PARIS — Puig has built itself right into a 3 billion-euro-plus beauty and fashion powerhouse.

Masterminding the fastidiously planned and executed evolution is Marc Puig, a third-generation member of the Spanish group’s founding family. He became the privately held company’s chief executive officer in 2004 and added chairman to his title in 2007.

“Since 1914, every generation of the Puig family has endeavored to depart behind a greater and stronger company than the one they inherited, guided by a way of doing business — the Puig way — that has been passed down from one generation to the subsequent,” said Marc Puig.

“Our priority has at all times been to work on the success of our company and our brands for generations to come back, and to preserve the aim and values which have guided Puig for over 100 years,” he continued.

Puig has spent the past many years mining the corporate’s wealthy roots, while keeping a firm future focus.

The result? A portfolio with a few of the most creative — and buzzy — beauty and fashion brands within the industry today. Consider Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl perfume poured in a towering stiletto-heeled, shoe-shaped bottle. Or there’s Rabanne’s 1 Million scent flacon modeled after a gold bar, Dries Van Noten’s fragrance and lipstick packaging awash with patterns, textures and colours, and Carolina Herrera’s jewelry-like makeup.

Other Puig-owned brands include Jean Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci, Byredo, Penhaligon’s, L’Artisan Parfumeur, Kama Ayurveda and Loto del Sur. The corporate holds the licenses for Christian Louboutin beauty and Comme des Garçons Parfums in the luxurious category, in addition to those of Antonio Banderas, Adolfo Dominguez and Benetton in the life-style fragrance segment.

Overall, business has boomed faster than even Puig expected. In 2022, the corporate registered net sales of three.62 billion euros, a 40 percent rise in reported terms and a 30 percent increase on an organic basis from the prior 12 months.

In March 2021, almost one 12 months into the coronavirus pandemic, Puig publicly stated its goal was to double 2020 sales in three years and triple them in five.

“By the tip of 2022, we had already greater than doubled our 2020 revenue figure [surpassing 3 billion euros] — that’s, one 12 months ahead of schedule, and we project to achieve greater than 4 billion euros this 12 months,” said Marc Puig.

This performance has earned the group this 12 months’s WWD Honor for Best-Performing Beauty Company, Large Cap.

Company sales in 2022 were driven by each of its product categories, which posted double-digit percentage gains. Business was spurred by a powerful performance of Puig’s own brands, amid an increase in consumer spending — especially for perfumes — and despite macroeconomic difficulties, resembling inflation and rising rates of interest.

“The extraordinary performance of our business over the previous couple of years is as a consequence of quite a lot of selections we’ve got remodeled time,” said Marc Puig. “First, 20 years ago, we decided to deal with prestige products versus mass categories, constructing a portfolio of fastidiously curated brands, where greater than 90 percent of our sales are from brands we own; expand into area of interest fragrances after which complement our fragrances and fashion category with makeup and skincare, and pursue careful, selective and value-accretive acquisitions. We prefer to represent Puig because the home of creativity.”

This involves a whole lot of storytelling, often with an incredible dose of humor. Take, for example, the spot for the brand new Gaultier Divine women’s scent through which Yara Shahidi, surrounded by muses, holds a bottle containing a miniature boat floundering as she rocks it from side to side. The camera zooms in and there’s then a life-size ship, with a captain who catches her eye — and her his. This love drama was set to Maria Callas’ “Casta Diva,” remixed by Massive Attack.

Puig has been a pioneer in concurrently — and seamlessly — constructing a brand’s beauty and fashion businesses. It’s a feat that has been tricky for a lot of other multinationals, since beauty and fashion are such different activities. But in today’s competitive marketplace, it has turn out to be increasingly necessary to attain a powerful, single brand image.

Rabanne has this ethos, with beauty and fashion, designed by Julien Dossena, firing on all cylinders. This past summer, the brand abbreviated its name simply to Rabanne (in lower case) by dropping the primary name Paco, launched makeup and kicked off a direct-to-consumer intensification with a flagship boutique in Recent York City — all while slowly applying its recent holistic visual identity to numerous product lines and retail spaces.

The unified fashion-beauty image is dubbed One Rabanne and sprang to life right before the brand’s spring 2024 collection showed with expanded ranges of evening, denim and knitwear.

In one other example, the Carolina Herrera brand brought its fashion and wonder closer than ever by introducing its first range of lipsticks and compacts in packaging so sculptural and precious it could double as jewelry.

Carolina Herrera Recent York Makeup, launched in mid-March 2020, also closely echoes the private elegance of the style house’s founder — and the color-intensive approach of its current creative director, Wes Gordon — who has kept the brand prestigious and desirable.

Earlier this month, Carolina Herrera, designed by Gordon, was the guest of honor at Dubai Fashion Week.

Then there’s Jean Paul Gaultier. In 2011, Puig took a majority stake within the label’s fashion activity, and in mid-2016, it snapped up Gaultier’s fragrance license, which included the blockbuster Le Male men’s scent, housed in a torso-shaped bottle and tin-can outer packaging.

