A lot of companies with great products start strong and gain plenty of momentum, but fail to maintain the quality of their customer experiences as they grow. DECIEM is not one of those companies.

Founded in 2013, DECIEM quickly made a name for itself as a beauty brand with a science-first approach and in-house product development. Leveraging premium quality in both its products and customer service, DECIEM rapidly gathered market momentum and became an influencer in the beauty industry.

As DECIEM’s direct-to-consumer (D2C) business grew, the additional scale began to put stress on its existing technology and operations. Leadership knew they would need to further strengthen their technology foundation for both the back and front end of the business to continue thriving.

From their earliest days, DECIEM's leaders recognized the value of technology platforms like Salesforce to standardize and streamline operations across their business. It worked with a number of system integrators who helped them set up multiple tools to support objectives including marketing, ecommerce, and customer service. Those solutions worked perfectly for DECIEM in its early stages of growth. But as the scale of their business accelerated, DECIEM’s leadership recognized the need for a deeper level of integration and synergy to achieve the agility necessary for the next phase of growth.

DECIEM’s leadership wanted to improve collaboration and data visibility between departments to streamline the development of new web content, launch new products faster, and efficiently build new features for their ecommerce site like a gift card program or chatbot. 

“DECIEM's first approach was to engage an expert system integrator (SI) for each Salesforce cloud to help us with the implementation,” says DECIEM technology director Julio Torres. “Each SI was excellent on their own, but their approaches were different and not necessarily compatible with each other. It was like assembling a team of top chefs to cater an event, all wonderful on their own but each with a different cooking style. The result, instead of a feast, started looking more like a potluck. We needed a master chef with a common vision in all the clouds to make sure our ecosystem grew organically.”

When Slalom and DECIEM began exploring a partnership to reach these goals, a clear overlap in company values and priorities created excitement and momentum from the beginning of the project through delivery and go-live.

Slalom’s mission was to craft a large-scale services program to assist in consolidating DECIEM’s technology and streamlining its operations. As always, our approach to accomplish that mission started with empathy. We spent time analyzing the technical environment, interviewing DECIEM’s customers, as well as stakeholders across the business, to make sure we understood the challenges that needed to be addressed and what success would look like.

“The key to this program was delivering immediate value but staying focused on long-term results for DECIEM,” says Aaron Mohammed, a senior principal at Slalom Toronto. “We didn’t want to just resolve short-term pain points. We wanted to build efficient, foundational systems and processes that would yield tangible results 5, 10, even 20 years from now.”

The Slalom team took a two-pronged approach to setting DECIEM up for scalable success. The first goal was to connect and streamline previously siloed teams and technologies.

As proven experts and a celebrated partner of Salesforce, we helped tie together DECIEM’s software tools like Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Service Cloud. This improved collaboration and data visibility across departments and enabled a faster time to market for new ecommerce releases.

The second goal was to advise DECIEM on how to improve operations, processes, and workflows to optimize efficiency and agility alongside rapid business growth. We recommended frameworks, governance models, data KPIs, and procedural best practices, connecting people, processes, and technology within DECIEM.

“Like the old adage says, we didn’t just give the team at DECIEM a high-end fishing pole,” says Mohammed. “We gave them tailor-fit advice on how and where to use their technology to catch bigger and better fish, both delivering and teaching as we went.”

Slalom’s partnership with DECIEM is ongoing, and stakeholders across the company are just beginning to recognize the opportunities that come with their new agility and efficiency.

DECIEM decided to pick up a previously impractical cross-cloud gift card initiative after working with us, and successfully went “live” in February 2022. The improved technology and cross-platform collaboration helped the company stand up the initiative in record time. This created a new source of revenue, delivered on customer expectations for ecommerce brands, and generated momentum and excitement around what was possible with DECIEM’s new and improved operations.  

DECIEM and Slalom are both eager to continue our partnership and unlock new growth opportunities that leverage both existing and new technologies. Specifically, the teams are eyeing advanced analytical capabilities and improved ecommerce features, like a chatbot, to alleviate the customer service team’s case volumes and increase customer satisfaction in the buying process.

“We couldn’t be happier with this partnership,” says Torres. “Slalom has felt like an extension of our team every step of the way, and we’re genuinely excited to grow with even more confidence in our business.”

Aaron Mohammed is no longer with Slalom.