Breaking Barriers in Beauty: A Conversation with Robin Shum of Estée Lauder

Episode title and number: Breaking Barriers in Beauty: A Conversation with Robin Shum of Estée Lauder 4-#3

Summary of the show:
This episode of Bold Blind Beauty On A.I.R. celebrates International Women's Day by featuring Robin Shum from Estée Lauder who discusses the groundbreaking voice-enabled makeup assistant. Aimed at breaking barriers and fostering inclusivity in the beauty industry, this tool is designed for individuals on the blindness spectrum, enabling them to apply makeup confidently and independently. The show delves into the development process, challenges faced, and the impact of the tool on accessibility and inclusion. Furthermore, it highlights Estée Lauder's commitment to inclusivity and advice for other companies on enhancing accessibility in their products or services.

Supporting Our Advocacy Work:
⦁Shop our online store
⦁Assist us in furthering our advocacy efforts

Robin Shum's Bio:
Robin Shum is an Inclusive Technology product manager on the Innovation and Emerging Technologies team at the Estée Lauder Companies. With a background in Linguistics and Technological Systems Management, she sits at the intersection of technology and inclusive design. Currently, as the Product Owner of the Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant, ELC’s first app that makes beauty more accessible for the Blind and low-vision community, Robin merges thoughtful co-creation with championing digital accessibility. She is passionate about the future of inclusive design and accessibility in the beauty industry. 

Bullet points of key topics & timestamps:
00:00 | Introduction to Bold Blind Beauty On A.I.R.
00:42 | Celebrating International Women's Day with Robin Shum
01:40 | The Inspiration Behind the Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant
05:00 | Challenges and Learnings in Developing the Makeup Assistant
07:19 | Dana's Beauty Byte 
08:52 | Collaboration with the Blind Community
12:11 | Advice for Enhancing Inclusivity in Products and Services
14:47 | The Future of Inclusive Technology in the Beauty Industry
15:26 | Availability of the Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant
16:06 | Connecting with Robin Shum
16:22 | Closing Remarks and Thanks

Connect with Bold Blind Beauty to learn more about our advocacy:

• Join our Instagram community @BoldBlindBeauty
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @BoldBlindBeauty
• Check out our website www.boldblindbeauty.com

Music Credit: "Ambient Uplifting Harmonic Happy" By Panda-x-music https://audiojungle.net/item/ambient-uplifting-harmonic-happy/46309958

