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Foreign hello and welcome back to the Bareface Podcast, a beauty business podcast hosted by me. My name is Lily twelve Tree and I am a beauty analyst, a Tata science student and now the founder of Unfiltered, a mobile app that we're developing to be the home for beauty research so you can filter beyond the marketing noise. But today's episode is a little bit different and it's me trialing a bit of a new format with these episodes and it's very much inspired by the acquired podcast which for those who are uninitiated, it's a podcast hosted by two ex finance Bros Venture capitalists, I believe. They do these really brilliant several hour long deep dives into the stories behind brands from Google to Ikea to Hermes. And they're brilliant. I highly recommend checking them out. But I was listening to their MES episode and wish that they would dive into the world of beauty conglomerates. The Sephora is the Coty's, the Estee Lauders, or even some of the unlikely beauty brands like Dyson or wild stories like Aesop. So I considered why don't I have a crack? Why? While I don't have the ability to go to their level of detail and richness, what I do have to get us started is a sort of secret weapon to kick us off and test out this new format. And that is today's episode on the story of l'. Occitane. How do you say Loxitang? L'. Octane. Likely not the first company that comes to mind when you think of big beauty conglomerates. At least it doesn't for me. Do I pronounce the L? It's pronounced l' Occitane and I don't even know how I know that because it was maybe the only French name in this entire episode. I didn't have to YouTube the pronunciation of, but it's hilarious to me that that is a clip from the brand's own YouTube channel that has over 80,000 views. Because it's perhaps the simplest capture of how truly international this brand is. And the French pronunciation must get lost all the time. I would say that I spend most of my time thinking about beauty business, but l' Occitane is a company that has barely crossed my mind. It's a nearly 50 year old French brand that to me represented nothing more than dated packaging and one fantastic hand cream. I'd always associated it with a dying customer base and I mean that quite literally. The founding story of l' Occitane is like many in the beauty world where it's easy to dismiss when it's told through this polished prose of an About Us page. I'm certain that you know what I'm talking talking about. It's that brand centered messaging where their founding story is based around a noble mission to share nature's wonders of the world, a promise to save the planet. But of course, just as long as you're spending right? This was an ad published by l'. Occitane and just listen to the language and the tone that they use when they're talking about their products. Our hands are our most incredible tools. Take care of them every day. I totally understand creating a brand world, but it just feels so empty or even satirical. Not to mention the visuals and the warm color grading. It's like rustic and almost cinematic in style, but it feels like bad poetry dressed up as sales copy. Maybe they worked 50 years ago, but anytime someone from a big beauty brand wants to totally avoid the reality that beauty is peak capitalism, I can just never trust them fully. This is the true story of a dream. The dream of a 23 year old who wanted to change the world. And for the most part, l' Occitan have been the only ones to tell the story of l'. Occitan. The dream of a man impassioned by the power of plants. It is a dream distilled in a copper still. So this is the only way we've ever heard it. And I promise you that there is so much more here than what meets the ears. Because then I received an email from a listener of this very podcast, an equity analyst from a surprisingly prestigious financial advisor firm. I'm always excited to hear from really engaged listeners. But this equity analyst firstly was a man, and judging by his knowledge and email etiquette, I'm guessing that he is middle aged, which is fantastic. It's just something that's quite different from my usual audience. The majority of that email was about something else entirely, but right at the end was a nugget of a story. He'd been lucky enough, and I quote on behalf of clients, to come across a lowly valued l' Occitane on the Hong Kong Stock exchange. It was traded cheaply despite the ever growing Sol de Janeiro inside of it. Sol de Janeiro ended up slipping out from under us. He wrote that the controlling shareholder, with the help of Blackstone, underwent a management buyout of the whole company. End quote. When I first read this, I was mortified at how much firstly, this was news to me. I had no idea that l' Occitane was even big enough to be publicly traded. And once I accepted that as a fact, they were traded on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. They're notoriously French, like to their core that why would they be traded in Asia? I knew that l' Occitane was was a conglomerate. I knew they were bigger than their namesake brand. And I also knew that they had acquired Sol de Janeiro, the teen favorite body care