Making Spirits (and Smiles) Bright: Securing a Holiday Win with Scintilla Insights
How Colgate‑Palmolive Used Scintilla Insights to Turn Seasonal Complexity into a Holiday Win
The holiday season brings a unique rhythm to retail, with key decisions taking shape well before the first decorations appear in stores. Assortment selection, inventory commitments, and store-level allocation must align within a focused selling window, making early planning especially valuable during this high-impact time of year.
Traditionally, these decisions have been informed by past performance and planning assumptions. While foundational, those signals alone don’t always explain how customer motivations evolve during seasonal moments or how demand varies by store, region, or occasion.
“Holiday planning at Walmart starts with recognizing that customers shop differently during the holiday season compared to the rest of the year,” says Josh Alper, Senior Director of Account Management at Walmart Data Ventures. “They shop with a specific mission, in a condensed timeframe, and often with gifting in mind. Insights help us understand that behavior early, so merchants and suppliers can plan with greater clarity and execute more effectively when it matters most.”
Using first-party Walmart data and insights from Scintilla, suppliers can better connect what customers say they want with what they actually do—supporting more informed, flexible seasonal execution and helping deliver the right experiences.
Fresh Strategy, Festive Results: The Colgate-Palmolive Story
Toothpaste may not top every child’s holiday wish list, but for Colgate, holiday gift packs represent a meaningful seasonal opportunity. Using Scintilla insights, Colgate turned seasonal planning into a repeatable, insights-driven growth model.
Holiday personal care gift packs are often time-sensitive categories where demand concentrates in narrow windows, and execution must be precisely timed. Success depends on delivering the right products to the right stores exactly when customers are ready to buy. Scintilla enabled Colgate to better understand the seasonal shopper and plan with precision, in collaboration with Walmart teams, to support fast, effective store-level execution.
A Very Different Kind of Shopper
Scintilla insights revealed that holiday oral-care gift packs, particularly kids-focused sets, attract customers with a distinct mission, often driven by “stocking stuffer” behavior rather than replenishment.
This seasonal shopper looks different from a typical grocery trip. Their baskets over-index on holiday and seasonal items, frequently including multiple giftable products and festive scents. They are shopping with gifting in mind, not routine restocking.
From Concept to Shelf with Confidence
By integrating customer feedback with operational insights from Scintilla, Colgate built an end-to-end approach that guided holiday kids’ oral-care gift packs from concept to shelf with greater clarity and speed.
Customer feedback served as the foundation of product innovation. Colgate used surveys to evaluate gift pack designs, configurations, and licensed character themes across entertainment, gaming, and children’s programming, validating shopper appeal before scaling production.
Once concepts were validated, Colgate layered in operational insights from across Scintilla, including forecasting, trend signals, and historical performance. This allowed Colgate and Walmart teams to respond more effectively to evolving demand patterns across regions and stores throughout the season.
Together, this approach helped identify high-velocity store profiles and refine demand forecasting, while aligning Colgate’s product design and production planning with Walmart’s assortment strategy around a shared understanding of the seasonal shopper.
The Real Impact: A Holiday Win
By combining the voice of the customer with sales trends and inventory signals, Colgate increased the performance of its holiday kids’ oral-care gift packs. Sales at checkout increased by high double digits year over year, with triple-digit unit growth, driven by strong in-season performance and improved product availability at checkout across stores through close collaboration with Walmart.
Stronger forecasting and early alignment around demand also meant products were better matched to shopper demand from the start. Holiday gift packs sold through at an improved average rate between 90% and 95% across all character licenses, demonstrating better alignment with consumer demand.
“Scintilla has changed how we approach seasonal moments,” says Stacie Furlano, Director of Category & Shopper Insights at Colgate-Palmolive. “By bringing together customer feedback and real shopper behavior, we’re able to make better decisions earlier, adjust more effectively in season, and scale what works with greater confidence.”
Scaling the Model: From Holiday Oral-Care to Seasonal Scents
The success of Colgate’s holiday kids’ oral-care program established a scalable blueprint for other seasonal opportunities. Using the same integrated approach, Colgate expanded the model into its Softsoap seasonal hand soap program at Walmart.
By applying Scintilla insights to understand seasonal scent preferences, gifting behaviors, and store-level demand patterns, Colgate was able to plan Softsoap assortments with precision in collaboration with Walmart teams. What began as a holiday initiative has since extended into additional seasonal moments, including Halloween, spring, and summer programs, with rotating seasonal SKUs that live on the shelf beyond limited-time endcaps.
Today, Colgate continues to leverage Scintilla to optimize seasonal performance, monitor in-season dynamics, and inform future planning across categories. By connecting the customer’s voice with operational insights, Scintilla enables suppliers to execute seasonal programs with greater precision and consistency—meeting customers when and where it matters most.
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