Gilles Andrier is poised, on June 5, to become the first fragrance house executive to be inducted into The Fragrance Foundation Hall of Fame.
“It’s a recognition of the work that we do with great passion around fragrances with our clients,” said the chief executive officer of Givaudan, the Swiss fragrance and flavors supplier behind iconic scents such as Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium, Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps, Dior’s J’Adore, Mugler’s Angel, Carolina Herrera’s Good Girl, Versace’s Eros and Tom Ford’s Noir.
Andrier is humbled by and grateful for the accolade.
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“I’ve been 30 years with Givaudan, and every day I can only cherish how lucky [to be] working in such a beautiful industry,” he said. “It’s a wonderful thing that we do — creating fragrances, bridging memories, dealing with senses and emotions.”
Andrier was named Givaudan’s CEO in 2005, and subsequently grew the company to be valued today at 35 billion Swiss francs, or $38.59 billion. It employs more than 16,000 people in more than 50 countries.
The group’s like-for-like sales reached 6.9 billion Swiss francs in 2023, and its fine fragrance business today is 60 percent bigger than in 2019, pre-pandemic, on an organic basis.
Andrier, who was listed among top-performing CEOs worldwide in 2019 by Harvard Business Review, champions approachable leadership and leadership continuity. He doesn’t go by any book telling CEOs what proverbial suit to wear.
“I’ve always meant to make my own suit — one that would be naturally comfortable and [give] me the best impact,” Andrier said. The strategy has informed much of the company’s leadership programs constructed on self-awareness.
“My engine, my fuel, is a lot of curiosity,” continued Andrier, who gets intellectually excited by learning from and discovering things with everyone from clients, employees, investors and salespeople.
He has been building the house of Givaudan, founded in Zurich in 1895, partially through successful acquisitions. A pivotal purchase came in 2006 of fragrance and flavors supplier Quest for approximately 2.8 billion Swiss francs.
“The fit was quite perfect,” Andrier said, of the company that was at the time half of Givaudan’s size. “It was quite significant and transforming [for] Givaudan and Quest together, and we did that à la Givaudan, meaning in a very human way — respecting and building upon what the other company was bringing to Givaudan and vice versa.
“That’s always the mindset with which we have done acquisitions,” he said. Over the past seven years, Givaudan has made 22.
“We are a very different company as compared to 30 years ago,” Andrier said. Yet its transformation has not rocked the boat in an unreasonable way and, to use another metaphor, a common thread runs throughout, which is Givaudan’s culture, which the CEO describes as “being passionate about this business, but also about the human side.”
That culture has been built upon but never been officially defined. “It’s something that we recognized,” Andrier said. “It is the result of 250 years.”
He knows Givaudan well, and fine fragrance runs through his veins. The executive began his career as an Accenture management consultant. Andrier joined Givaudan in 1993 with the titles fragrance division controller and assistant to the then-CEO, Jean Amic.
Fast-forward a decade, and Andrier became Givaudan’s head of fine fragrances, Europe in 2001. The group today is among Switzerland’s 20 largest listed companies and a leading player in taste and well-being, and fragrance and beauty.
There’s a lot of intensity and churn to the business of fine fragrance, which resonates with the more emotional, artistic side of Andrier, whose other side is highly rational — well-honed with two master’s degrees in engineering.
“I love the interaction with clients,” he said.
Spurring fine fragrance’s remarkable gains — Givaudan’s sales in the category grew 14 percent like-for-like in 2023 over 2022 — has been the emergence of e-commerce, which brings a new consumer cohort: Gen Z. The category’s geographic reach has widened beyond the Europe, U.S. and, more recently, Latin America, too.
“Suddenly, the whole [South Asia, Middle East, Africa or] SAMEA region bloomed,” Andrier said. “For us, it’s been a spectacular growth, with a lot of local clients emerging. That has also added to the market size. Now, we see the same, in a way, with China, with a lot of local clients, start-ups and niche players that have emerged over the last four or five years, but really going now at high speed.”
Givaudan’s client base is diverse and extensive, including U.S. specialty retail and niche brands in mature markets, which helps the company maintain its fine fragrance growth.
“I’ve always tried to build — consciously or unconsciously — what I call the ‘natural hedges,’” Andrier said. “You don’t want to be totally one-sided with one set of geographies or clients. We need to be diversified across different dimensions. Because of our size, we can do that.”
Acquisitions have helped, adding new clients and capabilities, allowing Givaudan to go after new, promising segments.
Part of the secret sauce behind the group producing such successful scents has been its close partnership with clients, according to Andrier, who feels highly responsible for their joint fine fragrance projects.
“There’s so much at stake,” he said. That is true for planet Earth, too.
So another focus is on sustainability at Givaudan, which has set ambitious goals, such as cutting its operations’ carbon footprint by 70 percent, versus 2015, before 2030 and being carbon-neutral by 2050. Helping meet that challenge is replacing non-renewable carbon with renewable carbon with the likes of sugar using biotechnology.
“All of those things drive innovations,” Andrier said. “We believe that innovation, which usually is a way to face and deal with constraints, is also part of our DNA.”
Ten percent of Givaudan’s sales are spent on innovation across the board.
“The impact on biodiversity is equally important,” he continued, referring to the effect sourcing natural ingredients has on nature as well as communities linked to it.
Givaudan’s core business remains fragrance and flavors, but a number of years ago it began stretching its savoir-faire toward active beauty, skin care, health and wellness.
“That’s part of our purpose — creating for happier and healthier lives,” Andrier said.
It’s a space Givaudan has entered for fine fragrances, as well. “We have a whole program on moods and emotions,” he said, noting the company’s capabilities to read people’s brain waves to discover the impact of a scent. “How does smell impact the well-being.”
Givaudan is a staunch advocate of diversity and inclusion.
“I’ve always felt it was core to the culture of Givaudan,” said Andrier, citing examples such as the diversity of companies comprising Givaudan today, the group’s client diversity and the fact that women consume two-thirds of perfumes. “That means you need to be diverse as a company. The monolithic way of thinking cannot work.”
Andrier is no stranger to diversity, having spent his childhood traveling the world with his family, due to his father’s engineering work.
He’s about meaningful change, so five years ago Givaudan set goals, including aiming to have 50 percent of senior leaders being women and coming from high-growth markets before 2030.
“We are continuously trying to find different ways to accelerate the progression against those ambitious targets,” Andrier said.
The company also advocates through the Value of Beauty Alliance the importance of Europe’s beauty value chain.
White spaces Andrier might have named pre-pandemic for fine fragrance don’t exist anymore, since the segment has evolved so fast since. The big question today is how to sustain its development going forward.
“This growth is on the back of things which are quite solid and sustainable,” Andrier said. “It’s really quite formidable what we are living today.”