line. But a management buyout, that was a concept that went right over my head. I wanted to understand what on earth all of these terms meant. So I turned to Google and ran a few chatgpt prompts. But I was still left clueless. I wrote back to him with nothing but questions. And what followed was a business saga that read like a brilliant episode of reality tv. If only it wasn't drowning in finance jargon. So today we're going to be looking at the untold story of l'. Occitane. The episode is going to be broken down into three parts. The founding story, the brand's expansion into Asia, and then their life after their ipo. When you actually peel back l' Occitane's glossy About Us page, something much more human starts to emerge. It's not just a tale of oils and orchids, but a real small business story, the kind that you might see in your newsfeed or social media feeds today. Young founder, big dream, borrowed money, and a hell of a lot of luck. L' Occitane's founding story is a story of one Olivier Beausin. The difference with this founding story is that it's a real rags to riches tale. There is no conveniently forgotten loan from a wealthy parent, no secret friend giving a big head start. And you might be thinking, how do we know that this wasn't true for Olivier? Maybe he was just better at hiding it. Well, unfortunately for him, as the years passed, it became really clear that he lacked both money and connections. In the early 1970s, Olivier founded Main & Sons, L' Occitane's predecessor, by experimenting with essential oils at home. The roots of the now multi billion dollar company can be traced back to a wooden cart in a small town square in province where Olivier first sold his DIY concoctions. And before long, the company was stocked at a handful of willing retailers and set up its first headquarters, I say with air quotes, in a dilapidated farm that lacked running water. Here he is talking about the heritage of the brand in a YouTube video from 2015. For those that can't speak French, Olivier describes his first concoctions as a symbol of an alternative way of life, the natural way of life. And that ethos set the foundation for both the aesthetic of the brand and the formulation. So the first products were concentrated and simple bubble baths that were made of rosemary, cedar or chamomile. And what was on the label was exactly what you got. And by the late 70s, Olivier had added a cream, but still lacked his signature soap. That breakthrough came when he asked a former girlfriend how she washed her hair with Marseille soap. She supposedly answered, we know all of this to be true about the story thanks to Pierre Magnan, a French journalist and author of the Essence of Province, The Story of L', Occitane, which was first published back in 2003, who was able to piece together the original story from a wealth of resources, but also a lot from Olivier himself. So keep that in mind. As Olivier was building his business. For the first decade, he was mostly focused on body care. But he couldn't shake this memory of this girlfriend and her hair as he watched the soap making industry in Province fade away, shrinking from over 100 factories in the early 1900s to just three by 1980. After spending a decade perfecting formulations, he recognized a quality product by touch and was confident he could transform this forgotten staple into a luxury item. And that self belief was far from unfounded, because at this point, Olivier had had significant commercial success on a local scale. Once he set his sight on soaps, he managed to trace down an old soap works that had been sitting dormant for years. Eager to ensure Olivier's investment was worthwhile, the former soap maker that had owned of this equipment offered to move to the south with the equipment to teach Olivier and his small team how to operate it effectively. This was notable because it meant that l' Occitane was now armed with generational expertise and Olivier's sale acumen, allowing the brand to reintroduce the classic soap bricks. They were marketed as moisturizing, richly scented and locally rooted, and quickly flew off the shelves, laying the foundation for l' Occitane's identity that we know today. Interestingly, it's at this point where the business is picking up that that's when things start to unravel. Since everything originated from Olivier, it inevitably returned back to him. And this was a man gifted in sales, not necessarily management. So balancing company politics while operating a soap vat or labeling machine was a juggling act that few could manage, and Olivier was no exception. By the late 80s, L' Occitane was being propelled into the future Purely by momentum alone. RA strategy. Something that Olivier did not want to sacrifice in the name of turning a profit. So instead, he began to rely on bankers and investors to finance operations for expansion. With his ownership slowly slipping away with each new deal. Determined to expand the brand beyond Provence and throughout France, Olivier chose, what feels like to me, an absolutely bizarre strategy. He bought a slow moving barge. Full service barges can be hired with.
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A captain and crew who do the.
