Interview mit Davines' Inhaber und Vorsitzendem Davide Bollati

We've been knowing each other for many years, and you know that this is a new chapter of life in Germany. It's great to get closer to you. And you questioned my core values. They are kind of written in stone: beauty, ethics, and sustainability, big heart. And of course, we started very little. It was really just four or five people in the 80s, and now we are 800. So certain things have to change because the more the company grows, the more complexity there is. We need to get organized, because being in so many countries, there are sorts of things we wouldn't like to change, particularly that feeling of having this humanistic approach to business, where every person is unique and every relationship counts. This is something that we nurture and make the effort to do, like basic things like getting to know each other by name. It's already a challenge when you have so many people. We are like 400 in that quarter and another 400 around the world. There is loyalty; there are many people that are with us for many, many years, but it's a combination of new people coming in. Every single person that comes into the company changes the culture a little bit, so it's a constant adjustment. Then you have people with more experience and new people, and the new people say, 'Oh, but those are people that have been there for a long time.' So it's a constant adjustment, but it's good because we always think person first and then professional aspect after. It comes from something very instinctive, very intuitive. I think it comes from my grandparents who were farmers living in nature. Since I was a kid visiting them, when I joined the company to help my parents, it became natural. Then, as the company gets bigger, we need to get structured, so we got certification, like B Corp. Already almost 20 years ago, we put sustainable beauty under the name Davines. At that time, nobody talked about sustainability and people didn't even know what it was, but little by little we started the journey step by step because it takes a very long time for companies and organizations to adjust all the industrial systems and make all the different steps. We took so many steps; now we have a sustainability real core strategy, but we still have a long way to go. No, I think we are very happy in Japan that everybody is coming on board on this sustainability journey, first of all because it's very important in a situation like this. Alone you don't achieve so much, so you have to work on the principle of interdependence, on cooperation, on partnership for the goals of sustainability. So absolutely, we are super happy that more and more people are coming in. In fact, we started the bigger beautiful edition. We were the one that launched the idea, and now in only two years we have 70 beauty companies and counting, every day more joining that have joined this beautiful Beauty Coalition, and we work on topics like supply chain, packaging, and logistics on a pre-competitive level, but it's a super important cooperation. Lots of things are going on at the moment. We are in a phase where we have to readjust and disrupt our own supply chain because we came to a point where if we want to go one step further, we need to recreate the supply chain. That's why we created the IROC Organic Agricultural Center, where we are starting a new way to get the raw materials for our formulas. We know chemicals inside and out, and we even started a green chemistry lab dedicated to active principles that are high performing because if there is no performance, forget about the market joining. And then also the same thing on packaging, with the goal of being virgin plastic-free as soon as possible. Right now we still have 30 plus percent of virgin plastic in our packaging, and we need to go 100% circular, i.e., zero percent virgin. Of course it's much more expensive, but it's the way to go. So at the moment with Plastic Bank, we compensate 100% of all our plastic emissions, so again we can say we are plastic positive because for every single product that comes out from the company, we take back one from the environment. It could be beach plastic, ocean plastic, and then at the end it becomes social plastic because we work in countries like Philippines, Brazil, and Thailand. Now the last one is we are even creating a photovoltaic agriculture on the field to create... well, right now we are already carbon neutral, but the next step... yeah, we are carbon neutral because we have a lot of decarbonization programs around the world, but now the next step is that we are going to build and create all the energy from the sun right on the building, right on the village, with this five megawatt agriculture that we are expecting the permitting any moment, and then we're starting to build it in a very landscape and aesthetic way. But first of all, let's say that Davines has a long story in Germany. I think we went a long way thanks to our partner FP that worked with us for so many years. So after all those years, it came the moment to go one step further and add a bit of acceleration on the growth and fine-tuning of the positioning. Germany is the country in Europe and probably in the world that started first in being such a country with a big industry, very industrialized, the first country in the world with Guru napunt I think you know 50 years ago to come up with this type of accessibility for the environment. So I think it's a very favorable place for us. Also, Germany has the maturity as a market to understand the complexity of sustainability and to appreciate the fact that as a company we don't take shortcuts and to appreciate the holistic approach that we have. So I have a very high confidence in the German market, but as long as there is a unity of purpose, unity of intent, and understanding of the journey. Commercial and economic success comes after values and culture. So values and culture first, and the economy always comes after.