The decision dates back to mid-December. Clarins confirms it now: Kibio will be “stopped” mid-February. The time needed to manage the layoff plan for the 22 salary people still in the company, as the cosmetic brand will be neither sold nor transferred. Too much money lost and no prospect, even for the long-term, sealed the fate of Kibio, which is to disappear.
Established in 2005 by Pierre Cabane and Laurent Potier, previously both cadres in L’Oreal, Kibio had sold 10% of its shares to Clarins in 2006, before being sold as a whole in 2010.
Once the founders gone, Clarins group was alone to have the full destiny of the organic brand.
Two years later, the closure is, then, decided. “We could not financially get out of it,” Olivier Courtin-Clarins, the Chairman of the Clarins Group Management Board, told CosmeticOBS6L’Observatoire des Cosmétiques. “We did try torestructure, but the perspectives for the brand staid negative at least until 2016.”
Too much turn-over at the head of the company (several managers have succeeded each other since Kibio was bought), policy errors?
And yet, Clarins has invested a lot in the development of its organic brand: formulae were redesigned; new products were launched, and huge ads budgets spent in 2011. However, the policy, successful for the Clarins brand, failed with Kibio. “It could be we made mistakes; we launched too many products,” Olivier Courtin-Clarins says now, “but, above all, the customers are not present. All the surveys we paid for to understand why, and a survey of 15,000 people in UK, show that women still …