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Navigation, navigating, cooking and guiding. Boats have comfy staterooms. A barge is essentially a boat, but with more floor space that kind of floats down a river or canal rather than jets. They're long, rectangular, and according to Rick Steves, who I stumbled across in my barge research, they're ideal for cruising through the French canals or marketing campaigns. If you're Olivier Busson by today's standards, this method feels quite odd, at least to me. And if it sounds like an expensive exercise, it's because it was. The whole thing was so wonderfully and impractically French that I can't help but admire it. The idea was to embark on a slow voyage from the brand's home in the south of France up to the capital, inviting, I quote, a select group of opinion leaders and local dignitaries from cities along the route, encouraging them to spread the word in their communities. This is literally influencer marketing, but hilariously, in a style that feels like in 2025, we're actually starting to see the industry slowly move back to, which is tapping into niche communities. And in the late 80s, early 90s, that meant socialites of different small villages, which is fascinating because in the book, we didn't actually get any insight into how he found who these people were. Who did he know to invite before arriving in their city with the barge? I have no idea. But anyway, the barge was thriving beyond anyone's expectations. And to say that this marketing activity worked is truly an understatement, because the brand's reputation was spreading uncontrollably throughout the country. But it was that very success that actually strained the company's finances to the breaking point in 1992. Bankers had to intervene and take control of the company. By then, Olivier's loans had stacked so high that he was left with just 10% ownership over his life's work. And to be honest, it's hard to not feel bad for him that after nearly 20 years of dedicating himself to the brand, that was all that remained. Of course, he did that to himself, but he was a creator, a world builder, if you will, but not a great businessman. Really, if you think about the stories we hear today of people trying to find their way in business and getting it wrong all the time. And that's in an era where business and founder content and self employment acumen has been completely democratized. So I don't know, this part of the story makes me a little bit sad for him. But the bank has allowed him to retain the title of managing director, although the title came with very little authority. And what was funny was that the new leadership proved no stronger than Olivier's had been. Between 1992 and 1994, the company limped along barely. Financial experts were bought in and the ever changing stockholders offered all sorts of suggestions that never materialized. And I can't help but think Olivier must have taken a quiet pleasure in watching all of this unfold, watching business people try and systemize something that he had created from instinct alone. Amid this turmoil, a man named Reynold Geiger had been watching from the sidelines. He had acquired 33% of the company in 1994, when all the financial drama began and when some of the original investors wanted off the sinking ship. Two years later, he sees that moment becoming both majority shareholder and CEO. Here is Renal giving an interview about the company strategy. He is exactly what you picture a French businessman to look like, down to the striped cotton button up and blazer. Specifically, he talks about the decision to expand into Asia, which is really interesting.
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It's that the company was doing very badly. It looked like I'm going to lose my investment, so I ended up working in it. So at least I thought then I can cannot blame anyone else if it all goes down the drain.
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But what about our guy? What about the founder, Olivier? His ownership at this point had been diluted to less than 5%, although Reynold had been perceptive enough to understand how important Olivier was even out of power to the future of the company. So he appointed Oliv as a creative consultant overseeing l' Occitane's interactions with the media and press, and tasked him with generating new ideas to enhance the company's success and image. This was the turning point for l' Occitane because they now had brilliant products, great success in France, beauty's most powerful market at the time, and now also the business acumen of Renault. And it's at this point that the story shifts from the story about a founder leg brand to a global powerhouse. Right before Renault took charge, l' Occitane had launched in Hong Kong. Why Hong Kong? Well, at the time it was a British territory, and essentially was the connector of the west to the rapidly growing Asia that had caught everyone's attention. International beauty wasn't really something that had taken off in Asia more broadly, but local brands in Asia had had strong success for many years. The growth was fast enough that l' Occitane knew that they should at least test the waters to see if spanning into Asia was the move. As one of the first French beauty brands in the region, l' Occitane watched as competitors scrambled to localize, altering their packaging, language and identity to suit the market. Which, in fairness, were all decisions that made a lot of sense, because that is how beauty, for the most part, had operated up until the early 2000s. L' Occitane chose a different path and stayed true to their roots, a decision that ended up being an incredibly smart one. But it didn't work for quite some time. When you picture their bright yellow packaging and the flowers of province very similar to the imagery the brand still uses today, it stood out vividly against the distinctly Asian backdrop of one of Hong Kong's busiest malls. That contrast makes it easy to understand why it took l' Occitane quite some time to find its footing with local customers.
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People ended up coming in and trying the products, and all at once it took us about three, four years of real hard suffering, and all at once it just went off.
