Behind the prettily packaged perfumes and lightly scented body lotions, the
world of beauty companies is one of giant conglomerates. A few companies own
almost everything: LVMH has Guerlain, Givenchy, Benefit, Fresh, Dior parfums
and Acqua di Parma, to name but a few. Over at Estée Lauder, there’s pretty
much everything else: Clinique, Jo Malone, Origins, Prescriptives, Stila,
Bobbi Brown, Darphin, MAC, Aveda and Crème de la Mer. So a big-name,
successful, global beauty brand that is independent and entirely
family-owned is as rare as hens’ teeth.
Sisley has been the business of the d’Ornano family alone since they acquired
it as a struggling, fledgling company more than 30 years ago. Not that they
haven’t had offers – they have, regularly – but the head of the family,
Hubert d’Ornano, is a shrewd veteran with considerable form in the cosmetics
world. He started off by founding skincare company Orlane, while his father
co-founded Lancôme, no less. If the Lauders are the cosmetics kings of
America, the d’Ornanos are European royalty.
The cosmetics dynasty began with Hubert’s father, Guillaume. After an eclectic
career as a diplomat, newspaper proprietor and board member of the make-up
brand Coty, he set up Lancôme with a former Coty colleague and built it into
a successful business. When Orlane started to take off in 1952, d’Ornano
senior sold his shares in Lancôme and joined his two sons. Hubert was 20 and
his brother Claude 22 when they set up Orlane. By the time they sold it in
1969, it was the number one skincare brand in Harrods (the name Orlane is a
reworking of Ornano).
“What else would I do if not cosmetics?” says Hubert, 82, with a Gallic shrug.
“We were successful and we were well-known in the industry.” Even so, he
only sold Orlane – “for a lot of money” – because he had no choice: his
brother wanted to go into politics. Legally obliged not to set up another
cosmetics company for five years, it wasn’t until 1975 that Hubert agreed to
buy a struggling beauty company set up by a former Orlane employee, who had
named it Sisley (no one knows why). They brought their Orlane chemist out of
retirement – he was bored, apparently – and set to work. What was Hubert’s
dream? “I never dream.” OK, what was the plan? “To make a very successful
business! In 1975 you had to be mad to try to do that, but because of
Lancôme and Orlane everyone trusted us.”
Hubert’s wife, Isabelle, 71, met him when she was 17. They celebrate their
45th wedding anniversary this year. “My husband had this idea, way ahead of
its time, that the biggest breakthroughs in technology would be with
plants,” she says. “So we created a line of products based on plants. Later,
we added essential oils. One of our first bestsellers was called Ecological
Compound; 15 years later, we had to prove that there were enough plants in
it to call it that.”
When Hubert and Isabelle took over Sisley in 1975, they worked in a two-room
office in Paris; Hubert says he couldn’t have done it without Isabelle’s
help, and you can still see their names, in very small print, on the
packaging. Hubert’s father was still alive at the time, though old and
bed-ridden, and Hubert used to visit him every day and tell him about the
new venture. The business is also now run, and part-owned, by their
children: Christine, 35, who lives in London with her husband and two
children and is in charge of the UK and Ireland market; and Philippe, 43,
the company’s Paris-based general manager. (Another sister, Elizabeth, who
lives with her four children in Spain, used to be the “face” of the brand,
but is now what Philippe calls an “ambassador” for it, and a board member.)
In 1975, the world’s economy was still in turmoil after the 1973 oil crisis.
It was a terrible time to buy a company. Hubert’s brother Michel, France’s
minister of industry at the time, said they were mad; he was closing ten
companies a day. “But,” says Hubert, who is dressed in a taupe three-piece
suit with exuberant scarlet buttonholes, “if you are strong and know what
you want, sometimes it’s easier to launch in a bad moment because it’s
easier to make money – your rivals have less money, fewer advertisements and
are afraid. So you close your eyes and you go for it. But it’s very
important to believe in what you do.”
It’s a theme that recurs in the conversation of all the family: how it’s their
business, and their good name. “It’s like a baby,” says Christine, “and you
want to make sure it comes out well.” Says Philippe: “Three generations of
d’Ornanos have worked in cosmetics. We know the field very well. It’s a
family tradition; it’s in the blood.”
