Jenny B. Fine
16 min read
Cyril Chapuy’s title may be president of L’Oréal’s Luxe division, but a more apt moniker would be cultural anthropologist.
While he has a large and beautiful office in L’Oréal’s worldwide headquarters in Paris, filled with art, books and assorted bibelots, it is not here where he’s strategized L’Oréal’s rise to be the leading seller of prestige beauty products globally. It’s out, in the field, in the markets of the world, be it a hot new restaurant in Kuala Lumpur or Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, New York, where Chapuy has honed his understanding of what constitutes luxury for consumers today — and how that should translate for the 27 brands that fall under his purview.
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“In our business, if you don’t understand culture, forget it,” said Chapuy, the son of a doctor and an artist who thrives on the operational and emotional aspects of the business. It’s an approach that has garnered great success. Over the last five years, L’Oréal has solidified its position as the worldwide leader in fragrance, with five of the top 10 global bestsellers in the women’s category in 2024 and four in the men’s.
Overall, the Luxe division’s sales reached 15.59 billion euros in 2024 and it is the leading player in every key geography save travel retail, where, said Chapuy, L’Oréal deliberately pulled back amidst the ongoing challenges in that channel. According to the company, it sold four fragrances every second in 2024.
But Chapuy isn’t content to rest on such laurels. Instead, he’s laser-focused on driving uniqueness and desire across all categories, especially fragrance. That might mean olfactive innovation, for instance, or driving L’Oréal to be the leader in refillable fragrance bottles.
“Luxury is about permanently surprising, permanently disrupting, permanently enchanting consumers,” he said, during a wide-ranging interview in the company’s New York headquarters, “so even for fragrance growing by double digits, if you don’t keep bringing exciting stuff, consumers will get bored. We don’t want them to ever get bored. We’re the worldwide luxury leader in beauty and in fragrance, too, and we always want to keep this category very enchanting, very experiential and very surprising for consumers.”
What does it mean for L’Oréal to be the number-one luxury beauty player?
C.C.: It’s an incredible source of pride for our teams, because L’Oréal as a company is number one in beauty, but we were not number one in luxury, so that is what we were all dreaming of and we have been very strongly working on that for years.
