At Revlon, innovation spans everything from cosmetics and skincare to fragrance and haircare. That means the Consumer Insights team is responsible for evaluating a huge volume of new product concepts throughout the innovation process - from early ideation and concept development through to packaging and campaign testing.
For Louise Duvall, Director of Consumer Insights at Revlon, that scale made it clear that traditional concept testing wasn't keeping pace. In a conversation with Cambri Co-founder Dani Kamras, Louise shares how Revlon moved beyond conventional purchase intent metrics to a new, AI-powered approach focused on predicting real in-market performance - and how that shift is helping the team work faster, make smarter decisions, and build greater confidence in innovation.
With innovation happening across multiple beauty categories, Revlon's insights team was running a significant volume of concept tests every year. The process was highly manual, requiring teams to sift through hundreds of rows of consumer verbatims in Excel to uncover meaningful patterns and recommendations.
At the same time, the team was questioning the effectiveness of traditional purchase intent metrics.
Rather than relying on top-box purchase intent benchmarks - often built from historical concepts that never launched or competitor concepts influenced by brand awareness - the team wanted a better way to understand which products were most likely to succeed in market.
One of the biggest shifts for Revlon wasn't simply adopting a new metric - it was changing the way the business thought about concept evaluation altogether.
Instead of asking, "Would consumers say they'll buy this?", the conversation became, "How likely is this product to deliver velocity once it reaches the shelf?"
For Louise, this wasn't an incremental improvement to traditional concept testing - it represented a fundamentally different approach to innovation decision-making.
After seeing success in the initial category, Revlon quickly expanded its work with Cambri into several additional product categories.
The early momentum has created excitement across the business, with new concepts already moving through the pipeline using the same approach and further category expansion on the horizon.
Adopting a new way of evaluating innovation naturally raises questions - but the data quickly helped build confidence across the organisation.
Seeing Launch AI deliver nearly twice the predictive accuracy of traditional purchase intent gave teams confidence that they were making better decisions. As a result, interest spread rapidly, with stakeholders across the business requesting direct access to the platform to explore concepts themselves.
Beyond prediction accuracy, one insight stood out for Louise: understanding the commercial impact of improving a concept's quality.
Rather than thinking only about identifying winners, the team began focusing on how moving a concept from the fifth quintile into the fourth could create meaningful business value—highlighting that relatively small improvements in concept quality can have significant downstream impact.
Louise also highlighted the ease of use of the platform and the value of automated open-end coding, helping the team spend less time analysing verbatims and more time acting on insights.
Another surprising moment came when Cambri quantified just how many new product launches underperform in market.
While the team intuitively understood the challenge, seeing the distribution of concepts across performance quintiles on paper helped reinforce both the scale of the opportunity and the importance of improving concept quality before launch.
Louise closed the conversation by describing Cambri as "a fresh modern way of evaluating new products."
We were delighted to welcome Louise to the stage at Quirk's NYC and equally pleased that she stopped by the Cambri booth to catch up with Dani Kamras.
A huge thank you to Louise and the entire Revlon team - we're excited to continue the journey together.
If you are an Insights or Innovation leader, we would love to hear your perspectives: