to real-time POS reporting, the data is clean, consistent, and set up to surface what’s actually driving performance each week. What’s more, with tools like Crisp AI Master Data, the team can organize and attribute product data seamlessly, which proved especially useful when 10,000 online-only items entered their system and needed to be categorized quickly.

“Crisp enables us with the data foundation to optimize the store experience.”

_{Jordan Klosterman, Director of Category and Insights, Coty}

Shaping and execution

Space planning automation is where Coty’s category strategy becomes real at the shelf. Using Crisp MissionControl, the team can build modulars in smaller, more intentional pieces, then stitch those components into complete Nail Care planograms that account for the complexity of retailer fixturing.

Planogram automation has drastically transformed Coty’s pace of execution. A process that once took two weeks or more can now be completed in less than a day, giving the team more time to focus on assortment decisions, including localized experiences, that matter so much in category leadership.

Protecting distribution with POS insights

Once a relay is live, Coty’s work shifts from planning to protection, leveraging Crisp’s reporting studio for performance insights down to the individual SKU- and store-level. Tabitha Talburt, Senior Category Manager at Coty, used to spend hours on Sunday preparing for Monday merchant meetings. With Crisp, the trusted insights arrive at the cadence she needs, with visuals and actionable gaps and opportunities ready to share. 

Tabitha shared that, “With Crisp, we can walk into a merchant meeting with a clear, data-backed narrative that shows exactly where we have gaps and how we can win. Rather than spending time just trying to explain what happened.”

The combination of real-time visibility with the agility to make planogram revisions quickly has translated into results that shine: Coty has seen 20% sales growth for the Nail Care category mod-to-date, with optimized assortment mixes driving both velocity and basket size.

“With Crisp, we can walk into a merchant meeting with a clear, data-backed narrative that shows exactly where we have gaps and how we can win. Rather than spending time just trying to explain what happened.”

_{Tabitha Talburt, Senior Category Manager, Coty}

Connected data builds confidence

Looking ahead, AI is helping Coty keep pace with the growing complexity of beauty. Category management automation with Crisp MissionControl combined with clean retailer data closes the loop on category feedback and continuous improvements. With tools like Crisp’s AI Agents and AI Master Data, the team can analyze POS data through natural language prompts, generate executive summaries, and attribute items faster while maintaining visibility into how decisions are made. As the category grows across items, brands, and data points, that combination of speed, structure, and auditability will help Coty continue making executive beauty decisions with confidence.

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