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It's easy to say that that decision was a strategic one and it was important for the brand to stay true to its roots, blah, blah, blah. But my hunch is that in the mid-90s, no one actually knew how big the opportunity in Asia was going to be. This expansion into Hong Kong actually did something much more vital than drive any sort of significant sales. It laid the groundwork for the company to ride the wave of the Chinese beauty boom. In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organisation, the WTO, and that drastically reduced trade barriers and tariffs, causing a surge in imports. China, as we looked at in episode 14 on tariffs, had been investing heavily into becoming the go to destination for product manufacturing since the very late 70s. They opened up four special economic zones with tax incentives and exemptions from the rest of the country to essentially create free market portions of China. None of them was more successful than Shenzhen in the Guangdong Province, which is located only 30km away from Hong Kong. So it became the go to place for Westerners to manufacture goods. This combination of WTO access, reducing trade barriers and decades of manufacturing investment transformed China into a magnet for international brands. And by the mid-2000s, beauty in China was booming, with beauty imports into China soaring over 1,100% between 2005 and 2015, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, the most dramatic growth the beauty industry has ever seen. When you consider that growth figure alongside the fact that L' Occitane launched into mainland China in 2005, you can start to form a of picture picture in your mind of the growth that the business experienced in that next decade. It's safe to say that expanding into China marked a significant turning point. L' Occitane was riding China's beauty boom perfectly, but their business structure was a mess. Years of loans and deals and fundraising had left the company fragmented and scattered. And to evolve, the brand needed to restructure into a group of holdings under a new parent company, the l' Occitane Group. This restructuring was more than just organizational. It was a clear step towards something bigger. Listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Any company going public is a big deal, but this, this felt bigger. Reynolds had taken a company from a point where it was hanging on by a thread to 2010, where they eventually IPO'd. There's one photo from the day that they IPO'd that when I was researching this story, I just kept returning to it's of all of who I assume to be the senior leaders of the business standing as Reynold is giving his address into a microphone. And Reynold just doesn't look like a tycoon. He looks like someone, you know, an older man who can hardly believe he made it. The photo itself is grainy. The clothes unmistakably from another decade. But everyone wears the same expression, the one that we all wear when, you know, you've pulled off something remarkable. I'll include the photo on substack for the post of this episode. But you know who isn't present in that picture? Olivier. By the time the company went public in 2010, his shares had been diluted into insignificance. There is actually really great documentation of all of these restructures throughout l' Occitane's history, which I'll link for you as well, because it's pretty wild to see the mechanics of a business that grew this quickly. In the next few years, the IPO buzz very much faded and l' Occitane's momentum slowed significantly. Beauty in China was still accelerating from 2010 to 2015, but interest in foreign brand began to wane. It was Korean and Japanese beauty that stepped into the spotlight in China and in Western markets. L' Occitane's once differentiating messaging of French heritage and natural ingredients had become the new standard. So while the business remained profitable, the growth that they were on the trajectory that justified their public listing never materialized. It actually pains me to imagine the tension in those boardroom meetings. The weight of an unconventional and risky decision that just never paid off. I imagine the team that had been around since the 90s were feeling some sort of whiplash from when they thought the company was sinking to now. They thought it had been saved. But no. L' Occitane stock essentially hovered in place for the entirety of the next decade. At this point, they were armed with a ton of cash. But just like every other beauty business, they had to find a way to continue growing and quickly. In an effort to course correct, the group went on a little bit of a shopping breathe. It's not entirely fair, but they acquired slash, invested in three companies in the 2000 and tens because the group realized that while expanding into Asia was the smartest thing they ever did, investing solely into Asia was perhaps the dumbest. They acquired brands to try and diversify their business geographically. First came Arborian in 2013, a Korean skincare company best known for that color changing CC cream. The pigment kind of like bursts out and adapts to the skin. It actually adapts to a wide variety of skin tones. If you were around in the 2016 makeup YouTube days, then I'm sure you know the CC cream I'm talking about. But that was NikkieTutorials doing a TikTok review of the cream that went viral again earlier this year. The second win that some of these older gimmicky products are having will never not be funny to me. The timing of this investment is interesting because when we consider that it was Korean and Japanese before beauty starting to take off in China. So this was likely an early effort to maintain their grip on that market that had given them so much of their success. Then in 2017 they invested in Limelight by Alcon and 2019 they acquired Elemis. This strategy made sense on paper. Each acquisition came with a small boost in investor confidence followed by a quiet decline. Time and time again they returned to the same formula, acquiring brands that appeal to the high income consumer. And again, this makes sense beyond the amazing margins that of course come from operating a prestige to luxury style beauty business. But it was a type of consumer and a type of company that they already knew really well. They had specialized teams and infrastructure in place to develop those styles of businesses. But the next wave of Growth was coming from an entirely different demographic, although they didn't quite know it yet. Yet. Then came the pandemic, sending shockwaves through every industry. L', Occitane, with its heavy exposure to China, took an early hit. Between December 2019 and March of 2020, its stock dropped by 40.5%. But then, in a twist of fate, by January 2021, the company had made a full recovery. And it didn't stop there either. By the end of that year, 2021, L' Occitane stock jumped another 63.2%, reaching a massive all time high.