Thanks for listening!❤️

Transcript

0:06

Welcome back to another edition of Bold Blind Beauty on Air, the show that's clearing the air for more A.I.R.,(Access, Inclusion, and Representation). My name is Stephanae McCoy and with me on my co hosts, I'm Dana Hinnant, I'm Nasreen Bhutta, and this is Sylvia Stinson-Perez. to a special International Women's Day edition of Bold Blind Beauty On A.I.R., where we're uniting innovation and inclusivity in the beauty industry. Today, we celebrate the remarkable journey of Robin Shum, a visionary from Estée Lauder and the collaboration with the Bold Blind Beauty team on the revolutionary Voice-enabled Makeup Assistant. As we honor the theme, Invest in Women: Accelerate Progress, join us for an inspiring conversation on breaking barriers, fostering inclusivity, and propelling progress with Robin, Estée Lauder, and the dynamic Bold Blind Beauty On A.I.R. team. Robin, we're ecstatic to have you here. Welcome to Bold Blind Beauty On A.I.R. Thank you, Steph and team. I'm so excited to be here and to speak with you today. Thank you, Robin. I'm now going to turn the mic over to Sylvia for our first question. Hi, Robin. Welcome. I am super glad to have you here and I use the app and products. So what inspired you to develop the technology to assist individuals on the blindness spectrum, like all of us, with makeup application and how has this journey impacted your views on accessibility and inclusion? So at the Estée Lauder companies, we first noticed that there was a huge gap in the beauty industry as it related to products for people with disabilities, specifically the group of 1. 3 billion people or 16 percent of our population. And this has been called out in publications like Vogue Business and the New York Times, where there's a lack of widely available beauty options for people with disabilities, and it's a weak spot or seen as a mark of goodwill rather than a necessity. So our team saw this and wanted to address this gap since Estée Lauder companies reaches a market of over 150 countries and territories and truly reflect and properly serve this global diversity. We made it our goal to be the most diverse and equitable beauty company in the world. So our first step was to create a tool to make beauty more accessible, and since we knew something was needed for the community, we relied on extensive human centric research and interviews with blind and low vision participants across the globe to discover just what that could be. We didn't want to create a product that we felt was needed, but we wanted to hear from the people who would actually use it. Eventually, we noticed a pattern where they would put on makeup and then send a selfie to a person that they trust to give them honest feedback. Though the system itself worked, the general concerns were that they were being a bother to their family members or friends, and worrying about the need to reach out to someone for a second time later in the day if they needed to touch up their makeup again. So the biggest takeaway was that this prevented autonomy and created a bit of insecurity in applying makeup, and so that allowed for an opportunity to create a tool to allow for that independence in applying makeup and touching it up throughout the day without needing another person. Hence we arrived at the idea for the voice enabled makeup assistant, which is a virtual assistant that uses AI to give feedback on your makeup application and symmetry. In terms of how this has impacted my perspective, I've personally learned so much along this ongoing journey. VMA is the first step in this inclusive beauty space and hopefully that gets others thinking about and talking about accessibility in beauty since everyone deserves to feel beautiful and confident. I love that you actually went out and asked people and you got it exactly right. That's exactly what happens is we put on makeup and then we ask someone else. I know that using this app has really actually relieved some stress for my husband because I would go and ask him. And now I still have to go and ask him but he's fixing a lot less things, I'll say. So that's great. So thanks. So I'm going to pass off the next question to Dana, our beauty editor. What challenges did you encounter and how did you overcome them while working on the makeup assistant? The main challenge was algorithm development. It took a long time and a lot of dedication to train our artificial intelligence to ensure that it could recognize makeup on different face shapes and across diverse facial features. So through trial and error and advancement in our algorithms, plus the work that the engineering team put in, what eventually resulted is an AI powered virtual assistant that can read out when there's a spot of makeup that might need additional attention. And across this experience, I learned the technicalities of makeup, like at what threshold of intensity eyeshadow would be considered even or uneven. And this specifically required months and months of iteration across our engineering teams to understand technical requirements, as well as meeting with our blind and low vision user research participants to understand their makeup habits. And then meeting with our beauty education teams to understand from their artistry point of view what even and symmetrical makeup would look like in order to refine our machine learning back with the engineering teams. There's an ongoing cycle and process where we were all doing this for the first time, since there wasn't another voice enabled AI beauty assistant out there that we could reference. Another challenge was creating a luxury makeup experience that fully meets the needs of our community. We had to continuously validate the design through ongoing usability studies with low vision and blind participants and ethnographic research as we added and developed new features, sometimes confronting our own assumption. For example, when choosing the voice of the virtual assistant, we expected that a customized humanistic voice would be the preference, but our user research actually confirmed the opposite. In fact, familiarity with their existing voiceover settings was most important. Since some blind and visually impaired people used screen readers, which tended to sound more robotic, those users had already, had custom experiences. In fact, familiarity with their existing voiceover settings was most important. Since blind and visually impaired people use screen readers sometimes, which tend to sound more robotic, those users already have custom preferences that they're familiar with. And while we could use our assumptions as a starter, we needed to always validate with our end users. Estée Lauder once said, "I never dreamed about success, I worked at it." In 1946, Estée and Joseph Lauder started their company with four skincare products in New York City with the philosophy of, every woman can be beautiful. In 1953, they launched their perfume oil, Youth Dew, that created a phenomenon and turned the company into a multi-million dollar business. In 2017, it was estimated that Estée Lauder owns 7. 