Wella
We designed a new hair salon experience with AR features
Wella Company is one of the world’s leading beauty companies specializing in hair care, styling, and hair color both in salons and at home. Wella Professionals launched a survey to uncover new opportunities to innovate and upgrade the hair salon experience. 1,700 stylists and clients expressed their eagerness for more personalized consultations while at the salon.
Wella turned to Baracoda for our IoT development expertise, and together we co-created the revolutionary Smart Mirror for hair stylists and salon owners.
The Challenge
Wella wanted to upgrade hair salons with a more personalized experience for each customer. They requested that Baracoda create a new technology that could be scaled at salons of all sizes and integrated with different salon management software to continue the in-salon experience with personalized post-consultation communication.
What we did
We combined AI, AR tutorials and try-ons, 3D visualization, voice commands, and facial and object recognition to develop the Wella smart mirror. The result is an immersive and personalized experience for every client who comes to the salon. Beyond the development of the mirror itself, its system has been integrated with Wella’s customer management system to provide enhanced, seamless communication between salon professionals and clients.
We developed a next-gen 3D avatar experience for smart mirror users
Our teams needed to create a digital consultation experience where the customers could digitally project new hairstyle ideas onto their real faces with the smart mirror. To do this we used a cutting-edge algorithm with Unreal Engine 5 running on Cloud GPU instances to create a 3D avatar with ultra-realistic hair rendering. This allowed Wella to provide a hyperrealistic experience that lets customers try new hairstyles and colors with ease at the salon. With the connected mobile application, clients will also be able to get product recommendations and personalized tips from their stylists between appointments.
We built the core mirror infrastructure with a microservices architecture powered by Pulsar
In order to design a smart mirror that’s flexible enough to integrate with any of Wella’s third-party solutions, Baracoda used a microservices architecture and Pulsar so that the core infrastructure of the mirror would be event-based. This way, our teams can add any new feature or functionalities that Wella needs as a microservice without disturbing the existing system.
Results
The Smart Mirror won a CES innovation award in 2021 for its innovation in developing the augmented hair salon of the future.
“Inventing the salon of the future is a very ambitious endeavor. This is why we partner with leaders in their area such as Baracoda in innovative IoT. The consultation experience we have developed on the smart mirror with a photorealistic 3D avatar is a game changer for our customers and their clients. Before executing any service, they can explore many hairstyles and color results on themselves in a completely safe environment.”
