The Umbrella × Love Without Sound
ELC is in the middle of the most significant transformation in its 80-year history.
Every new channel ELC opens carries signals the organization can't yet hear.
Since CEO Stéphane de La Faverie took over in January 2025, ELC has launched “Beauty Reimagined” in response to pressure that is concrete and measurable. Here is what drove it:
From recent earnings calls
CEO de La Faverie diagnosed the problems explicitly on earnings calls.
Paraphrased from multiple investor calls (Q3 FY2025, Q1 & Q2 FY2026):
Increased organizational complexity and a lack of agility in addressing growth opportunities
Elevated inventory levels at retailers leading to destocking — M·A·C specifically called out
A disconnect between what ELC ships to retailers and what consumers are actually buying — the net sales vs. retail sales gap
Inability to quickly respond to shifting consumer preferences across channels
Why this is happening now
The channel explosion
ELC has gone from a company that primarily sold through department store counters to one that now sells across an exploding number of channels — simultaneously:
25+ brands. 150 countries. All of these channels at once. Each retailer has its own inventory systems, feedback mechanisms, sell-through data, and operational rhythms. There is no unified way for ELC’s teams to aggregate, interpret, and act on what is happening at the point of sale.
The Ask
“We are focused on developing a Retailer Feedback Platform. This will be a structured, real-time feedback loop to deepen our relationships with key retailers by capturing real-time insights into their experiences, needs, and challenges to identify improvements across our products, operations, and services.”
— The Estée Lauder Companies, Value Chain Pitch Day Brief
The fact that this brief was commissioned through ELC's Global Value Chain organization — not through marketing or digital — tells us this is fundamentally about operational intelligence, not consumer engagement. We've built Honeycomb to that read.
Based on this research, we believe ELC needs a system that helps close the massive gap between what is happening at the retail shelf and what internal planning, supply chain, and brand teams actually know and act on.
What the evidence shows
Three breakdowns behind the blindness
We’ve seen this firsthand
The Umbrella has been a registered ELC vendor for three years.
On a recent activation, a four-figure-unit shipment silently failed to reach the venue. The brand side had no idea. The warning signs were buried in an email thread between a supplier and one mid-level contact. Our team salvaged the launch by driving to a warehouse ourselves.
The intelligence existed. The system to surface it didn't. That's the gap Honeycomb closes.
What this tells us the product needs to be
Product Requirements
Integration, not replacement
ELC is already building. This is the missing layer.
Any solution must fit into what ELC already has — not compete with it:
A conversational AI platform that serves as ELC’s universal interface for capturing, normalizing, and acting on retailer feedback across all brands, channels, and markets.
It doesn’t just listen. It starts the conversation.
Modular Data Connectors
Plug in what you want.
When you want.
Each connector is independent. Deploy one at a time. The system gets smarter with each source you add. You control the pace.
Amazon
VendorRetailer
ShopifyDTCHow it works
From raw signal to actionable intelligence
Watch an ordinary email become structured intelligence that reaches the right person — automatically.
incoming email
That email would have sat in an inbox. The stockout would have persisted. The shelf space would have been lost. HONEYCOMB captures the signal, normalizes it, routes it, and tracks resolution — automatically.
Employee feedback
A voice that actually reaches someone
Right now, frontline employees describe a system where feedback disappears. HONEYCOMB gives them a direct channel that they can see working.
Every employee interaction feeds the graph. Every question asked, every insight shared, every issue flagged — it all compounds.
What the C-Suite sees
Signals converge into decisions
With HONEYCOMB, leadership doesn’t discover problems in quarterly earnings. They see the pattern forming in real time — and act before it becomes a crisis.
The flywheel
It gets smarter every day
More usage → more data → smarter system
→ more value → more usage.
The flywheel is self-sustaining because the product
solves real problems for the people using it.
Why this team
The Umbrella is a creative studio specializing in beauty, fashion, & technology. We've been a registered ELC vendor for three years working closely with teams from MAC, Clinique, & the relaunch of Aramis Intuition. Our studio has managed brand and product relaunches, developed 360° campaigns, and designed products for both VM and gifting programs. We have worked closely with North American brand leads, ELC Global, and myriad contractors across the ELC supply chain.
Love Without Sound brings the engineering. Founder Jordan Davis was recently featured by Explosion.ai — makers of spaCy, the industry-standard NLP library used across Fortune 100 enterprises — for his work on production NLP systems. His systems process billions of records at enterprise scale with industry-leading accuracy, and have helped organizations recover significant value from previously unstructured data.
We know ELC because we work inside ELC. We know this problem because we've had to fix it by hand. Honeycomb is the system we wish had existed.
This is HONEYCOMB.
The nervous system of ELC’s value chain. Built to listen, built to act, built to learn.