8 percent of the skincare market shares. Estée Lauder has acquired companies such as Glamglow, Smashbox, and Too Faced Cosmetics. Estée Lauder's net sales have increased into double digits among the Americas. For more information, you can go to www.elcompanies.com and that's your Bold Blind Beauty Byte Robin, what I love about the app is that it's so verbose and that's really, really helpful. So as a sighted ally, how do you collaborate with members of the blind community to ensure that the technologies that you develop meet their needs? And also Robin, can you highlight any insights gained through these collaborations for us? Yeah, in short, constant usability studies and user research interviews were what we did to continually validate the app experience and features throughout the design and development process. We knew going in that this project would be a collaborative effort with the blind and low vision community. So our guiding principle was to build with and not only for people with visual impairment. We knew we couldn't make any assumptions, so we tested and validated with the community at every step of the design and development process. We worked also with outside organizations such as Disability:IN and a school for the blind and our own internal resource groups that were focused on disability and mental health called Kindred. These groups gave us valuable insights and ensure that our app was serving the community. So with each advancement of the application, we engaged with members to validate our assumptions. And our goal is for the app to become part of people's everyday lives and to be a tool that makes independence and confidence for the community even more possible. So you mentioned that the app is pretty verbose and so two examples of how these insights from the collaborations drove our experiences were the features for our voice feed setting and also a skip button. Both features help the users advance through the makeup checking experience more quickly. And so for the first one, when discussing the voice speed with our participants, we found that blind people who utilize screen readers set them to fast speeds and are accustomed to hearing spoken words extremely quickly and being able to understand it. So as a result, we needed to adjust our assistant to be able to speak faster so they can move more efficiently through the makeup scan. And so in that setting, you can either toggle the voice to speak faster, or you can also make it speak slower. Similarly, the skip button was implemented to bypass familiar dialogues to accomplish that same goal so users can advance more quickly if they're already familiar with the experience. These features together are once again an example of letting our community of users validate our assumptions and then guide design decisions that would impact their experience which is what the team and I have been doing at Sighted Ally. What I love, Robin, is how at the end, when there is no discrepancies that it can find, it says, you look fabulous. I love that too. Which is something we all aspire to do. Ditto for me, fabulous is one of my favorite words. Again, Robin, I think that collaboration is such a powerful thing, especially when we're working with different groups of people, because even though the human experience, we share a lot of similarities, we do have our unique qualities as well. And I think that you and Estée Lauder have done a phenomenal job in working with the blind community, and I so appreciate that. But given your dedication to creating accessible solutions, what advice would you offer to other professionals or companies looking to enhance inclusivity in their products or services, particularly in industries where accessibility may not be as commonly prioritized? So my answer has three parts. On an individual level for me, I think being very intentional about the mission for inclusivity is very important to start with. As an ally in my personal life and work, I come from a place of wanting to understand our users and something that I have no first hand experience of because I want to create something that's helpful. So I've noticed as we were developing VMA, when you come from a place of genuine curiosity and the desire to do something better, I found that it makes the people you're creating with more eager and willing to provide their feedback. On a team level, if accessibility isn't a requirement, or in the form of an initiative as straightforward as developing a voice enabled makeup assistant with the blind community specifically in mind, ask yourself how you can empower your design team to create universally accessible features. Other companies looking to enhance inclusivity in their products or services don't have to start advocating for inclusivity by creating a tool like VMA. They can start small first with internal advocacy. And lastly, of the 16 percent of the world's population, we know that 75 percent of these consumers will walk away from inaccessible businesses. We're talking about a consumer segment of 1. 3 billion people demanding disability friendly products and services who have 1. 4 billion in annual revenue potential. So it just makes sense from a business standpoint as well that it should be a priority to address this market. According to Accenture, four out of 10 customers will spend 5 percent more to shop with a company that values diversity and inclusion, and 29 percent would switch to a more conscientious retailer than the one they now shop with. So for all those reasons, it makes sense so it makes sense to start thinking about these initiatives if they haven't already. At ELC specifically, inclusive beauty for us means creating products and experiences that are accessible to everyone, from makeup products themselves to how consumers interact in our in person stores. To us, it's about taking the luxury, prestige beauty experience that ELC brands are known for and bringing it to everyone. The future of inclusive technology in the beauty industry is so exciting to me and so full of possibilities. And VMA has provided us with a start with huge learnings for developing inclusive technology at the Estée Lauder Companies, and we will keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible, helping create a beauty industry that's truly welcoming and accessible to everyone. That's awesome. And I love that you are committed to continuing to make it even better and better. Yeah, that's our goal. It's an ongoing process. We're, we're learning as well along the way. And hopefully that inspires others to do the same. So Robin, the app, the virtual makeup assistant, is it available for both iOS and Android users as well? Yes, so the voice enabled makeup assistant is available on iOS and Android. So you can go to their respective app stores or the play store and type in EL space VMA to download. Wonderful. Or in other words, fabulous. Yeah, I should add that it's also available only in the USA, the UK and Ireland with more locations coming soon. So Robin, how can people find you if they want to connect with you and maybe share some more of their insights or their experiences about makeup? Yeah, that would be great. The best way would be LinkedIn. It's just my name, Robin Shum, and they can find me on there. Brilliant. Thank you so much today, Robin, for coming on to Bold Blind Beauty On Air and talking more about the Virtual Makeup Assistant. It's such a wonderful app. I know that it's helping people out there. It's a game changer for giving us more independence to be able to put on our own makeup with minimal discrepancies so thank you guys so much, Estée Lauder, for providing this technology for us end users and also spreading A.I.R.(Access, Inclusion and Representation), something that we believe strongly here at Bold Blind Beauty. So once again, for joining us today. Thank you to the Bold Blind Beauty team for having us. It was really great. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in to Bold Blind Beauty On A.I.R. today. We hope this episode has left you inspired and empowered. Remember, our journey continues beyond this podcast. Don't miss out on future episodes. Hit that subscribe button and stay up to date on all of our latest discussions. Also, join our vibrant community on Instagram for behind the scenes content stories and doses of motivation. Your support means the world to us as we strive to amplify the diverse voices and stories. Together, let's keep advocating for Access, Inclusion, and Representation. Until next time, stay bold and beautiful.