Michel Brousset's guest appearances

Michel Brousset

Beauty Is Your Business - beautytech and beauty innovation

Absolute Return Podcast

The Glossy Beauty Podcast

Kendra Kolb Butler

Mark Curry

Winky Lux

Casey Georgeson

Saint Jane

Colette Laxton

John Demsey

Christine Chang

Sasha Plavsic

Sarah Lee

Alicia Yoon

Christin Powell

Alison Haljun

Rich Gersten

Francesco Clark

OwlTail

On today’s show we chat about beauty industry investing with Waldencast CEO Michel Brousset. Waldencast is building a global best-in-class beauty and wellness operating platform by creating, nurturing, and scaling conscious, purpose-driven brands. On the show, Michel discusses: -Key investment characteristics of the beauty industry including its recession-resistant nature -Their thesis behind the acquisitions of Milk Makeup and Obagi -The importance of ESG considerations for beauty brand consumers -How social media and eCommerce transformed the industry -And more

On today’s show we chat about beauty industry investing with Waldencast CEO Michel Brousset. Waldencast is building a global best-in-class beauty and wellness operating platform by creating, nurturing, and scaling conscious, purpose-driven brands. On the show, Michel discusses: -Key investment characteristics of the beauty industry including its recession-resistant nature -Their thesis behind the acquisitions of Milk Makeup and Obagi -The importance of ESG considerations for beauty brand consumers -How social media and eCommerce transformed the industry -And more

#216: Beauty Industry Investing with Waldencast CEO Michel Brousset

After 20 years in big beauty, with stints at L'Oréal and Procter &amp; Gamble, Waldencast founder and CEO Michel Brousset set out to start over, with an eye on the future."We started with a dream, which was to create this big global company, but you [have to] start as an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur, just like founders are," said Brousset on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.Brousset was most recently group president of L’Oréal's consumer products division in North America. In 2019, he started Waldencast by investing in and providing operational support for emerging brands. Early investments included refillable cosmetics line Kjaer Weis and Francisco Costa's beauty debut Costa Brazil, which was recently sold to Amyris. And while that is still one arm of the business, brand incubation is also a focus. It debuted its first foray last week, a travel-inspired line dubbed Whind, and it has three other brands in the works.With multiple goals and scale as its focus, Waldencast recently announced its special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC), Waldencast Acquisition Corp, with $633 million to invest."As we were developing these two areas of how to create this new, next-generation company -- in a way, we're creating it from a blank sheet of paper, the way we want to create it and with the values that we want to create -- we started thinking relatively early that we wanted to do larger acquisitions," he said. "When we started developing and firming up how to do that is where we landed with a SPAC, as an efficient way of building that capability."Still, Brousset said the focus for Waldencast is to bet on brands with a similar ethos. "If you look at all the brands in our portfolio, they have certain threads or flows between them, some commonality between them. They are brands that have in their DNA, not just a perspective on beauty, but also a perspective relative to important social values like sustainability, inclusivity, responsibility and conscious entrepreneurship, which happen to be our values," said Brousset.

After 20 years in big beauty, with stints at L'Oréal and Procter &amp; Gamble, Waldencast founder and CEO Michel Brousset set out to start over, with an eye on the future."We started with a dream, which was to create this big global company, but you [have to] start as an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur, just like founders are," said Brousset on the most recent episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast.Brousset was most recently group president of L’Oréal's consumer products division in North America. In 2019, he started Waldencast by investing in and providing operational support for emerging brands. Early investments included refillable cosmetics line Kjaer Weis and Francisco Costa's beauty debut Costa Brazil, which was recently sold to Amyris. And while that is still one arm of the business, brand incubation is also a focus. It debuted its first foray last week, a travel-inspired line dubbed Whind, and it has three other brands in the works.With multiple goals and scale as its focus, Waldencast recently announced its special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC), Waldencast Acquisition Corp, with $633 million to invest."As we were developing these two areas of how to create this new, next-generation company -- in a way, we're creating it from a blank sheet of paper, the way we want to create it and with the values that we want to create -- we started thinking relatively early that we wanted to do larger acquisitions," he said. "When we started developing and firming up how to do that is where we landed with a SPAC, as an efficient way of building that capability."Still, Brousset said the focus for Waldencast is to bet on brands with a similar ethos. "If you look at all the brands in our portfolio, they have certain threads or flows between them, some commonality between them. They are brands that have in their DNA, not just a perspective on beauty, but also a perspective relative to important social values like sustainability, inclusivity, responsibility and conscious entrepreneurship, which happen to be our values," said Brousset.

Waldencast's Michel Brousset: Beauty brand building is about "managing this level of complexity"

Imagine starting a career at some of the biggest consumer product and beauty companies in the world, skyrocketing to the head of L’Oreal in the UK and U.S., then pivoting to incubating burgeoning beauty and wellness brands. Veteran beauty executive Michel Brousset (Founder and CEO of Waldencast, a holding company and investment fund that incubates and accelerates early stage beauty and wellness brands and helps them rapidly create scale and profitability) delves into how to run and build brands that last a lifetime, why product performance is key in beauty, but a point of view and emotional connection direct to the consumer is king. Plus, the biggest reasons brands fail, how indie brands can scale, and the evolution of marketing in a digital age, how much has changed (you can now launch a brand with a cellphone), yet much has stayed the same. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beautybizshow/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Imagine starting a career at some of the biggest consumer product and beauty companies in the world, skyrocketing to the head of L’Oreal in the UK and U.S., then pivoting to incubating burgeoning beauty and wellness brands. Veteran beauty executive Michel Brousset (Founder and CEO of Waldencast, a holding company and investment fund that incubates and accelerates early stage beauty and wellness brands and helps them rapidly create scale and profitability) delves into how to run and build brands that last a lifetime, why product performance is key in beauty, but a point of view and emotional connection direct to the consumer is king. Plus, the biggest reasons brands fail, how indie brands can scale, and the evolution of marketing in a digital age, how much has changed (you can now launch a brand with a cellphone), yet much has stayed the same. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/beautybizshow/" rel="payment nofollow" target="_blank">Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beautybizshow/</a>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.

Michel Brousset of Waldencast - Incubating Beauty and Wellness Brands