Image via WikipediaWith a career that spans more than 30 years, Philip Shearer, an avid competitor, thrives on big moments, making big decisions. Utterly comfortable with taking risks, he’s reaped the rewards throughout his career, whether it was betting the farm (and winning) on the launch of Giorgio Armani’s Acqua di Gio while at L’Oréal or being a pioneer in introducing Western beauty brands into the Chinese market. Today, as head of the $1.38 billion Groupe Clarins, Shearer oversees an equally iconoclastic group of brands, including its eponymous skin care powerhouse and Parfums Thierry Mugler.How was it coming into a company that is so family oriented? You’re one of only two outsiders to have ever headed Clarins.
I’ve actually been involved with family companies my whole career, from the Lauder family to L’Oréal. Even my first job, at Eli Lilly, had a family side to it. And I’m on the board of a privately owned spirits company, Bacardi, which is family-run. The culture of family businesses doesn’t surprise me. The twist at Clarins is that it’s French, which makes it more special.
How so?
It’s good and bad. It’s very different from working in the U.S. But the business is the same. The business is the business.
Where is the business going in the next two-to-five years?
On the consumer side, there will be an erosion of the fragrance business. In countries like the U.S., there may be a cultural change, toward wearing less fragrance. Skin care will be booming, though. We have an aging population. People know more about beauty than they ever have. There are geographical changes in the market, with a changing weight of different ethnic groups. The Chinese consumer is evolving rapidly, becoming more sophisticated, and that helps skin care. Then you have Latin America, especially Brazil, whose population is so diverse it’s a market in itself. Plus, there is the growing Latino population in the U.S.
All of these groups are reacting to different things. Some are more focused on skin care, some on makeup. In Asia the first step into beauty is often hair; in Brazil, the body. Of course you can’t write off Europe or America. I’m a strong believer of the everlasting power of the U.S. All the transformational inventions of the last 40 years are coming from there. Google, Microsoft, Apple.
So you have to play a whole new game today.
Exactly. For people like me who have done business for a long, long time, it opens up a fantastic number of opportunities we didn’t have 30 years ago. But even if you have deep pockets you have to allocate your resources to meet the best opportunity. In our case, [it’s] skin care.
It feels like we’re ripe for the next killer skin care innovation. What research most excites you now?
We’re more scientific than ever, but for skin care, we look first to efficiency and safety. Research is evolving at an incredible rate. That means there are extraordinary opportunities ahead of us, but we have to have huge humility. The more you discover, the more you have to admit what you didn’t know before. For instance, we just launched a product for firming, an idea that’s very important for us. We’ve discovered that it’s not just the cells that are important but the links between them too, via enzymes and proteins. So our products will become more sophisticated. In 2010, we launched Vital Light based on research we did on a peptide combined with plant extracts, making a new molecule. But with discoveries just ahead of us, we still have to choose which ones we want to go with. We play to our strengths. For us, that often means firmness and slimming, and also protection. Back to humility, we’re also going to start working more closely with outside research institutions, universities and suppliers. We have French institutions and hospitals that we’ve been working with for years, but now we’re going to try some new associations. Back to geography, there are other cultures that have been dealing with plants for thousands of years, and we may want to think more about them too.
So you’re getting more global in your research as well as your sales arm?
We’ve accelerated that in the last couple of years, attracting employees from different cultures too. We have a more international profile to our workforce now. But people make so much of globalization! It’s been going on forever. Everyone forgets the potato was once a New World product. Chocolate too. Google did not exist in 1997. Now it’s the only word that exists in all languages.
Have you ever launched a serious clunker of a product?
Of course! Though at Clarins, under my watch, not yet.
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