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China was one of the first countries to actually be hit by Covid, but it was actually one of the first countries to sort of get out of the problem. And we saw very strong growth accelerating through the year. It was our fastest growing market, led by E commerce, because our E commerce business in China actually grew by 63% for the full year. But our brick and mortar stores recovered also very nicely and they grew by 23% for the first year.
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That is Andre Hoffman talking to Bloomberg in June of 2021, where he calls out how although China were the first to be hit with COVID they were also the ones to have the fastest recovery. That said, the recovery wasn't significant enough for the group to slow down their international plans. At the peak, Reynolds stepped down as CEO. But not without setting one more thing in motion. The acquisition of Sol de Janeiro. It's pronounced as boom boom in Brazil, though it's a nationwide obsession. If you've scrolled TikTok in the last five years, then you've definitely seen this brand before. Housed in a now iconic round sunshine yellow tub, their cult favorite body cream has become impossible to miss. And it became l' Occitane's secret weapon. From my research, no one knows the full story of how Sol de Janeiro and l' Occitane Group were first introduced. But one thing was clear, they made a very unlikely pair. For years, l' Occitane had targeted an older, more affluent audience. Again, they were experts in prestige, quality and French sensibility. But Sol de Janeiro had something that they'd never been able to manufacture, which was virality. Building a brand around a fleeting moment can very much be a brand signing their own death warrant. And in most cases, it is. But Sol de Janeiro was proof of something different. Social media virality is how younger generations often discover their staple. A year before the deal, Sol de Janeiro was generating us 60 million. Two years after the papers were signed, that figure had more than tripled to US 200 million with the digital first model. Sol de Janeiro was more than a breakout star of l' Occitane's portfolio. It was at times driving a third of the entire group's sales and fueling double digit growth. And you could see this growth on social media. You could feel it in retail stores that stocked the brands as teenagers shoved their fingers into testers and left gondolas a mess. Sol de Janeiro was soaring. But l' Occitane stock price didn't reflect it. It was erratic. It was rising and falling and stalling. And by the end of 2023, investors were confused. If Sol de Janeiro was performing this well, why wasn't the stock price reflecting that? In February 2024, California based hedge fund Butler Hall Capital decided to say what everyone had been thinking. L' Occitane Group, by all accounts, was more than twice the rate of its publicly traded peers, yet it was trading at less than half the price. Frustrated and understandably, as they were holding more than 1.5 million shares of L' Occitane Group stock, Butler Hall Capital sent a letter to the company's board, a message that stopped people in their tracks. L' Occitane Group was a company being managed in Europe whose breakout brand was powered entirely by the Americas, yet it was publicly traded in Hong Kong. The investors that were setting the listing price in Hong Kong for the most part had very little context of what was happening in the American beauty market. What this meant was that the l' Occitane Group was being dangerously undervalued. They're probably offering between 33 and 34 Hong Kong dollars per share within the buyout. That would give investors a premium of about 15%. That's Felipe Pancheco reporting for Bloomberg News back on April 29, 2024. And he reported that Renault was getting very close to presenting shareholders with an offer. And ultimately he offered 34 Hong Kong dollars per share, a price that was framed as generous, given it sat above L' Occitane's all time high of 32.45, and it was much higher than when the stock was taken off the market at 2960. So when Butler Hall Capital sent this letter to the group, while they never stated it outright, there was a subtle undertone of a call out. The wording and how they frame the situation kind of implied that l' Occitane knew exactly what they were doing. And Butler Hall Capital were just the first to make it public. If you visit one source I mentioned in this entire episode. Please let it be Butler Hall Capital's PowerPoint that accompanied the letter they sent to L' Occitane Group, which of course I'll link you on substack. When I said at the start of this episode that this episode had been gifted to me by the Equity analyst listener, this was what I meant. He shared this document with me and it kicked this, this whole thing off. If you're a nerd about this stuff, it will blow your socks off. Firstly, because it's just really cool to see inside an investment management company and get a look at what the work of an