Givenchy takes its luxury vision to stores around the world with Asana

Challenge

• Before Givenchy implemented Asana, the Product team used a schedule in Microsoft Project to try and stay organized. 

• This made it difficult to keep deadlines straight and see continuous progress. 

• A lack of central coordination also made it more difficult to design a consistent consumer brand experience through unified merchandising, digital, press, and education materials.

Solution

• Now, the company has adopted Asana to gather and align the work of anyone involved in a launch. 

• In Asana, they can manage all 80+ ongoing projects at a macro level.

Outcome

• Centralized launch planning to coordinate 80 projects at a time

• Increased visibility for all team members with end-to-end information for product launches

Asana is a great solution for collaborative project management. And the flying animations, as rewards for completing tasks, make it fun. Everyone in marketing has an Asana unicorn sticker on their laptop.”

Asana for product launches

Connected teams for smoother global launches

The company brought in Givenchy’s Planning & Development Lead in March 2018 to manage global launches. They coordinate as many as 80 projects at a time for the Product and Consumer Experience teams, from inception to the moment a product hits the stores. Launches must follow the same overarching vision to give the shopper a consistent experience of the Givenchy brand and products, whether in a store, on a website, or at a makeup counter in Paris, New York, or Singapore. 

This role connects the dots across functions—the nexus of all efforts to bring products to market. The Planning & Development Lead works with all services at LVMH, especially with marketing. They also collaborate with the Consumer Experience team on merchandising, digital, press, and education; with the Product team on packaging development, R&D, and formulas; and with Finance on forecasts and pricing. They manage development schedules, oversee ongoing work, and anticipate future needs, solving problems with the overall vision in mind.

Their small team interacts with 200 people across 19 functions. One of the core challenges for the product team was communicating effectively with all the different functions across the organization, including a wide variety of roles and managers with more tenure. To do this, they needed to pull together stakeholders from across Givenchy. 

Bridging the communication gap

• Leverage Asana during weekly task force meetings with merchandising, digital, press, education, and marketing representatives to collect and track any deadlines discussed for the launch.

• They also use Asana to store and share presentations, reports, and information about the product’s vision, so that cross-functional teams could reference them at any time.

Coordinated, cohesive project management

• Having information in one open, accessible place like Asana lets the team cut out extra emails and phone calls. 

• Everyone on the core task force and beyond—all 200 collaborators—can now go into Asana and see the same project updates, requirements, and deadlines.

• For example, when they launch new products like L’Interdit (2018), they use an Asana project with dates and tasks related to development, formula, merchandising, digital assets, press, animations, training tools, and more.

Before Asana, we didn’t have any way to update, share, and view a consolidated schedule for each launch that spanned all functions.”

Launching luxury faster and more efficiently

With Asana, Givenchy is able to coordinate launches like L’Interdit, to about 120 countries worldwide. “We consider the launch particularly successful,” the Planning & Development Lead says, “because of the quality of the product and the differentiating fragrance. And we’re especially proud of the consumer experience we designed.”