BW Confidential - Issue #12 - November/December 2012 - 39

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We need to continue making Lancôme more luxurious, while making seductive products for young women. We also have to continue to improve the experience at the pos and would love to establish a fragrance in the top five worldwide, which is the objective of the new launch La Vie est Belle

L’Oréal Luxe president Nicolas Hieronimus

on the US. Year-to-date YSL is one of our fastest-growing brands in the US, where we are working on the three axes. We are expanding Armani in the same way as we are developing YSL in Asia. Armani is well-established in the US, strong in Europe and is beginning to expand in a more significant way in Asia. We just launched skincare with Luminessence and we also have premium skincare with Crema Nera. How big do you see skincare becoming for YSL? This year skincare represents about half the growth of the brand. Thanks to Asia, skincare today is the number-one market segment in luxury beauty, so eventually it will become the number-one category within YSL. However, ideally I would want YSL to be 30% skincare, 30% make-up and 30% fragrance, but skincare is a long road; we are starting well, but it will take years, which is why it is important to animate make-up where the brand is strong. In fragrance we are good in the men’s category, but we need a modern iconic fragrance next to Opium and that is one of the objectives of the new Manifesto scent. Clarisonic does only 3% of business internationally. How will you expand it? Clarisonic is our fastest-growing brand to date and it has not been expanded internationally. It was the fastest-growing skincare brand in the US over the past couple of months and was the number-two skincare brand at Sephora there. We want to roll it out, and a number of countries will see the brand coming in the next year. The brand is complementary to what we do. If you use Clarisonic to cleanse your skin, and use a serum like Visionnaire its efficacy is doubled. So there will be strategies to make sure that the device is put in the hands of Lancôme or Biotherm consumers and Clarisonic will also be used for animations and demonstrations at counters. What was the rationale for setting up a retail division? I wanted to make sure that the best practices in terms of retail are transmitted to all the teams globally. Distribution is reshaping itself:
November-December 2012 - N°12 - BW Confidential

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s Last year L’Oréal acquired Clarisonic, which is one of the fastest-growing skincare brands in the US. The group is now working on expanding the brand internationally

the traditional perfumery is trying to modernize; department stores are reinventing themselves; there is the explosion of standalone boutiques and the rise of e-commerce. Ecommerce is growing over 30% annually and we want to double its weight in our global business in the next couple of years. Today for Kiehl’s e-commerce is more than 10% of sales. The objective of the new division is to try to help retailers evolve and also transmit within L’Oreal the best strategy to make sure we fully benefit from the changing dynamics of distribution channels. How can you boost buyer conversion levels in travel retail? Our market share in travel retail at 22% is higher than our domestic share worldwide. With Asia and the US, travel retail will be one of our biggest growth drivers. Our research shows that in 2011 in 15 airports only 19% of international flight travelers visited P&C stores, and 68% of them purchased a product. The conversion of people who enter the shop and buy is quite high, which means that we are doing an ok job with our brands and BAs, but 68% is not enough and 19% visiting stores is not high. Getting passengers to the stores is a collective job between travel-retail operators, airlines, ourselves and our domestic markets, where there is a more common strategy than before. There are two types of travelers—the first are those who have planned to shop and if we have done our homework by making them consumers of our brands in the domestic market they will usually buy from us. However, we need to get to know them a bit better and know when they are traveling so that we can increase their propensity to buy—that is where common data work with operators and airlines could help. We also need to make sure that products that are successful in one country are found in all the airports where that nationality travels. The other group of travelers are those who do not intend to buy. And here it is about more animation, retail experience and services. The best operators have understood that airports will become big beautiful shopping malls where you just happen to have planes. n
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BW Confidential - Issue #12 - November/December 2012

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of BW Confidential - Issue #12 - November/December 2012