Huda Kattan, a beauty blogger who built a billion-dollar makeup brand, has enthralled millions of TikTokkers and Instagram users who clamour to buy Huda Beauty’s latest products as soon as they are launched. At the SAPICS Conference in Cape Town, hundreds of supply chain managers from across Africa and around the world were captivated by a compelling presentation on this rapidly growing business’s supply chain challenges and how they are being solved using demand-driven material requirements planning (DDMRP) methodology.

Emmanuelle Cohen, Huda Beauty’s senior vice president for Supply Chain shared her insights and experiences with the more than 700 delegates at this year’s SAPICS Conference, the leading event in Africa for the supply chain profession.

Huda Beauty has more than 67 million followers on social media. The organisation has 250 employees, offices in Dubai, London and New York, and four distribution centres. Huda Beauty products are sold in 97 countries. It is one of a growing number of beauty brands leveraging the power of influencer marketing. But this comes with big challenges in demand planning and forecasting.

Many supply chains would collapse as a result of what Cohen called the “viral effect”. One example that she cited of the viral effect, which results in high demand volatility, was when a TikTok influencer made a viral video about Huda’s Easy Bake powder and drove record, exponential sales growth. Overall, the business’s growth has been extraordinary - in four years, Huda Beauty has grown 20 times.

Other challenges that Cohen said impact Huda’s supply chains, sales and operations planning and forecasting are the ongoing launches of new products and phasing out of old ones. “This is a highly innovative market, with a short lifecycle – less than three years on average. At any time, 47% of products are new and 47% of our SKUs (stock keeping units) are at the end of their life.”

Outsourced production with long lead times and a “push” distribution model were among the issues that Huda needed to address in a transformation project that would enable the business to scale up for rapid growth, Cohen told SAPICS delegates. Decreasing service levels, overstock and the expense of rebalancing stock between distribution centres were some of the consequences that Huda Beauty was dealing with.

“We needed to build an agile supply chain to support the business scale up,” Cohen explained. The solution was found in DDMRP. Using this methodology in its sales and operations planning, Huda Beauty drastically improved service levels - from 68 to 81% to 95% consistently. Stock rebalancing costs were reduced by 75%. SKUs needing emergency rebalancing dropped from 4% to 0.6%. “Flow was accelerated thanks to the daily checks and the visibility,” Cohen expanded. She said that the success factors in this transformation project included accurate master data, a dedicated team and effective change management.

Huda Beauty’s supply chain success story formed part of Demand Driven World, which was part of the SAPICS Conference this year for the first time. Demand Driven World is the world’s top convention focused on Demand Driven methods and applications. Combining it with SAPICS 2025 gave attendees a unique opportunity to attend two globally recognised events at the same time, in one location.