To describe the d’Ornanos as tight-knit doesn’t begin to convey it. They work
together and holiday together. They live and breathe the business, and the
business has rewarded them handsomely. D’Ornano père et mère live in
palatial splendour in an apartment overlooking the Seine on the Quai
d’Orsay, packed to the gills with art, sculpture, antique furniture,
porcelain and silver. Every wall and surface is covered in family pictures
and paintings, and every furnishing is lavishly embellished, from the swirly
carpet and heavily upholstered chairs to the silk-tasselled curtains and
skirted tables. The family crest (Hubert and Isabelle are the Comte and
Comtesse d’Ornano, the first count being a cousin of Napoleon) is on
everything, from lampshades to china. They are waited on by white-gloved
staff and the loo seat is leopard print. Understated and minimalist it is
not.
Which is odd, because Sisley skincare is both. They do perfume, too, and
make-up, the multicoloured packaging of which was inspired by swatches of
fabric Isabelle bought back from Jaipur. But it is the iconic plain, silver
and white packaging of the skincare, with its ahead-of-its-time insistence
on natural ingredients, that has won legions of fans in 80 countries who are
happy, or at least willing, to pay the sometimes vast sums required. (They
don’t publish sales figures because, being privately owned, they don’t have
to. But they will admit that France is still their biggest market, China may
soon take over, and they’re keen to launch in India and Iran.) Sisleÿa
Global Anti-Age, their best-selling product, costs £199. Their flagship
product, Ecological Compound, is £105. Boots No7 this is not. “Price is not
an issue for us,” says Philippe “We’ve chosen to make the best quality and
be more expensive if necessary.”
“Some people tell us they prefer to use one of our creams rather than go to a
restaurant on a Saturday night,” says his mother, Isabelle. “That gives me
enormous satisfaction.” The formidable matriarch of the family, immaculate
in a beige suit with tiny pale-pink satin buttons that’s probably couture,
Isabelle is in charge of product creation and image. She still talks to the
chemists every day and reads the reports of the sales force around the
world. It’s this personal attention that, she thinks, sets Sisley apart.
“It’s completely different when it’s the owners who work with the chemists
rather than the marketing people,” she maintains, “because we don’t look at
the bottom line. A product should be created the best it can, and if it’s
too expensive we won’t produce it commercially. And if a product is
expensive, it has to be good or people will not buy it twice.”
No new product is, or has ever been, launched without Isabelle’s say-so. One
of Philippe’s earliest memories is of the rows of white sample tubes of new
products lined up in his mother’s bathroom. Married with three daughters
himself, his wife shares the enviable task of trying everything before it
goes into production. “We try to do the best products in a very competitive
industry,” he says. “It takes time. That’s why we don’t launch products very
often.” They seem to be doing something right: on average, he says, turnover
has doubled every four years for the past 20 years. Are they ever tempted to
sell? “No. We’re having fun. And the important thing is we have only one
brand, so we focus on that.”
Philippe originally wanted to be a journalist, but malign fate intervened when
his elder brother was killed in a car crash. “I didn’t feel like leaving my
parents, so I said to my father, ‘I’ll take the place of my brother.’” As
for Christine, working for Sisley was almost a foregone conclusion. After
graduating from Princeton, she went to work for Saks in New York, where she
eventually became a buyer. But Sisley was always at the back of her mind.
“I’d grown up with it. All the conversations round the table were about
cosmetics.
I remember coming back early from a weekend away to see how the window display
in a department store looked.” Her father charmed her into leaving Saks and
set her to work as a sales rep in South America. His strength, she
maintains, is that he never doubts that his children will make the right
business decision. “He will say, ‘What do you think we should do?’” What’s
it like when your father is also your boss? “He tells me to come to the
countryside on Thursday and I say I can’t. And he says, ‘Won’t your boss let
you?’ He and my brother can talk for hours about the business,” she adds.
“We all have a real passion.”
Christine thinks they’re still independent partly because of her father’s
skill with cosmetics, but also because he’s a good businessman, who knows
when to invest and how to cut a deal. (They’ve just built a huge new factory
near Blois at a time when most businesses are pulling in their horns.)
“We’ve never got to the stage where we can’t produce enough,” she says, “and
it’s at those stages that businesses, or a stake in them, are usually sold.”
But what will happen when Hubert retires? Would he care if they sold out?
“Why would I retire?” says Hubert. “There’s room for everybody. I have no
intention of selling: I have a lot of money, a very good staff and the
children are happy and interested in what they do. After our death, sure,
they can sell.” But until then, the bottom line is that in the middle of a
credit crunch, and in a bitterly cut-throat industry, Sisley sells. Why?
“Because the products are good,” says Isabelle immediately. Hubert leisurely
crosses one tasselled loafer over another, a genial glint in his eye.
“Because I’m clever,” he says.
