Gareth Hughes, Executive Director, Retail Technology (North America) at The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.

In this Sage Spotlight, Gareth Hughes, Executive Director of Retail Technology at Estée Lauder Companies, shares how he navigates a complex portfolio of luxury brands and their varying tech needs, from unified POS systems to loss prevention and API security. Gareth highlights how Sagetap has helped him cut through biased vendor referrals, discover niche solutions he would’ve missed elsewhere, and build relationships with partners who actually deliver.

Key Takeaways

• ‍Managing Complexity Across Diverse Brands: Gareth leads retail tech across Estée Lauder’s brand portfolio, aligning global systems like POS and customer service while balancing each brand’s unique goals, demographics, and innovation pace.‍
• Industry Blind Spots Around Omnichannel Architecture: He wants to see more native omnichannel platforms, where customer and transactional data is unified out-of-the-box, rather than treating in-store and online systems separately.‍
• Rethinking the Vendor Estate in 2025: With AI, ML, and third-party risk now some of his top priorities, Gareth is reevaluating his existing vendors, especially those falling short on resources or innovation in critical areas like DLP and security.‍
• Moving Beyond Traditional Channels and Biased Referrals: Before Sagetap, Gareth leaned on Gartner, resellers, and trade shows — but found that recommendations often favored large incumbents and didn’t provide a full market view.‍
• Real-World Wins from Niche Vendors on Sagetap: The vendors that have impressed him most include Barracuda (firewall upgrades), 42Crunch (API security), and Kissflow (automated auditing), none of which he would have discovered without Sagetap.

Full Transcript

Gareth Hughes: I'm the Executive Director for Retail Technology at Estée Lauder Companies. We own and operate a large number of different beauty and luxury brands.

My responsibilities are primarily around retail technologies. We play in lots of different channels, from our own stores to our own brand.com sites, and my role encompasses all of the technology around those, from point of sale to service systems through to innovation, such as some of the pilots we're doing with AI at the moment.

The brands have different demands, different dynamics, different consumer demographics they're targeting, so you're balancing all of these different plates, sometimes, across the organization and trying to pull everybody together to try and utilize the same products and platforms where possible. If we were looking at kind of AI bots or AI chat, you'd try to get everybody to use the same one rather than using kind of 12 different ones, for example.

Meghan Lafferty: In your world, is there something that the industry is not talking about enough that you think is important?

Gareth: I think the industry isn't talking enough about omnichannel systems. So, we're still building in-store systems, we're still building online systems, and we're pulling data together to make those two work.

But, actually, we should be looking at some of the later changes that are happening. We can see with some vendors now where they're building single systems out of the box. So, things like customer data, transactional data becomes one, and you don't have to go through any kind of integration or data merge to make that happen.

Meghan: Is there something that's most pressing for you in 2025?

Gareth: We've got quite a large vendor estate at the moment, but some of those partners don't necessarily have the resourcing or technology or applications that we need as we change our environment, especially in things like AI, machine learning, security, third-party risk, areas that we've traditionally not really focused enough on.

One of the bigger projects we've done recently is an upgrade of our loss prevention tool. We had an older system that really wasn't fit for purpose. We wanted somebody that was able to do loss prevention, both in store and online, and there weren't many vendors that could do that. We actually found one on Sagetap, so the platform helped us get over that obstacle.

Meghan: Before Sagetap, how did you identify the right vendors to evaluate?

Gareth: Previously, we would work with our partners, but also the likes of a Gartner, attend trade shows, but you're really looking at one sales pitch versus another sales pitch. You're not able to really get into the detail. I found with the likes of Gartner and also some of our resellers, everyone has their favorites, and you don't necessarily get a competitive view, sometimes, of the landscape that's out there, and also generally favors probably the larger organizations, rather than Sagetap's given us access to maybe smaller organizations. That's kind of where the platform really helps for us.

I came across the platform probably three or four years ago now. Had a really good conversation, we actually moved forward with that partner at the time. That made me use it as a reference guide.

It's given me an insight into organizations that I wouldn't have ever maybe considered or heard of. And I've been able to kind of narrow down the search and the filters to  find fairly niche organizations for projects, which has been really  interesting.

Meghan: Let's talk about the vendors that you have found on the platform. Can you tell me what they do, how they've helped you, and how you've worked with them?

Gareth: I've got two to three that I've really enjoyed. So the original one we worked with was Barracuda around our firewalls. Some of our hardware was out of date at the time, and they came in and we did a big firewall deployment within our UK offices, and it was great, worked really well.

The second one was 42Crunch. We have an API security gateway that's due to be renewed, and they came up on the platform and I'd kind of heard about them, but I was able to have a demo and engage with them.

And the other one is a company called Kissflow that I did some work with. We had a problem where a lot of our auditing was quite manual still around accounts that were still active from people that had left. Kissflow are able to resolve that. We're actually due to do some work with them, but that was a really interesting one and something that I didn't necessarily know existed before I kind of had a conversation with them.

It's definitely worth a try. You'll get the option to talk to vendors that you may struggle to engage with previously. It's certainly a different way of going to market and looking for vendors in a traditional way. Sagetap obviously makes the process a lot easier.