equity advisor actually looks like. Because suddenly I want that to be my job. But the report was dated on February 5, 2024, and it walks you through all of the research that led Butler Capitol hall to their pretty intense claim that l' Occitane was intentionally undervaluing itself. And it's fascinating. In the report they state, and I quote, l' Occitane International Group owns a brand, Sol de Janeiro, that we believe could be worth the company's enterprise value. In fact, the market is currently ascribing a USD 9 billion dollar valuation to Elf Beauty, despite Sol de Janeiro having similar CY25 sales and EBITDA earnings. Earnings with Seoul most likely having a better sales exit rate in Q4 of CY25. So these were conservative metrics. They went on to say that moreover, when evaluating the company as a whole as compared to its peer group of leading beauty companies, I. E. L', Oreal, Estee Lauder, Elf Cody and Shiseido publicly traded beauty conglomerates, l' Occitane currently has two times the forward sales compound annual growth rate, but trades at half half the multiple. Butler Hall Capital went on to state that we believe the largest driver of this valuation discrepancy is the fact that it's a company run by a European management team, headquartered in Switzerland, listed and trades solely in Hong Kong, yet much of its growth is from a US brand that is heavily indexed to the Americas. Ultimately, we believe a relisting in the US and separation of Seoul would lead to a 100% upside for the stock. That's insane, right? And that's just the opening slide of this document. From there, they outlined that there is still substantial room for Sol de Janeiro to grow. And they outlined four levers to continue growth that they believe could 5x sales in the next five years, the first being geographic expansion. Seoul is currently not selling in three of the world's largest six retail geographies Being Korea, Japan and China. China. Secondly is their distribution expansion opportunities in the U.S. sephora had sole brick and mortar exclusivity for the brand in the US until 2024. Beginning in January of last year, Seoul expanded into half of the U.S. ulta Beauty Inc. Stores and it's likely targeting full expansion by the end of the fiscal year. Ulta's Prestige Beauty size has the potential to be as large as Sephora in a few years. Thirdly, they believe that there's huge opportunities for category expansion. With the success in Body cream and Fragrance Mist, we believe SOL is likely to launch SPF based products. We think it's the very essence of the sole brand to put a prime position to launch a premium product in this category. We believe a successful product introduction in this category could grow sole sales by 40 to 50% in Sephora alone. And their fourth and final lever was travel penetration. Butler Hall Capital believed the Sol brand is substantially under indexed to Travel. Sol's travel sales represent 3% of the total brand sales as compared to 20 to 25% of its peers. They go on to compare Sol to Elf, which I think is really interesting because from 2019 to 2024, Elf's enterprise value expanded from 400 million to 9 billion. And over that same timeframe, SOL had grown even even faster. Butler Hall Capital were expecting that Seoul would in fact exceed elf's revenue by FY25. So they made the claim that Elf Beauty is a great proxy for where soul should be traded. And based on Elf's multiple, they believe that Seoul alone was worth 32 to 41 Hong Kong dollars at this point. There were also rumors circulating in finance circles that Blackstone Inc. The American private equity giant, were helping l' Occitane prepare to take the company private equ Again, something that to be honest, I did not even realize was an option. This letter and the rumors were enough to send l' Occitane stock surging to an all time high. So l' Occitane had options. They could wait it out. They could list Sol de Janeiro as a standalone entity on the US Exchange or sell it to the highest bidder. Alternatively, they could drag down profitability by overspending, let the share price price sink, and then return with a buyout offer to anyone that owned publicly traded stock at a price that looked generous on paper but was well below the company's true value. That last option is obviously the most brutal yet it was the path that they ultimately chose. Thanks to Butler Hall Capital, many saw a lowball offer in disguise. For those unwilling to cash out, there was a second option. They could remain invested, receiving 10 shares in the newly private company, but it was a deal that few people wanted. The appeal of public stocks lies in their liquidity, the flexibility to move where they're needed, and that freedom disappears when a company goes private. So for many, staying in, it wasn't really an option for all. So for most, including the equity analyst who was kind enough to give me the story, this deal stunk. The stock was effectively stolen from beneath. So l' Occitane pulled this off. They were successful, thanks to Blackstone to re privatize their