Proya's first CDO takes office, and the leading domestic beauty brand doubles down on digitalization.

The domestic beauty giant, Proya, has announced a key executive appointment.

On April 14, Proya officially announced the appointment of Hu Ningbo as the company's first Chief Digital Officer (CDO) in its history. Hu Ningbo has over 20 years of experience in information technology and digitalization. He has previously served as the head of the IT department of the duty - free retail enterprise Lagardere in China and the CIO of the fashion division of LVMH in North Asia. He joined Proya in January 2025. "Rich management experience and a service - oriented leadership style" is how Proya's internal staff evaluates him.

No ambitious consumer goods company can afford to ignore digitalization. Previously, the popular position in the industry was the CIO, or Chief Information Officer. Although the CDO and CIO differ by only one letter, they represent a divide between different eras. Hu Ningbo, who has just taken up the position of CDO, understands his "new title" in this way: "Shift from project delivery to value creation, and move from partial digital upgrade to overall digital planning."

Proya was founded in the early 21st century and excelled in offline channels and the sinking market. Twenty years later, in 2023, this home - grown domestic brand surpassed Shanghai Jahwa with a revenue of 8.9 billion yuan and topped the throne of domestic cosmetics. According to industry forecasts, Proya's revenue is expected to exceed 10 billion yuan in 2024 (the annual report will be released on April 24).

For this Chinese domestic cosmetics giant with a scale of tens of billions, which has fought its way from the cosmetics franchise stores to the mobile Internet era, the role of digitalization has also changed significantly.

In April 2024, Hou Yameng, then the deputy general manager of Proya, said at the launch meeting of an internal digital transformation project, "Digitalization is the key to promoting the upgrade of Proya's business capabilities and market performance." Earlier, when introducing and popularizing digital tools like Feishu, Hou Yameng was also an enthusiastic promoter and initiator.

In the CIO era, digitalization was partial digitalization based on business.

At the beginning of its entrepreneurship, cosmetics franchise stores, or CS, were Proya's main sales channels. Later, with the rise of Taobao, Proya became one of the earliest domestic beauty companies to engage in e - commerce. In 2019, the sales proportions of Proya's online and offline channels were almost the same. By the first half of 2024, the online proportion had exceeded 93%. From the shelves of Taobao, JD.com, and Vipshop to the live - streaming rooms of Taobao, Douyin, and Kuaishou, Proya has seized all the dividends.

Doing e - commerce business requires a basic technical skill: a stable and reliable online order management system (OMS). During peak order periods such as the 618 and Double 11 promotions, the ability to "receive" orders from large e - commerce platforms accurately, timely, and handle the requirements of the business and logistics departments such as order consolidation, splitting, and adding gifts in an orderly manner is a key test to measure the excellence of this system.

In many consumer goods companies, one of the core tasks of the technology team in Q3 and Q4 is to test the system during the off - peak sales period to prepare for the upcoming e - commerce promotions. An old employee of Proya's technology team recalled that although the OMS is suitable for most companies, Proya's OMS has undergone several rounds of "transformations" to adapt to the rapid development of the business. "Especially since around 2020, there has been a huge increase in orders from the entire e - commerce platform during Double 11 every year, and our pressure is imaginable."

During the two promotion periods of March 8th and June 18th in 2024, Proya's Tmall flagship store ranked first in the Tmall beauty category in terms of transaction volume. During the June 18th promotion in 2024, Proya also ranked first among domestic beauty brands on Douyin in terms of transaction volume. This system withstood the test.

Using the collaborative office platform Feishu to improve the efficiency of key business processes such as product R & D and marketing was a decision made by Proya in 2023 and is also a result of its digital transformation.

Proya became well - known through the hot sales of its Ruby Essence and Double - Antioxidant Essence. Product R & D is the soul of a beauty company. However, it takes a long time for a new product to go from project establishment to market launch, which requires communication and collaboration among multiple departments such as R & D, procurement, production, and marketing. Feishu's multi - dimensional table can optimize the collaboration rhythm and shorten the R & D cycle. More than 40 employees in Proya's Shanghai R & D center use the multi - dimensional table to view the work schedule in real - time, saving 25% of their daily work time.

Like many fast - moving consumer goods companies, Proya's market research department previously used questionnaires to collect consumer data. When they went to the front - line counters to collect consumer feedback on - site, Feishu's voice function can record information in a noisy environment. After being summarized by AI and stored in the multi - dimensional table, it can generate a consumer behavior portrait report for R & D reference, improving the efficiency of data collection and reducing the threshold for analysis.

At the same time, Feishu co - created activities such as "Efficiency Pioneers" and "AI Hackathon" with Proya in 2024. While promoting the implementation of the product, it also cultivates employees' digital thinking and truly stimulates their innovation. It is foreseeable that when Proya enters the CDO era from the CIO era, Feishu can also play a greater role and become a tool that every employee can use.

Entering the CDO era, the essence of digitalization has become to let data guide business.

An important product within Proya is an intelligent decision - making platform that "lets data speak."

An employee of Proya's technology team said that Proya's intelligent decision - making platform initially evolved from a BI (Business Intelligence) dashboard. During the process of promoting digital transformation, it completed a major version upgrade in 2024. The data granularity has been refined to the extent that the independent marketing cost of a certain major product can be disassembled. Combined with data such as product cost, it can more intuitively present the overall profit level of the product. This product can help managers at different levels and with different usage permissions make better use of data and make as accurate business decisions as possible.

Most marketing in the e - commerce era occurs online. This intelligent decision - making platform also applies a cross - channel attribution data model to better track the conversion effect of grass - planting behaviors on sales results, providing a solid data foundation for more scientific advertising decision - making optimization.

As Proya's first CDO, Hu Ningbo has a clear strategic design for the future. In a nutshell, it is to promote Proya to "move from partial digitalization to overall digitalization."

There are three specific directions: deeply apply AI in core business processes such as precision marketing, product innovation, and supply - chain optimization; build an enterprise - level global database, explore the establishment of a large - scale model for the beauty industry, and provide dynamic support for business decision - making; build a talent team with the concept of "IT integrated into business and business integrated into IT."

How AI can transform the business of beauty companies is a topic that the entire industry is paying attention to and researching. Hu Ningbo's team also has a systematic plan for this. Their goal is to build two platforms and a middle - platform. The global knowledge platform is to transform the wisdom and experience of senior experts into computable digital assets, exploring Proya's "digital brain" and comprehensively empowering AI applications in various fields around data + AI. For example, a generative AI beauty formula large - scale model, which is trained based on a large amount of cosmetic formula and ingredient data points. Through deep learning and data analysis, it can uncover key insights hidden in the data, thereby accelerating formula development and shortening the R & D cycle. The intelligent decision - making platform combines AI, big - data analysis, and machine learning to help beauty companies make data - driven decisions, improve operational efficiency, optimize product development, select products intelligently, conduct scientific advertising, and allocate budgets intelligently. The modular capabilities middle - platform covers modular system ecosystems such as the R & D system and the supply - chain system, encapsulating expert experience into hot - swappable modular applications, enabling the business side and small - and medium - sized brands to call corresponding modules like installing an APP to solve problems encountered in business.

"This not only requires IT to be integrated into business but also business to be integrated into IT. That is, business colleagues need to have a deep understanding of which data to focus on and how to think with data," said Hu Ningbo, Proya's CDO. In this sense, successful digitalization in the future is not only the mission of the CDO department but also a vision jointly shaped by all employees, carrying infinite possibilities for the enterprise.