1. Could you tell us about your job and the activities Guerlain carries out?

After heading the Packaging department at Guerlain, I took on (and created) the position of Sustainable Development and CSR Director in 2007. At the same time, Laurent Boillot became Chief Executive Officer and decided to place social and environmental responsibility at the heart of Guerlain’s business strategy and creations.

Guerlain’s sustainable commitment has been formalised in a charter and is carried out by a Sustainable Development Direction which I have the honour of representing since its creation; moreover, I have surrounded myself with a steering committee that represents all of the firm’s entities and professions.

Our approach is built around four key issues, each of them corresponding to ambitious goals that we measure and improve, always keeping in mind the ideas of transmission and heritage. What are these issues?

• Biodiversity conservation. We are already committed to those sustainable raw material channels that are iconic of Guerlain. We have also carried out substantial work on bee protection, especially in Ouessant, and continue these efforts today with a global perspective.
• Our second issue, eco-design, is probably one of the most complex ones. It is about creating an equally beautiful, if not more beautiful packaging while preserving our planet’s resources. Our goal is the following: 100% of our new products should be ecodesigned by 2020.
• Then, as far as climate is concerned, we are committed to cutting by half our CO2 emissions compared to 2007, by promoting sea transport for instance.
• Finally, as regards the topic of solidarity, which is particularly important to us, we assist a world association dedicated to self-esteem called Belle et bien (internationally known as Look Good Feel Better). This association offers free beauty workshops in hospitals for women treated for cancer. By 2020, we would like to support them in all countries where Guerlain operates.

These ten years of commitment have provided collaborators with a clear vision of our major environmental and social stakes and strengthened their capacity to operate on each of the subjects related to their own field, because they are fully involved in this initiative. From the very beginning, Sustainable Development has actually emerged as a collective project led by all teams and has become a source of pride and cohesion. This project is also supported by our suppliers and customers.

2. Do you think that in 2018 luxury and sustainable development can be compatible? Can you think of any examples?

I am absolutely convinced that luxury and sustainable development make up a beautiful, even necessary combination. Multiple elements overlap between luxury and sustainable development, which are almost natural, even consubstantial: the notion of long time for instance, the selection of rare and precious raw materials that need to be protected, know-how that needs to be transmitted…. However, I agree that this is sometimes hard to get across because we are aware that we do not have an exemplary behaviour yet. But who does as of now??? We adopt an approach of continuous improvement, a slow construction without any compromise, in accordance with the quality and prestige of a luxury firm. The “ecologist reductionist” view of sustainable development is over, beautiful and sustainable innovations need to be highlighted in order to reconcile both approaches. That is what is at stake and our luxury audience pays more and more attention to these arguments. It is something that is evident for our female customers: a luxury brand does things well. It is a tacit agreement between the luxury brand and its audience, a prerequisite. It is our duty to go further and anticipate their questions and aspirations. For example, we have been sharing information for a long time about our rare and natural materials. Today, we develop our arguments further by highlighting our commitment to protect biodiversity around these precious ecosystems. We have the role of a prescriber, a trainer. It is our duty to raise awareness among our female customers, also for those who have not paid attention to this issue in the past … Apart from Guerlain, if I had to mention successful examples of the luxury-sustainable development combination, I would invite your readers to look into the realisations that have been carried out by the LVMH group’s Environment Direction over the past 25 years, which is the oldest and the most mature environment direction in a French group.

