Lancôme expands its beauty brand around the world

LEADING French beauty brand Lancôme is reaching around the world.

WISH 6 March 2015

THE future of beauty is a question that the managing director of Lancôme – one of the world’s biggest fragrance and beauty brands – thinks about a lot. Françoise Lehmann has spent her entire career working with Paris-based L’Oréal, parent company of Lancôme and the world’s biggest beauty conglomerate, and says the future of beauty will not just be about scientific advancement in the quest for maintaining a youthful look. Scientific performance, while essential, just won’t be enough.

“I think about this a lot. I think the future will be about personalised beauty,” says Lehmann. “It will be about the idea of giving to one woman the beauty she and only she deserves. More and more you are seeing that when a woman buys something like a handbag she wants her initials to be on it. People are asking for specially designed beauty products just for them, adapted to their skin and their environment.” How exactly a brand the size of Lancôme — which sells to millions of people in every market in the world — will execute something like that is still being developed. “For the moment it’s very preliminary, but we are thinking about it,” she says.

Lancôme celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. From its origins at the World’s Fair in Brussels in 1935 with just five fragrances, it has become one of the luxury beauty industry’s biggest players. According to an estimate by Women’s Wear Daily, Lancôme’s annual global sales are almost €2.3 billion ($3.4bn) and it is thought to be L’Oréal’s third-largest brand. Founder Armand Petitjean was 50 when he decided to go into the fragrance business and was motivated, according to various biographies, after seeing two American brands — Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden — dominate the beauty industry. He thought a French brand should be up there alongside them. Since that time, as well as Lancôme, Chanel has grown into a beauty powerhouse and brands such as Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Clarins have all been established, making it almost impossible to think of leading beauty brands without thinking French.

Lancôme’s 80th anniversary is an important one for the house, says Lehmann. “It’s really the age of maturity for a brand,” she says. “For a human body being 80 years old means having lived a long life and being at the end of that course, but for a brand being 80 years old is proof of great vitality and of great resilience, I think.” Lancôme generates 54 per cent of its revenues from skincare, 28 per cent from makeup and 18 per cent from fragrance. Lehmann says that third category is growing rapidly thanks to its latest fragrance, La vie est Belle, which has put Lancôme back on the fragrance map (see page 72).

The US is Lancôme’s biggest market but Asia, driven by rapid growth in mainland China, is expected to surpass it within the next two years. “Europe is much more difficult,” says Lehmann. “It’s traditionally a fragrance market and a very stable market, but Asia is very big for us. From the very beginning of the company our founder travelled and anticipated that a brand should design products for specific needs and geography. Lancôme was early in anticipating the needs of Asian people in terms of whitening products and UV protection, and it’s one of the reasons why we are so successful in Asia today.”

Lancôme’s success in the US market, however, has no doubt been aided by the fact that some of Hollywood’s biggest stars appear in its advertising campaigns: Julia Roberts, Kate Winslet, Penelope Cruz. In 1978 the American model Carol Alt became, at 18, the youngest face of the brand. Other faces include the Canadian models Daria Werbowy and Shalom Harlow. Perhaps the brand’s best known association, however, was with the Italian model and actress Isabella Rossellini who fronted the brand for 14 years from 1982.

Despite the importance of the Asian market, Lancôme, unlike some of its competitors, doesn’t have an Asian “face”. “We are conscious of the fact that our ambassadors are mostly caucasian and thus not reflecting the diversity of the world,” says Lehmann. Partly to address that, last year Lancôme announced 12 Years a Slave actress Lupita Nyong’o as its newest face. “We were not only looking for someone who could embody diversity but a role model that younger girls could relate to. I am very conscious of the fact that younger girls today are looking for role models and there are currently, on the internet, women who have done nothing and who are suddenly becoming very famous and I don’t think it’s a good example. We want to show that there are young people who have done things with their lives and their careers. Lupita is like Julia Roberts but younger.”

Lehmann says that when she met Nyong’o about a month before the 2013 Academy Awards, they clicked. “She explained that when she was young she was conscious of how women in magazines looked different from her, and it wasn’t until she saw a picture of the Sudanese-British model Alek Wek that she realised you can be beautiful if you have darker skin and this really allowed her to find her own path and her own beauty. So I think for Lancôme it’s more a question of whether we click when we choose our collaborators. If we meet somebody who is Asian and we feel it then we’ll go for it, but it’s ... not about about thinking, oh we need an Asian spokesperson, or we need an African spokesperson. It’s about feeling that this person and Lancôme could fit together and share the same values.”