Premium Beauty Retailer Achieves Global Pricing Clarity with Pricefx, powered by Applexus Lavendel

Overview

The client is a premium lifestyle and beauty brand with a presence across 33 countries, operating through 1,500+ standalone boutiques, outlets, hotels, and airline channels worldwide. As a global multi-channel retailer managing 50+ lines of business, the brand is known for the depth of its product portfolio - spanning gift sets, value packs, and a wide range of lifestyle products - and for the care and precision it brings to every customer experience. 

As the business grew in scale and geographic reach, so did the complexity of its pricing landscape. The client recognised that its pricing infrastructure needed to evolve to match the ambition of the brand.

Key Challenges 

Managing pricing across 50+ channels and 33 countries is an inherently complex undertaking. For the client, this complexity had outgrown the tools and processes in place. The organisation needed a solution that could bring structure, transparency, and scalability to a pricing operation that touched every channel, every market, and every product category.

Key challenges included:

• Lack of transparency - pricing decisions were not visible across the organisation, making it difficult for leadership and country managers to understand how prices were set or track changes over time
• Scalability constraints - managing 50+ lines of business from a master price list down to individual channels including stores, outlets, airport locations, hotels, and airlines required a platform built for that complexity
• Non-standard pricing structure - the client prices at product group and category level - across gift sets, value packs, and standard sellable products - rather than at individual SKU level, requiring a tailored solution
• No structured workflows - new product pricing, yearly price change cycles, and new market entry were managed manually and inconsistently, with no repeatable process in place
• Limited auditability - pricing overrides and final decisions made by country managers and senior leadership had no formal capture mechanism, making it difficult to track the reasoning behind any given price

Solution

Applexus Lavendel partnered with the client to implement Pricefx as their governed pricing platform - designing the solution around how the client actually prices, not around a generic template. 

The engagement was approached in two stages. An initial configuration phase established the core platform and integration architecture. This was followed by a deeper process alignment phase, in which the solution was redesigned around standard Pricefx best practice and the client's three core pricing workflows - delivering a more robust and scalable foundation for the long term.

• Pricefx Price Builder - Price Builder was implemented as the central pricing engine and is now the single system of record for all pricing strategy and price setting across all 50+ channels. Every price originates in Pricefx, giving the organisation a unified, governed foundation for all pricing decisions.
   
• Custom Process-Specific Workflows - Three structured workflows were designed and built to align with how the client operates day to day:

        • New product introduction pricing
        • Existing product price update process
        • Yearly price change cycle

These replaced manual, inconsistent processes with structured, repeatable workflows that can be owned and managed by a team - not an individual.

• Group-Level Pricing Logic - The client's pricing structure operates at product group and category level rather than individual SKU, a commercially driven approach that reflects how their portfolio is organised. Applexus Lavendel built a custom implementation within Pricefx to support this structure natively, covering gift sets, value packs, and standard sellable products.
   
• High-Discount and Sell-Out Pricing - A dedicated pricing mechanism was configured for products nearing end-of-life within a group, enabling structured reduced pricing for outlet and sell-out scenarios - giving the commercial team a governed process for managed clearance.
   
• 50+ Channel Pricing - The master price list was configured to cascade across all lines of business - from global pricing down to individual outlet and airport channel pricing - all managed within a single platform.
   
• Custom Leadership Dashboards - Two custom dashboards were delivered, giving leadership and country managers consolidated visibility into pricing points, exceptions, and overrides across the portfolio. For the first time, senior stakeholders have a clear, real-time view of pricing activity across the business.
   
• Auditable Override Management - Final pricing decisions continue to rest with country managers and senior leadership - reflecting the client's considered, relationship-led approach to pricing. The platform now ensures that all decisions, including overrides, are captured and auditable within Pricefx, creating a complete and traceable pricing record.

Integration Architecture

Pricefx was integrated into the client's existing technology landscape to ensure seamless data flow across systems:

• Inbound - The client's internal systems connect to the Pricefx Open API to push master and product data directly into the platform, ensuring pricing is always working from current, accurate data
• Outbound - Approved pricing is exported daily via CSV to an SFTP location, where it is automatically picked up by the client's backend systems for distribution across all channels