3. Similarly, can CSR be a source of innovation regarding packaging of GUERLAIN products? Can you think of any examples?

Ecodesign is a source of innovation, creativity and commitment for our teams, and it allows us to reinvent luxury every day in a more responsible and sustainable way. For that matter, it is one of the major goals of our sustainable development strategy. We have been developing our products for several years by reducing their environmental impact at each stage of their life cycle, from their design phase to their end of life. With an objective of continuous improvement, this progress must be quantified, and that is why every innovation is assessed by an EPI index (Environmental Performance Index), which is calculated by a software operated by the LVMH group: Edibox. This index enables to rate every innovation between 0-20 and to measure its environmental impact.  It is especially shared and challenged at the Sustainable Innovation Committee, which brings together the Marketing, Merchandising and Packaging Development departments of Guerlain every quarter. This body has been set up to boost and develop more and more eco-designed projects. Last year, our President set a challenging goal: 100% of new Guerlain products will be eco-designed in 2020, meaning that 100% of them will have to show an EPI higher than 12 out of 20. Among the main eco-design actions carried out by Guerlain over the past few years, we are particularly proud of the work done with the Orchidée Impériale care. Besides our research on orchid preservation, we launched at the end of 2016 the fourth generation of the Orchidée Impériale cream. Its container has a more organic design: lighter glass weight, adjusted volume, a case made of non-laminated paper and a wedge made of pine cellulose reduce its carbon footprint by 55% to minimise its environmental impact.

We also reworked the design of our historical and iconic perfumes’ bottles, particularly by creating pumps that can be unscrewed so that these bottles can be separated at our female customers’ home and are therefore more easily recyclable.

Let me talk about our new concept “Guerlain Parfumeur” as well: our bottles Abeille (Bee), which have always been refillable, now become endlessly refillable thanks to the Perfume Fountains located in our brand-new shop at Vendôme, as well as at the 68 Champs-Elysées, rue des Francs Bourgeois and in Brussels.

Furthermore, we keep giving a second life to our advertising media along with our favourite partner Bilum, by turning advertising posters into small notebooks. This transformation has a triple impact: an ecological one (it enables to ensure a second life to short-lived media), a social one (notebooks are made by people with disabilities) and a societal one (profits from the sale of these notebooks are put into a Guerlain Support Fund which enables to defend the causes that matter to us).

4. Sustainable development is at the heart of Guerlain’s concerns. How do you integrate this dimension in the firm, particularly with regard to your consumers’ profile?

We are both proud of the work carried out in terms of sustainable development for over ten years now, and determined to go further. We will let the greatest number of people know about all the actions that we undertook for the last decade and all the ones that we commit to take during the next one.

As far as our customers are concerned, we are convinced that our sustainable commitment is a real extra touch of soul for our creations and our company. We still have a long way to go towards our female customers (and the ones that are not customers yet!) to make our commitment known and make it become a different vector which would complement our products, our singular history, a vector for fame, interest, affection. Because communication is not only about talking, but also about sharing with everyone the certainty that we are building a more sustainable and environmental-friendly growth. More and more women aspire to be beautiful while respecting the world’s beauty and humanity. As I was saying before, I think that we all have a prescriber role on this subject towards our loyal female customers… And we have a unique opportunity of “recruiting” new female customers, the “very committed” ones who are ever more numerous especially among the young generation…

5. One of the CNE’s missions consists in working for the “Right Packaging” and to do this, the CNE writes documents with the help of stakeholders’ collective intelligence. Would you be willing to contribute to our working groups?

Sure, it would be with great pleasure. Contributing, in all humility, to works related to “collective intelligence” in our profession is part of sustainable development. I think it is essential to welcome into this working group our Packaging Development Director, who is part of the Sustainable Development Committee, and strives everyday with his collaborators to integrate and create the “Right and beautiful packaging” of tomorrow.

6. According to you, what are the societal issues packaging will have to address within the coming years, and that could be discussed by a working group at the CNE?

Regarding cosmetics packaging, I am thinking about different projects that should be divided into working groups:

• How could we speed up the work proposed by Verescence on recycled glass? How could we imagine a more audacious circular economy on cosmetics glass?
• For plastics, how could we ensure that they are increasingly, or even exclusively made of recycled materials?
• Which solution can we provide to reduce our environmental impact with the development of e-commerce and the booming of cardboard packaging to protect the packaging of fragile products?
• How could we accelerate the refilling and the development of large containers?
• How can we meet the “zero waste” trend that is currently emerging?