L’Occitane International is soaring through the social media ranks.
According to CreatorIQ, the Hong Kong-listed French skin care company owns the three fastest-growing skin care brands by earned media value — Sol de Janeiro, Erborian and L’Occitane en Provence — which have seen respective year-over-year EMV growth of 144 percent, 156 percent and 628 percent, respectively.
L’Occitane-owned Elemis has seen a 132 percent increase in the metric, earning it the number-three spot by total EMV in the skin care category — up five spots from 2022. The four brands’ EMV growth outpaces that of the skin care category at large, which grew 45 percent during the first half of 2023 versus the first half of 2022.
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“What L’Occitane does well is giving creators free rein to talk about their products and brand in a way that is unique to that creator’s voice and audience as a whole; there’s a good degree of creator autonomy that comes into play,” said CreatorIQ’s director of content marketing Alexander Rawitz, noting influencer marketing momentum across the L’Occitane International portfolio began in 2021 and has ramped up since.
Largely driving the brands’ EMV growth has been consistent investments in creator retention and acquisition. Elemis, for example, maintains a 141 percent annual retention rate, while simultaneously having recruited 4,220 new creators — who drove $44.3 million in EMV for the brand — over a 12-month period.
Powerhouse creators, or those with more than 1 million followers, were the most represented influencer tier across Erborian, Elemis and L’Occitane en Provence’s respective top 10 EMV-driving creator lists.
Olivia Yang (@olafflee on TikTok and Instagram) was the top EMV earner for L’Occitane en Provence and the second-highest earner for Elemis. Nathalie Paris (@nathalieparis), Emma Leah (@byemmaleah) and Lena Bagrowska (@lenkalul) were other overlapping top earners for L’Occitane en Provence, Elemis and, in Leah’s case, Sol de Janeiro.
While TikTok outpaces Instagram in EMV share growth across all four brands — this year TikTok drove 30 percent of their collective EMV versus just 16 percent in 2022 — Instagram still owns 65 percent of their collective EMV share.
“Instagram is still driving more EMV because it is a slightly more known platform,” said Rawitz, noting that it’s not uncommon for short-form TikTok videos which have been repurposed into Instagram Reels to fuel EMV on the platform. “Instagram provides a solid base; kind of a high floor, low ceiling for posts, where TikTok provides, obviously huge viral potential — but less of a guarantee that the content is going to go viral in the first place.”
Still, TikTok has already overtaken Instagram in terms of EMV share for many beauty brands and Rawitz isn’t ruling out the possibility of a similar impending shift within L’Occitane International’s portfolio.
In total, Elemis collected $88.9 million in EMV from January to October; Sol de Janeiro generated $76.8 million EMV — making it the sixth-largest skin care brand by the metric, up from number 21 last year — while L’Occitane en Provence and Erborian garnered $45.8 million and $8.5 million EMV during the period.
L’Occitane International ranked number 21 on Beauty Inc’s list of the top 100 beauty manufacturers in 2022, posting $2.15 billion in sales for the year, a 17.3 percent increase versus the year prior. After seeing strong sales growth during the first quarter of 2023, the brand reportedly briefly mulled a $4.2 billion buyout deal in July, but revealed in September that talks to take the company private had come to a close.