company. And if you're wondering why, the most obvious reason is likely to use the success of Sol de Janeiro to invest in their slower moving brands without having to worry about stock price and profitability. And perhaps they'll relist somewhere that makes more sense. But that said, when you're trying to build a global business, which seems to be very much their strategy, I imagine that's a bit of a funny decision to make, especially given how poorly it went the first time. Because imagine if they did that all again, overly investing in the US and then a recession takes full force. I'm not sure it's a question that lies a bit above my pay grade, frankly, but I think what blew my mind about this story is that even when you play the market right, a few businessmen can decide to change the rules. It feels like the day that the deal was actually all said and done is a bit murky, but it appears to be sometime during August of last year, 2024. This was nearly a full calendar year after the rumors began to circulate. And if the story sounds messy, firstly it's because it is. But it also it gets messier. So when Reynolds stepped down as CEO in 2021, it was Andre Hoffman, the vice chairman, who we heard from a few minutes ago, that took his place. In 2022, L' Occitane purchased a major majority stake in Aussie skincare brand Grown Alchemist. This is a brand I had completely forgotten about until researching this episode, but visually they're kind of a more modern version of Aesop. Aesop in the sense that it feels quite timeless to me, but Grown Alchemist feels more trendy, but they share the same simplicity in design. And also their best sellers are in very similar categories to Tiloxitan hand and body care, but they do have hair care and skin care skus as well. So that was an acquisition that Andre helped facilitate in the second year of his tenure. But then in April of 2024, so three years into Andre's promotion to CEO and two years after acquiring Grown Alchemist, and four months before the buyout was finalized, Andre still down and with his resignation, he took a souvenir Grown Alchemist. Andre bought the entire stake that l' Occitane had in the brand, and this was a brand that he had helped acquire, which I thought was really interesting and kind of confusing. So then from there it's a man named Loren Marteau becomes the CEO of the L' Occitane Group in April of 2024. So he took over from Andrew. He lasted five months. He resigned in September of 2024. I feel like that's a pretty intense capture of either how bad the state of the group was or how unfit Loren and potentially also Andre were as talent. Whatever the reason, the company was struggling enough to bring none other than Reynold Geiger out of retirement. And it's funny because there's so much press about Reynold, which I've touched on throughout this entirety of this episode, but I could find dozens of press releases and media coverage of the announcement and resignation of every CEO other than Reynolds return in September of 2024. There has been some material published by the group on their own website since, but it doesn't feel like an update that they wanted to turn into an announcement, which I thought was interesting. That brings us to the end of today's episode. Funnily enough, this episode is actually an adaptation of a creative nonfiction piece I wrote for a uni class, so I would love to know what you think of these types of episodes as I very much plan to do more of them. It would be great to get to a point where we can make them a bit longer and we can actually do a company justice because this episode is truly a whistle stop tour of l'. Occitane. There was so much we missed. One last area of the business worth calling out because they truly did it before it was trendy is some of l' Occitane's give back initiatives Fun fact the l' Occitane brand was one of the first beauty brands to ever include Braille on their packaging, and they still do to this day. From memory, I think it was Olivier's daughter or niece that was blind and one of his last big decisions he made as creative director was to include Braille back in, I want to say, the 90s. The group also invests a lot into environmental and education initiatives. They're a huge brand with a large legacy that has truly done a lot of good, which is much rarer than you might think. But beyond that, I would love to thank our new podcast producer, Kelsey, for helping me with this episode. This is our first episode together, and I'm truly so excited for what what this pod can become with her skills and guidance. Also, a call out to our wonderful editor Florence, who is helping with some of the grunt work of this show. If I've mentioned anything you would like to revisit in this episode, you can find a play by play of the full episode up on Substack with all the resources I use to piece this story together. So be sure to follow and rate the show wherever you're listening or if you're feeling generous, share it with a friend. Friend and I hope you have a wonderful week and I will catch you in a fortnight.