S2 E3: How BigQuery is helping L'Oreal cut costs and reach sustainability goals
18French multinational company L’Oréal is a world leader in beauty and cosmetics products. The company started its journey with data and machine learning via Google Cloud three years ago. Now, L’Oréal is ingesting petabytes of data every month on BigQuery, using data for analytics use cases that create better decision-making for the marketing team. “The center of everything is based on BigQuery because we believe SQL is the new common language at L’Oréal that everyone should know,” says Antonie Castex, the company’s Group Data Architect who leads all data initiatives at the company. “It’s natural, it’s easy to use, and also easy to maintain.”
Antoine has worked with Google Cloud technology since 2011. “We love the culture and the way Google proposes the product because it’s close to our approach in the business and marketing,” says Antoine. As a multinational company, L’Oréal operates in more than 50 countries, with its biggest markets in North America, Europe, and Asia. Just last year, the company sold close to 7 billion products. Managing these markets—each with their own culture and requirements—as they change requires lots of trial and error, which is why mixing and matching editions for different workloads is extremely helpful. As Antoine says, “It’s great to be able to be flexible and not fixed into something.”
Autoscaling is a huge feature for L’Oréal. Antoine had always thought that an employee would need to be responsible for managing slots—the virtual CPUs BigQuery uses to execute SQL queries. But with autoscaling, BigQuery manages the bursts in data and provides exact billing within the limits set. “It totally changed the vision we’ve had using this feature, and we adopted it immediately.”
Additionally, compressed storage has not only helped to reduce costs, but is helping to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, which is in line with the L’Oréal for the future sustainability goals.
To learn more about the value new BigQuery features are bringing to L’Oréal and hear Antoine’s best practices, check out the full episode of Data Journeys with Bruno Aziza.