PARIS – L’Oréal is poised to launch a corporate campaign for refills, in tandem with World Refill Day on Monday. The campaign will be the group’s first cross-divisional, multi-brand, multi-channel activation, called #JoinTheRefillMovement.
It federates a dozen key brands from L’Oréal, including Lancôme, Yves Saint Laurent Beauté, Kiehl’s, Mugler, Maison Margiela Fragrances, Prada, Valentino Beauty, l’Oréal Paris, Kérastase, L’Oréal Professionnel and La Roche-Posay.
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There are to be related advertisements and social media content, alongside the hashtag the group conceived as a call to action.
The campaign is meant to raise the awareness about refills’ benefits. According to L’Oréal, 78 percent of consumers express interest in purchasing more sustainable products, but many are still not aware of how refill options can help the environment.
The campaign highlights benefits – to both the planet and pocket. For instance, there’s the fact that every time someone purchases a 100-ml. refill, rather than two 50-ml. bottles of La Vie Est Belle Elixir, there’s a savings of 73 percent on glass, 66 percent on plastic and 61 percent on cardboard.
“It makes the consumer the hero,” said Blanca Juti, chief corporate affairs and engagement officer at L’Oréal. “They can really take a stance. What’s very exciting is that we’re calling the consumer to join the movement with 12 brands. We have all categories – hair products, makeup, skin care and fragrance.
“We’re doing it all over the world, in all regions, offline, online for the World Refill Day,” she continued.
L’Oréal’s refill campaign is part of an overarching, long-term sustainability commitment that includes reducing its environmental footprint and offering more eco-friendly options to consumers.
“We’re always at the forefront of the latest technologies, latest innovations, really keeping our eye on the horizon about how we can continue to improve not only our operations, but also our ecosystem around us,” said Ezgi Barcenas, chief sustainability officer at L’Oréal.
“In everything we do, we try to lower our emissions, environmental footprint and impact,” she explained. “Sustainability is woven in the product design all the way to how we bring products to market.”
Last year 49 percent of the company’s plastic packaging was refillable, reusable, recyclable or compostable. L’Oréal also said its manufacturing facilities globally have been adapted to accommodate a 17-time increase in the number of refillable options over the past five years.
“Refills is a true new mindset in developing products for us in our four divisions,” said Jacques Playe, global head of packaging and product development at L’Oréal. “We have a very strong product design activity to provide refill solutions for all the categories of product on offer.”
Designing refills, he said, “pushes us to innovate and to reinvent ourselves.”
Take, for instance, a fragrance bottle. In the past, its pump was not removeable, so L’Oréal worked with glass makers and pump suppliers to create a new standard, with a pump that can be taken out.
“We propose this as a new standard for the full cosmetics and perfume industry,” said Playe.
For the group, the refill campaign is an opportunity and responsibility to help drive behaviors in more circular models, according to Barcenas.
“In tackling that, what we’re trying to solve for is sustainability, desirability and performance,” she said. “We’re really excited about this refill campaign that we’re going big on this year.”
This will involve ongoing activations and educational content, including brand spokespeople explaining how to refill products and people who create the refills.
“Hopefully with campaigns like this we can really make a change,” said Juti.
Meanwhile, refill solutions will continue to be expanded across all of L’Oréal’s product categories. Playe explained the challenge with refills is to reconcile three main issues: to keep product performance, desirability and sustainability.
“We do think that the refill is a very smart way to keep the premiumness of our luxury brands, while using fewer resources,” he said.
Among the group’s products with refills already is Lancôme Génifique serum with a refillable bottle that saves about 70 percent of the weight of the parent packaging.
“[Refills] is a journey that started long ago,” said Juti, referring to when Mugler launched Angel, the fragrance, in 1992 as a product refillable via a fountain. “Now we’ve got about 11,000 fountains in the world.”
And they’re used: an Angel bottle is refilled every 10 seconds somewhere around the globe.
Hundreds of engineers have historically been focused on L’Oréal packaging, but Playe created two new teams, so as now to cover three big competency skills: engineering, science and industrial design.
“This is a true evolution,” he said, adding refills and lightweighting are the two main ways to reduce the amount of resources used in product packaging.