While constructing on the perfume activity, Gaultier injects creativity into its fashion. Helping raise the home’s visibility in couture is a collaboration with a revolving solid of creatives. Sacai’s Chitose Abe was the primary to sign on, designing the autumn 2020 line; subsequent others have included Glenn Martens and Dossena.

Puig acquired a majority stake in Dries Van Noten in 2018. On the time, the Belgian clothier didn’t have fragrance or cosmetics, but Puig modified that just 4 years later. The group allowed the namesake designer to approach perfume and lipstick identical to he sets out about creating his fashion, garden or home décor — with a clash of concepts and a riot of colours, prints and textures. In a single swoop, 10 fragrances, 30 lipsticks plus accessories were launched that March.

Then last summer, Dries Van Noten unveiled its newest retail concept in Paris. The 650-square-foot corner unit showcases beauty alongside leather goods, jewelry and other accessories from the style collection, demonstrating how Van Noten’s beauty products commune seamlessly along with his other designs.

While most of Puig’s growth is organic, some has come through acquisitions. In May 2022, it purchased a majority share of Swedish prestige fragrance, beauty and lifestyle brand Byredo. Also last 12 months, Puig took majority stakes in wellness brands Kama Ayurveda and Loto del Sur, from India and Colombia, respectively. Such deals greatly increased the variety of Puig’s own sales points and brought 1,000 recent employees into the group.

One other way Puig has transformed itself for the long run was by shaking up its business structure. On Jan. 1, 2021, it established three divisions — Beauty and Fashion, Charlotte Tilbury and Derma.

Marc Puig explained in a December 2020 interview that the shift had two most important drivers. First, it was to initiate a recent phase for the corporate, pondering of how the group might be organized once the business is transferred to the fourth generation of members of the family.

Puig has said that the fourth generation is not going to run the corporate — they are going to not be on its management team, but on the group’s governing body.

The restructuring also stemmed from recent industry changes. Eighteen years ago, Puig, which then had a big and fewer coherent portfolio of brands, selected to deal with fashion and fragrance to be able to succeed and gain critical mass, before possibly broadening its scope.

“We used to say: ‘We construct the image of a brand through fashion, and we translate that image into the fragrance world — whether that image is from a fashion brand we own or a license,’” Puig recalled within the 2020 interview.

That strategy was rethought after licensing big brands lost its luster. Puig had had, for example, major fragrances licenses with Prada and Valentino that ended. The group then began focusing more on brands where it has control or ownership.

Concurrently, area of interest brands — especially in perfume — were gaining significant traction, which is why the group acquired Penhaligon’s and L’Artisan Parfumer in 2015. And as emerging markets have risen, Puig took minority stakes in additional corporations, resembling Granado in Brazil.

Moves like that helped Puig increase its share of the selective fragrance market to 10 percent. Rabanne, Carolina Herrera and Jean Paul Gaultier all figure among the many top 20 prestige perfume brands worldwide.

But in other product categories, resembling makeup and skincare, Puig was underrepresented. So in March 2018, it inked a beauty license with shoemaker Christian Louboutin, marketing the group’s first incursion into the world of makeup.

Next, in June 2020, Puig took a majority stake in Charlotte Tilbury Beauty, already a highly successful color cosmetics brand with a big digital footprint. That brand alone became one among Puig’s divisions.

The group put into the Derma division the 2 Puig family-owned dermocosmetics brands sold through pharmacies — Uriage and Apavita. Those two brands along with Isdin, through which Puig has a 50 percent stake (though Isdin isn’t consolidated in group figures), Puig is the third-largest European player within the dermocosmetics category sold through pharmacies.

Puig got down to have a portfolio of brands in several sectors, with each highly attractive. And the dream has turn out to be reality — bearing fruit.

Next steps are being considered.

“Puig is currently assessing all strategic alternatives for the long run of the corporate, including the choice of opening our capital to 3rd parties via an IPO,” said Marc Puig. “This is just one among several options, and no decision has been taken.

“We could also maintain the establishment. Whatever we resolve, the family will remain for the long run,” he continued. “For the previous couple of years, we’ve got already been running the corporate in line with the best-in-class principles that characterize a European publicly listed entity, as we deeply value the rigor that these principles bring and consider this construct to be fair for all Puig stakeholders, in addition to for the generations to come back.”

Regardless of the decision, environmental, social and governance issues will proceed to be corporate commitment mainstays. Puig’s goals in that arena align with goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, which sets out to limit global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 and turn out to be net zero by 2050.

To assist attain its sustainability goals, Puig’s roadmap includes promoting circular economy and end-of-life principles for packaging, enhancing traceability and upping the quantity of certified raw materials utilized in product formulas.  

Puig has attained Gold Medal certification from EcoVadis and an A-minus from the Carbon Disclosure Project — or CDP — Climate. The group also participated within the 2022 COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.