Omni Talk Retail’s Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga connect with Simone Dominici, CEO of KIKO Milano, live from the VusionGroup booth at NRF Europe in Paris. In this engaging conversation, Simone shares his journey from selling €1 ice cream to €100,000 crocodile bags, reveals KIKO’s unique three-pillar brand strategy, and discusses ambitious expansion plans for the US and India markets while unveiling an innovative one-handed lipstick designed for the social media generation.
From Ice Cream to Luxury: A Consumer Products Journey
Simone’s career path reads like a masterclass in consumer product diversity. Starting at Unilever in food and ice cream, progressing through home care products including vacuum cleaners, and then jumping to luxury at Bottega Veneta selling €100,000 crocodile bags, his experience spans the entire consumer spectrum from €1 to €100,000 price points.
This breadth of experience across pricing tiers and categories provides unique insight into consumer behavior patterns and retail operations at different market levels—experience that now informs his leadership of KIKO Milano’s global expansion.
KIKO Milano: The Italian Beauty Disruptor
Founded in Milan in 1997, KIKO Milano has grown into a global beauty brand operating in 73 countries. The company’s success rests on what Simony describes as three foundational pillars:
Fun Experience: Creating playful, colorful, vibrant experiences both online and offline that engage customers emotionally rather than just transactionally.
Unmatched Convenience: Not necessarily being the cheapest, but ensuring “you cannot find any product at the same quality for cheaper price.” This value proposition commits to delivering the best quality-for-money experience in their market segment.
Cutting-Edge Innovation: Launching more than 400 new SKUs annually, with some representing breakthrough innovations that set market trends rather than following them.
This combination has transformed KIKO from a mass retailer into what Simone calls “a global beauty brand,” with aspirations to become an icon in the industry.
Brand Elevation Strategy: Building Iconic Product Franchises
KIKO’s current priorities center on elevating the brand through curated assortment development and building franchises around key iconic products. The company has identified several hero products that define their brand identity:
- 3D Hydra Gloss: Their signature lip gloss that has achieved iconic status
- Maximode Mascara: A volumizing mascara that exemplifies their innovation approach
- Full Coverage Complexion: Foundation products that demonstrate their technical capabilities
Rather than proliferating endless product variations, the focus has shifted to making fewer innovations bigger successes through concentrated marketing and development efforts.
Global Expansion: Tailored Strategies for US and India
KIKO’s expansion strategy demonstrates sophisticated understanding of different market dynamics and distribution preferences.
US Market Approach: Recognizing that American shopping behavior is “very multifaceted,” KIKO is implementing a hybrid go-to-market strategy including:
- Brick-and-mortar stores: Leveraging their European store development expertise
- Direct-to-consumer e-commerce: Building their own online presence
- Marketplace partnerships: Recently joining Amazon Premium and partnering with TikTok Shop
- Department store presence: Finalizing agreements with “the largest chain of department store in US”
- Beauty specialist retailers: Ensuring presence across all customer touchpoints
This comprehensive channel strategy acknowledges that US consumers shop across multiple touchpoints rather than concentrating in single channels.
India Market Partnership: Taking a different approach due to regulatory complexity and local business requirements, KIKO has partnered with Reliance Beauty to open their first Indian stores in Delhi’s Mall of India by end of October 2025.
Unified Commerce: Technology Enabling Personalized Experiences
KIKO has invested heavily in what Simony calls their “unified commerce model,” engaging more than 14 suppliers to create integrated technology infrastructure. This system connects data analytics, customer data platforms, and inventory management to enable beauty advisors to conduct complete transactions through iPhones.
The unified approach allows beauty advisors to access customer data, inventory information, order management, and payment processing through a single device, creating what Simone describes as making “the iPhone become a store itself.” This capability proves particularly valuable in beauty retail where engaged consultation often happens away from traditional cash registers.
Innovation Listening: One-Handed Lipstick for Social Media
KIKO’s customer-driven innovation process led to developing a one-handed lipstick specifically designed for social media content creation. The insight came from recognizing that customers wanted to apply makeup while recording social media content or during interviews without interrupting their activities.
The technical challenge involved creating lipstick packaging that functions with single-hand operation while maintaining quality and user experience. As Simone notes: “The more it seems easy and facilitate people life, the more it’s complicated to design.”
This innovation exemplifies KIKO’s approach of listening to customer needs and developing solutions that address real behavioral changes rather than creating technology for its own sake.
AI Applications: Pricing and Forecasting at Scale
KIKO employs artificial intelligence in two primary areas critical to their global operations:
Price Elasticity Analysis: With 450 new product launches annually, AI systems analyze past customer behavior to determine optimal pricing for new products, ensuring accuracy across diverse markets and product categories.
Forecast Accuracy: Managing inventory for 150+ million products across 73 countries requires sophisticated demand prediction. AI helps determine specific needs for stores from Kuwait to Manila to Malaga, recognizing that local preferences and seasonal patterns vary significantly across their global footprint.
Time-to-Market Acceleration: The Ultimate Challenge
Looking ahead, Simone identifies reducing product development cycles as the industry’s ultimate challenge. Rather than accepting traditional 18-24 month development timelines, the goal is achieving 12, 9, or even 6-month cycles from concept to market.
Technology enables this acceleration through faster market insight generation and improved understanding of overcrowded market needs. Speed becomes crucial when surprising products outperform expectations and require rapid scaling and replenishment.
Leadership Lessons: Daring to Go Faster
When asked what he wishes he knew when starting as CEO, Simone’s response reveals thoughtful self-reflection: “I think I could dare a little bit more.” Despite doubling KIKO’s business size over three and a half years, he believes they could have accelerated further, particularly in categories like skincare and complexion.
His approach has evolved from managing numerous innovations to focusing on fewer, bigger successes: “Rather than having so many proliferation of new products we are limited and once we launch something innovative like this we focus on make it big.”
Key Strategic Insights
- Channel Diversification: US expansion requires presence across all touchpoints rather than focusing on single distribution strategies
- Customer-Driven Innovation: Listen to real behavioral needs rather than creating solutions looking for problems
- Technology Integration: Unified commerce enables personalized experiences while improving operational efficiency
- Global Localization: Different markets require tailored approaches while maintaining brand consistency
- Innovation Focus: Fewer, bigger innovations often outperform proliferated product launches
- Speed Advantage: Reducing time-to-market becomes increasingly critical in overcrowded beauty markets
The Future of Beauty Retail
Simone’s insights demonstrate how global beauty brands can successfully navigate expansion challenges while maintaining innovation leadership. KIKO’s approach combines deep customer listening with sophisticated technology integration and market-specific distribution strategies.
The one-handed lipstick innovation exemplifies how successful brands identify genuine customer needs emerging from behavioral changes, then develop technical solutions that appear simple while requiring complex engineering.
As beauty retail becomes increasingly competitive and fragmented across channels, KIKO’s unified commerce approach and focused innovation strategy provide a framework for sustainable growth while maintaining the fun, convenient, innovative brand promise that originally disrupted the market.
🔑 Topics covered:
- KIKO Milano’s three-pillar brand strategy: fun experience, unmatched convenience, cutting-edge innovation
- Global expansion strategies tailored for US hybrid distribution and India partnership models
- Customer-driven innovation process leading to one-handed lipstick for social media generation
- Unified commerce technology enabling personalized experiences through integrated systems
- AI applications for price elasticity analysis and global inventory forecasting
- Time-to-market acceleration as the industry’s ultimate competitive challenge
- Leadership evolution from product proliferation to focused innovation scaling
🎧 Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe for more retail insights and global beauty brand expansion stories!
Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton and Anne Mezzenga founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.