Coty Tackles Nail Care Assortments with AI, Season after Season
BEAUTY AND STYLE TRENDS change quickly with the seasons. That popular nail polish color for summer may be passé by the holidays, which demands nimble forecasting and merchandising.
No one knows this better than Coty, the beauty company known for best-selling brands like Sally Hansen, CoverGirl and Rimmel. Each season the company manages a portfolio of nearly 1,400 active nail color and care SKUs, with a commitment to stay on top of what’s hot and what’s not.
It’s a complex category, driven by a color story that rewrites itself every season and a multi-step beauty routine that unfolds across multiple planograms. The Coty Nail Care range encompasses polishes, beauty tools and press-on nail sets, each with distinct shopper behaviors and performance benchmarks.
Retail distribution compounds this intricacy. Coty sells globally through a vast network that includes Target, Walmart, Amazon, Sally Beauty, regional grocers and others, which means tracking demand, inventory and assortments data must always be top of mind.
Data gets a fresh polish
“There’s an art and science combination to the way we create shopping experiences around nail care,” says Jordan Klosterman, Director of Category and Shopper Insights for Coty. “We saw we needed a better data foundation to optimize the store experience.”
Coty category management teams routinely break the nail care category into five or six assortments built around the customer journey. That means they must sift through millions of data points to understand and capture seasonal demand, put the right products on the rights shelves, and meet retailer expectations.
View Coty's video success story.
To stay on top of the data around retail, POS, inventory and elevate useful insights, Coty turned to a data collaboration solution. The Crisp Retail Data Platform acts as a centralized hub that links Coty with multiple retailer portals, including Walmart Scintilla. It addresses the retailer "portal problem" by automatically ingesting, cleansing, and standardizing disjointed data across every merchant. With automation and clean data, Coty teams now have centralized intelligence for fast decision-making.
Category base layer
A solid reporting architecture helps Coty offset overwhelming data volume. From modular files to real-time POS reporting, nail care data is now clean, consistent, and set up to surface what drives performance each week. Crisp AI Master Data enables the team to organize and attribute product data seamlessly. This proved especially useful when 10,000 online-only items entered their system and needed to be categorized quickly.
“Your output is only as good as your input,” said Klosterman. “Clean data is a necessary foundation. That's probably true in everyone's role, but especially in Category Management.”
Color added to the shelf
Space planning automation is where Coty’s category strategy becomes real at the shelf. Using Crisp MissionControl, the team builds modulars in smaller, more intentional pieces, then stitches 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.
Merchandising gets a manicure
Once a new assortment is live, Coty’s work shifts from planning to protection, leveraging reporting for performance insights down to the individual SKU- and store-level.
Tabitha Talburt, Sr. Category Manager for Nail Care and Cosmetic Accessories at Coty, used to spend hours on Sundays preparing for Monday merchant meetings. With Crisp, the insights arrive at the cadence she needs, with visuals, actionable gaps and opportunities ready to share.
She elaborated, “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. We no longer spend that 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 since the last reset, with optimized assortment mixes driving both velocity and basket size.
Everything just ‘gels’
Looking ahead, AI is helping Coty keep pace with the growing complexity of the beauty segment. Category management automation combined with clean retailer data closes the gap between category feedback and continuous improvements.
With tools like Crisp AI Agents and AI Master Data, Coty’s 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 expands across items, brands, and data points, that combination of speed, structure, and auditability will help Coty continue to make and execute beauty decisions with confidence.
